Surprise Galaxies at the Edge of Observable Space

brindafella writes "A scientist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo & Siding Springs Observatories, Dr Paul Francis, has dicovered a string of galaxies 300 light years long, and further out than they 'should' be. The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible. The findings have been presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta. 'We have detected 37 galaxies and one quasar in the string, but it probably contains many thousands of galaxies.' He said the galaxy string lay 10,800 million light-years away. See the animation here."

Comments

300 light years?

[Cujo]

That can't be right.

Re:300 light years?

[daeley]

Yeah, it's actually 300 million light-years long. :) Kids these days and their new math.

Re:300 light years?

[Anonymous Coward]

And a link to a 63-byte file they claim is a "movie". Kids these days

Re:300 light years?

[brindafella]

There was some editing of my entry by the /. team before it was accepted for public viewing. :-( Some other details were changed, too. My original posting quoted directly from the scientist's information. :-)

Re:300 light years?

[Chibi Merrow]

While the 300m to 300 conversion was obviously an editor error... What about the first article claiming that since the galaxies were 10.8 million light years away we were seeing them as they were 10.8 billion years ago.

That's like saying "since you moved 100 metres in the last hour we'll conclude you're moving at the rate of 100 kilometers an hour". Is this an editing snafu on their part or am I missing something?

Re:300 light years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its understandable. michael has always had a habit of screwing up glaringly obvious facts.

Re:300 light years?

[jgoemat]

Good, I was thinking they'd have to be pretty tiny "galaxies" to fit so many in only 300 light-years :)

Re:300 light years?

[condensate]

likely to be a typo. When the light arrives here, it has travelled 10.8 billion years, which is precisely the definition of a light year therefore we see what happened there 10.8 billion years ago.

Perhaps..

[Kiriwas]

Perhaps our view of the Universe is not as complete as we thought. I hate to think of what things have been cast down as impossible to only later be shown as true. It's not as if these are amateur cosmologists, give them a break and a chance to be proven right or wrong.

Re:Perhaps..

[mOoZik]

No one worth his weight in popcorn would believe thta our view of the universe is complete. If anything, it is generally agreed that we're barely scratching the surface of the wonders and secrets that lie within.

Re:Perhaps..

[pvt_medic]

eh, I prefer the egocentrical view that we are right and any contradictory statement is by default wrong... remember we are the center of the universe and the sun revolves around us.

Now dont mind me as I take a stroll to the edge of the world.

NASA

[daeley]

Much better luck loading with the story at NASA's site, including an MPEG version of the animation.

Re:NASA

[Feztaa]

Absolutely stunning.

Those galaxies look so tiny, it's hard to imagine the scale involved.

Hooray for the status quo...

[addie]

The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible

This is just sad. I sometimes think we'd be centuries ahead in science if theorists could lay aside their egos and realize that hardly any theory lasts forever in its entirety. Refusing time to a group of astronomers who think they may have found something new is not so different from burning heretics who claimed the world was a sphere.

Maybe overdramatic, but my point stands.

Re: Hooray for the status quo...

[Black Parrot]

> > The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible

> Refusing time to a group of astronomers who think they may have found something new is not so different from burning heretics who claimed the world was a sphere.

It's not like there are enough telescopes for everyone to get all the time they want. Sometimes a judgement call is required, and sometimes judgement calls are going to be wrong.

It's not like these people have been labeled heretics and refused time on any telescope. Otherwise we wouldn't be hearing these results.

Re:Hooray for the status quo...

[Goldsmith]

There's a simple solution for that:

money

In science, we have to choose what research projects get funding. Someone is going to be rejected, we can't let everyone do what they want... unless we have a whole lot more funding.

For example, if we had more telescopes, then people wouldn't have to argue over who gets to use them.

In this case, the header was very misleading. They used the National Science Foundation's (a US government agency) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile and were given funding from NASA!

Re:Hooray for the status quo...

[astroboscope]

The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible

A very common occurance. See below.

This is just sad. I sometimes think we'd be centuries ahead in science if theorists could lay aside their egos and realize that hardly any theory lasts forever in its entirety. ...

Maybe overdramatic

Way overdramatic, but the article sensationlistically led you on. For one thing, they were refused time on a particular U.S. telescope, not banned from using all U.S. telescopes, of which there are many.

