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sluice
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15 Nov 2010, 2:18 pm

Yes, I think that is the way I have seen it described. I like to visualize it like one of those old-fashioned cotton candy makers that you would see in street carnivals. You see expansion all around between individual points and not just outward. It does play with your mind to realize that distant points are distancing themselves faster than any radiation can travel to reach you. Personally, the whole field of cosmology gives me hope that human beings are capable of thinking outside of what I normally see in my daily living, even if most of the current thoughts are eventually discarded. I sometimes feel that people are just layers of behaviors that just need to be unwrapped and teased apart to understand what a human being is. In a way, that makes areas like cosmology inspirational for me.



ruveyn
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16 Nov 2010, 4:10 am

DeaconBlues wrote:
x

Even more fun, though, is the idea that in those initial moments of expansion, when the universe was still too hot and dense for any laws of physics to settle out, it may have briefly expanded at greater than what would later become the speed of light - meaning that there could be even more universe that we'll never see telescopically from Earth, because it would take longer for the light to reach us than the time the universe has been in existence. This is called the Inflationary Theory, and is lots of fun to contemplate, although unless we find a way around Einsteinian limits on velocity, it will remain a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, and thus not (yet) truly scientific... :)


There is no upper bound on how fast spacetime can expand. However there is an upper bound on how fast things can move -in spacetime-. The long and skinny is we don't really know how big the cosmos is. We only have an estimate for the diameter of our light horizon.

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Ambrose_Rotten
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16 Nov 2010, 8:13 am

fernando wrote:
Close your eyes and open your mind if only for a moment. Turn off the TV and the radio. Close the books and the magazines. Forget the online articles and the studies and tell me... Does it sound possible to you that the universe started with a big bang? That all galaxies would fit in a space no bigger than a needle's tip? Does that sound like reality to you?


When the universe was at it's point of singularity. There were no galaxies/stars/planets/whatever. It was all just energy then.
The big bang wasn't an explosion of the universe, but rather, an expansion of space itself.

The energy was always there, and as the universe expanded, some of it converted to mass.

DeaconBlues wrote:
The big bang (or, as I prefer, the Horrendous Space Kablooie!) erupted from a singularity - a single-dimensional pointsource from which sprang space/time. Until it happened, there was no space for it to happen in; in this sense, then, it did happen "everywhere at once" because the point of eruption was the only space that existed. However, if you're referring to the current universe of at least 14 billion lightyears' radius, then no, it didn't happen in all that space (because, as explained above, that space didn't exist yet).


Oh... You beat me to it.



ruveyn
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16 Nov 2010, 8:57 am

Orwell wrote:
I like that show, but the line "the autotrophs began to drool" still bugs me. What autotrophs on this planet drool? None of them even have mouths!


"..... a tree who's hungry mouth is pressed,
a against Earth's sweet flowing breast...."

From "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer.

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naturalplastic
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24 Nov 2010, 8:56 pm

fernando wrote:
Close your eyes and open your mind if only for a moment. Turn off the TV and the radio. Close the books and the magazines. Forget the online articles and the studies and tell me... Does it sound possible to you that the universe started with a big bang? That all galaxies would fit in a space no bigger than a needle's tip? Does that sound like reality to you?


You got a better idea?
It had to begin somehow, somewhen, someway.
Any scheme (religous or scientific) would boil down something equally absurd.

Even if you're a believer in the dufunct "steady state theory" which was that the universe always existed and had no beginning- you still had to explain how it could be constantly expanding-which still requires a constant creation of new matter out of nothing.

Creating something out of nothing is no less absurd than a Universe exploding out of a pin head sized singularity.