I'm no astrophysicist, but I do read a lot about it, the kid has an interesting point, and it plays into a theory i've been working on myself. I doubt that the big bang ever happened, rather it was that space was originally so compact that from the currently expanded space we have today, all matter would have been close enough that it would appear as a black hole. (well, more specifically a white hole, which i'll say is a black hole that operates as though time were reversed... emitting matter, not devouring)
The universe expands at 71 km per megaparsec every second... that's an expansion rate of something on the order of 10^(-19)% per second. and this is the source of our current universe being 13.7 billion years old or something of the like.
I personally think that's all balderdash though, Instead, I think it was 13.7 billion years ago that we were in a place in the universe where space was so compact that from our current expanded state we would've viewed as the above mentioned white whole, which probably still exists, but is beyond our cosmological horizon (what we can see)
The universe is a 4-sphere set in a 5-manifold. That's extremely hard to imagine... but imagine a sphere in regular space.
We are living on the SURFACE of the sphere, not the inside of it, as our imagination would normally make you think (as our view of the visible universe is a spherical view outward approx 46 billion light years in radius)
Instead every point on that surface of the sphere you can go east/west and north/south. (and time forward/backward is just the sphere expanding/contracting) But there is also an up/down which as we are reducing the dimensions of the picture from 4d to 3d we have to just imagine.
That up/down does NOT mean going out from the sphere or into the centre of the sphere, rather it's just another direction we can't plot on our limited axis.
The only thing that takes us "into the sphere" is gravity, (well there could be other forces that warp space/time too, and i suspect there are, and specifically that all fundamental forces do.) It's actually not so much that we go into the sphere, but rather that we warp the surface of the sphere to be not perfectly spherical when mass exists.
One thing you have to do to understand distance in this view of the universe, is that you gotta view distances as latitudes longitudes and "other"-tudes. so if we are at the poles of the 4d sphere, then "a given distance" is a very short distance compared to if we're at the equator.... However all observation occurs at the equator, because of relativity... The observer who we would perceive that the poles themselves would see us at the poles and themselves at the equator. (though we cannot observe the poles, nor will we ever be able to, no matter how much times passes, or how large the universe expands.)
If there were no "source" to the CMBR then there would be more support for the above theory.... I think...
Though the space appears compact to us from the poles so there would be a more intense emissions from the directions of the poles... but the odd geometry of a 4d sphere is that every direction points to a pole, so every direction would have the same amount of CMBR coming towards us... accounting for what we would expect... but large objects outside of our cosmological horizon could well account for a blocking phenomenon that would account for the cold spots we see when observing the CMBR.
Well, not sure if i've said everything I wanted to say in this, but for those that can come even close to understanding what i've said, you can understand just how difficult it is to put the concepts into your mind, you'll be able to understand and excuse me if i've missed something.
For those of you who are just scratching your head, you'll even be more able to understand it.
29 Apr 2010, 8:45 pm