Telescopes usually have more requests for observing time than there is available, so a committee is given the job of deciding who will get how much time. "We have doubts about the feasibility of your proposed observation" is a classic rejection. It usually means that the proposer is attempting to pull off something terribly exciting at the cutting edge of science, where things aren't easy. The committee realizes that, and presumably gets many such proposals, but figures that most of them won't work and will just waste telescope time. Their job is to guess, in a finite time with finite expertise in all the different subfields in astronomy in a batch of proposals, which ones have a shot. ...which means that subjectivity plays a big role and some telescopes are fairer than others. But it doesn't necessarily mean that the team was intentionally mistreated.

Re:Hooray for the status quo...

[kwoff]

I sometimes think we'd be centuries ahead in science if theorists could lay aside their egos and realize that hardly any theory lasts forever in its entirety.

1) In what sense would we be "ahead" if the theories are always basically meaningless (we're going to replace them eventually anyway). 2) If every theory was taken seriously, there would be a lot of overhead added, so maybe we would not in fact be farther ahead (what evidence do you have other than your intuition?).

Maybe overdramatic, but my point stands.

Hey, this debating shit is easy!

Re: Hooray for the status quo...

[mbrother]

I've collaborated with Paul Francis myself in the past, and he's a good scientist. Good scientists get turned down for telescope all the time, for good projects -- there is a lot of competition. Those judgment calls are tough, and Paul and his collaborators may have failed to make a strong enough case to get high enough ranked against the competition, or he might have simply had the bad luck of having a too-skeptical reviewer on the panel. That happens, too. Depending on which telescope, the panel may have to evaluate up to a hundred proposals in their "spare" time and they aren't getting paid to do it either (astronomers serve on such panels for the experience and as a service to the community). Still, I've bashed panels myself when they've turned down my super-duper fantastic proposal for clearly the wrong reasons! Best response I ever heard about was an older, rich grad student who built his own telescope when his first proposal was turned down.

Re:Hooray for the status quo...

[Performer Guy]

That is NOT what was reported. They were actually refused time because the objects were too feint and they thought the observations weren't possible with their instruments.

Impossible

[samjam]

"The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible."

So thats the state of American science, only look at things that agree with current theory!

I guess Galileo's ideas were impossible too, no need for the pope to take a look through the telescope cos he already KNOWS Galileo is making it all up.

Bad science, but very quick science.

Shame!

Sam

Re:Impossible

[daeley]

Erm, you do know that this research was funded by NASA too, right?

Time is limited on the big 'scopes.

Re:Impossible

[samjam]

Yes, I knew, I read the article to make sure the block I quoted was really from the article and not some rabid summary.

Sam

Re:Impossible

[FesterDaFelcher]

So I can say I have a radical new theory that the universe is made of cheese, and they are supposed to give me time?

"So thats the state of American science"

Why do you single out American science? I guess in other countries, people never get turned down for telescope time?

Re:Impossible

[TMB]

You know, not reading the article is fine, but I'm not sure you even read the bit that you quoted.

"The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible."

This has nothing to do with theory. It has to do with trying to take very deep spectra of a whole lot of very faint objects spread over a relatively large area of sky. It's really hard.

[TMB]

Re:Impossible

[Anonymous Coward]

Bad science, but good policy for a telescope owner. I'm going to repost what I just posted to the post above yours:

own a telescope.

It costs money to let people use my telescope.

If my telescope doesn't deliver results, I lose my funding.

Ten people want to use my telescope.

There's only enough time in a day for five of them to use my telescope.

Six of them are observing known objects.

Three of them are observing objects that have been seen, but it isn't known what they are.

One of them wants to take a few pictures of a supposedly empty section of deep-sky.

Now, which five get time?

The three are making observations that are most likely to yield significant discovery, and get first dibs - after all, if the figure out what some mysterious object is, I get at least some attention out of it.

The last two slots are still open, but let's see:

Five of the remainder are looking at known objects.

One of the remainder are taking a blind potshot in the dark.

Which group are the lucky two going to be picked from?

There's only X telescope time available, but something like 25X telescope time requested. These people were effectively taking a shot in the dark photographing a small section of deep-sky. Such observations have been made many times, and only turned up blank plates, making them a waste of already-scarce money and already-overstretched resources. Any telescope operator seeing a request like this is going to put it down the docket after quasar surveys or even mundane planetary observations because such observations have *always* failed in the past.

The rational US response...

[Anonymous Coward]

...would be to burn the heretic witches before they get another chance at those New South Wales and Chilean telescopes.

Re:The rational US response...

[Guppy06]

And before we realize that, if they're looking for time at US telescopes, what they're looking for probably can't be seen from south of the Equator. :)

Learning to Say More Ofte

[leoaugust]

The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible. The findings have been presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Atlanta, GA (America)

Irony? Despite being refused, where do they present the results ...

Where's the string?

[G3ckoG33k]

I looked at the 8MB video, but could see no "string" of galaxies. It more looked like a cloud of galaxies. To me it seems like astronomers need some better definition of what is a string-like object.

Re:Where's the string?

[210288]

A string is a cluster, or at least that is what i am told! I also have seen the vidio and It looked like white powder rather than galaxies!!!!!!

Intelligent Design

[WaldoJMU]

Very interesting - If corroborated, then this data presents a huge stumbling block for the standard evolutionary "Big Bang" theory. As any good evolutionist knows , after the "Big Bang" all the matter in the universe, which had been compressed (through forces and mechanisms unknowable) into a very tiny ball, exploded outward (spherically, with planar tendencies) with tremendous force. All of this random matter eventually coagulated into more and more complicated forms until stars, planets, and the like were formed.

This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense, since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greatest initial velocity and energy), should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation). Obviously this is not the appropriate forum for an ultra-detailed discussion of the physics in the theorized Big Bang; suffice it to say that this observation stands to flip Big Bang Science upside down and inside out.

This brings to my mind ponderings of the Intelligent Design, or "ID", argument, which you can read more about here at LeaderU. I agree with the ID proponents - the more we learn about the universe, the more obvious it becomes that it takes more "faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).

Re:Intelligent Design

[RCO]

maybe we were looking at the wrong 'center'???

Whatever the case, this will be interesting either way, if corroborated, a lot of new theories, etc., if not they will end up with tatoos labeling them as crackpots.

Who's got the odds on this bet?

Re:Intelligent Design

[Bootsy Collins]

As any good evolutionist knows , after the "Big Bang" all the matter in the universe, which had been compressed (through forces and mechanisms unknowable) into a very tiny ball, exploded outward (spherically, with planar tendencies) with tremendous force.

This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang"

(snip)

Your criticisms would carry more weight if they demonstrated that you understood the relativistic hot Big Bang model at all. The Big Bang model does not presume any very tiny ball, it does not presume that the universal state of high density and temperature that existed long ago occurred because of compression from outside forces, it does not presume a "spherical with planar tendencies" explosion, or indeed any explosion at all.

Take some time and learn about the model. Seriously. Even if at the end, you think it's complete crap, you still should learn what it is. You cannot criticize it effectively if you don't know what the model actually says. And, as your post indiciates, you don't know what the model actually says.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe there are innumerable universes with different laws of physics. Any universe that supports life might grow intelligent beings here and there, who might then think the universe is too perfect to be a product of chance.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Jeff_West01]

There is no assumed center of the "Big Bang". The Big Bang was everywhere. Space itself expanded. The galaxies in question are far away in time (and distance from us), but not necessarily far from the center of the Big Bang. But this does mess up the standard model in that formations of this complexity should not have formed so soon after the Big Bang.

Re:Intelligent Design

[AuraSeer]

You don't quite have the point. This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang, since there is no center.

What's important about these galaxies is their age. Since they are ten billion light years away, the light that is reaching us now is an image of their state ten billion years ago. When the universe was that young, galaxies wouldn't yet have had time to organize themselves into strings.

The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.

So you're partially right, in saying this discovery will force changes in Big Bang theory. But that does not mean what you think it means.

Re:Intelligent Design

[barawn]

should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation).

Actually, you're messing up what chaotic means in this case. A string formation may or may not be chaotic, depending on the creation mechanism. In the early days of the Universe, matter would be uniform, not "chaotic". If it was formed as a string, then this would be consistent with an early age, because it hadn't had time for their peculiar velocities to distort the formation. If they didn't form as a string, then it wouldn't be consistent with an early age, because gravity wouldn't've had time to pull them into that shape (assuming it could).

The light that's coming from the farthest away from us is uniform - we call it the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation. And, amazingly enough, it's incredibly uniform and isotropic. Anisotropies in the CMBR are incredibly small.

If you doubt the Big Bang, get a microwave telescope and look around you. If a Big Bang didn't happen, SOME gigantic, uniform explosion happened, because there's this gigantic, uniform explosion everywhere around you. And it's redshifted by something like z = 10,000 : around 100,000 years after the Big Bang, if my memory serves. That is the universe, as it was very, very close to the Big Bang.

This observation just shows that galaxies formed quicker and faster than theorists predicted. This is not a big deal.

After all, theorists for a while had a hard time explaining how galaxies formed at all. The string formation may suggest that cosmic strings (1-dimensional topological defects) may actually have existed in the early universe. Cosmic strings have been "down on their luck" theoretically recently, as the preponderance of dark matter and energy have convinced many people you don't actually need cosmic strings. This may start them thinking otherwise.

"faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).

Chance has a perspective issue. Saying something happened by "chance" and saying that it was "planned" is a matter of belief, not of fact. Nowhere do scientists say why something happened. Just how. Trying to use scientific arguments to justify a "why" is flat wrong - you're trying to justify a statement that requires evidence outside of a proper frame of reference. It's similar to the problems with the strong anthropic principle - fundamentally, from our point of view, it's indistiguishable from its opposite (oddly enough, because of the weak anthropic principle). You can't tell the difference between a "chance" creation or a "designed" creation by an intelligent force because they produce exactly the same results, because fundamentally, you have to produce a universe capable of having humans (the weak anthropic principle). We have no knowledge of the number of "dead" universes, nor whether or not "dead" universes could even exist. Therefore, from our point of view, there's no way to prove which is correct, and which is incorrect, and therefore, it's a matter of belief, not of science.

Re:Intelligent Design

[barawn]

The most straightforward explanation is that the universe is older than we thought. That has already been postulated as a component of other theories-- various ideas about dark matter, the cosmological constant, etc.-- meaning it's not entirely contrary to current thinking.


Actually, the most straightforward explanation is that galaxies form differently than we think. Considering we have no evidence to the contrary (all we have are simulations), and we do have a fair amount of evidence on the value of the Hubble constant, and therefore an estimate of the age of the Universe, the theory that requires the least changes in the current model would be that galaxies form quicker, and differently, than current theory allows.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Bootsy Collins]

Actually, the most straightforward explanation is that galaxies form differently than we think. Considering we have no evidence to the contrary (all we have are simulations), and we do have a fair amount of evidence on the value of the Hubble constant, and therefore an estimate of the age of the Universe, the theory that requires the least changes in the current model would be that galaxies form quicker, and differently, than current theory allows.

I can't make up my mind whether this is the most straightforward explanation or not. It's true that we have very little observational data about galaxy formation. And I don't put too much stock into the semi-empirical galaxy formation models (e.g. the Kauffman et. al. stuff); too many ways to tweak them. But at the same time, you're constrained in what you can do in the Universe before decoupling by anisotropy observations, while the tiny value of the Compton y-parameter in the CBR constrains pushing stuff around by energy imput after decoupling.

I want to think that this is just some outlier, or simply a redshift-space distortion, or something like that. But I'm sure that someone somewhere has already done a calculation of the statistics of peaks in Gaussian random fields to show that it'd be ridiculously improbable even as an outlier (in the first case), or that the growing mode at that redshift should still be so small that enough organized large-scale mass to induce sufficient peculiar velocities necessary to produce such a redshift-space distortion through infall would again be absurdly improbable (in the second case).

Re: Intelligent Design

[Black Parrot]

> Very interesting - If corroborated, then this data presents a huge stumbling block for the standard evolutionary "Big Bang" theory. As any good evolutionist knows

Thank you for trolling.

The article does not call the Big Bang into question.

BTW, evolution and the big bang are separate theories; neither relies on the existence of the other.

> This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense, since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greatest initial velocity and energy), should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation). Obviously this is not the appropriate forum for an ultra-detailed discussion of the physics in the theorized Big Bang

Obviously not, given your lack of understanding of cosmology.

> suffice it to say that this observation stands to flip Big Bang Science upside down and inside out.

Actually, here's what the discoverer actuall said -

"To explain our results the dark matter clouds that lie in strings must have formed galaxies, while the dark matter clouds elsewhere have not done so. We've no idea why this happened - it's not what the models predict," Dr Francis said.

Doesn't sound like he's discarding the Big Bang to me.

> This brings to my mind ponderings of the Intelligent Design, or "ID", argument, which you can read more about here at LeaderU. I agree with the ID proponents - the more we learn about the universe, the more obvious it becomes that it takes more "faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).

What, precisely, about an old string of galaxies suggests intelligent intervention?

Are intelligent designers created by chance? If not, who designs them?

Want to troll again?

Re:Intelligent Design

[Sgt York]

This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang, since there is no center

I've heard this before, and although I don't disagree with it, I've never been able to wrap my brain around it. It seems to me that any explosion has a center, or a point of origin. Even one that expands out into "nothing" like the Big Bang did/is.

Like I said, I don't disagree with what you said, I've heard it before by people who know a lot more about the subject than I do, I've just never been able to understand it. How can an expanding body not have a center? I can get it if it's just that we have no way of determining where the center is; that would make sense. But saying it has no center is another matter entirely.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't anthropomorphize the Universe. It doesn't like it.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Bootsy Collins]

> This surprise has nothing to do with distance from the "center" of the big bang,
> since there is no center

I've heard this before, and although I don't disagree with it, I've never been able to wrap my brain around it. It seems to me that any explosion has a center, or a point of origin. Even one that expands out into "nothing" like the Big Bang did/is.

This is, unfortunately, a flaw in the name of the model. It conjures up the idea of an explosion of material into surrounding empty space, which is not what the Big Bang model describes. The expansion of the Universe is an expansion of space itself. The galaxies grow farther apart not because they are moving away from each other through space, but because space itself is expanding between them.

Not that that necessarily makes things easier for you. Fundamentally, this points out a failure of one of our most useful way of understanding thimgs: to relate them to things we already understand, or with which we are already familiar. For instance, when authors of cosmology books for laypersons construct analogies to the expansion of space and the resulting increasing separation of the galaxies, they use things like a loaf of raisin bread expanding in the oven. But that analogy is flawed: the raisin bread has space surrounding it into which it can expand (not to mention a "center"), while no such thing exists for the universe.

A better analogy in that it gets rid of the embedded center is to give up our 3D universe, and instead consider the 2D surface of an inflating balloon. Dots (galaxies) painted on the balloon's surface are all getting farther and farther apart from each other on the surface of the balloon (in space), but no place on the surface of the balloon (no location in the Universe) can be called the center of the expansion (the one place from which things started expanding apart). But this analogy is a bad one, as well. It makes an assumption about the topology of the universe (that it loops around on itself, or is "closed"); the Universe may be that way, but it need not be. More importantly, this analogy requires the existence of a 3rd dimension (the radial direction) separate from the 2D surface of the balloon; a change in the position of the surface of the balloon with time in that radial direction describes the expansion. But the Big Bang model doesn't require such a hidden dimension which is driving the expansion.

There just isn't something from our day-to-day lives which provides a decent analogy to the expansion of the Universe. It has to be understood on its own terms, without recourse to simple visualization. Not that this is uncommon in physics since the beginning of the 20th Century; for instance, quantum mechanics describes phenomena which are difficult to impossible to describe in terms of how things work in our common sense, everyday world. In the end, it comes down to a quote from (I think) Feynman (although he was talking about quantum mechanics at the time): "I don't know how to describe it in terms of something you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of something you're more familiar with."

Re:Intelligent Design

[AuraSeer]

It's easier to understand in a two-dimensional version.

Visualize a balloon filled with air. The surface of its rubber sheet represents the universe. Get a marker and make some dots on the balloon's surface; those are galaxies.

Now start heating the balloon, so the air inside expands. This will make the balloon bigger. As it enlarges, the dots will get further apart. This is the expansion of the universe.

Note that there is no spot on the balloon that can be called the "center" of the expansion. The expansion is happening everywhere. Every spot on the surface is the same, and nothing is closer or further from the "middle".

(Remember that the 2D rubber sheet is the whole universe. You can't say the expansion is centered on a point in 3D space inside the balloon, because there is no 3D space anywhere. There's nothing except the universe.)

The expansion of the real universe is like that. The real thing is just a lot harder to visualize, because it's expanding in 4 dimensions instead of 2. The point is, it is geometrically meaningless to talk about the "center" of the expansion, because there is no such place.

Re:Intelligent Design

[El]

Problem with your theory is simple: the farther away they are, the farther back in time the point at which the light originated. So you'd expect "far out" galaxies to be more organized, since they've had less time for entropy to take effect.

Re:Intelligent Design

[complete loony]

There are many other theories that predict the background radiation, and it's not necesarily from an explosion.

I have my own theory that also accounts for the observed quantization of the red shift of light (which IMHO there is no current plausible model to explain).

In a nutshell my theory is based on the collapse of a photons quantum function causing a second low energy photon to be scatterred (resulting in the background radiation) and the first photon to lose that same amount of energy. This would occur as the collapse of the wave function must still conserve energy and momentum which would be impossible without the second photon being emitted.

Theres more too it than that, but thats my idea, and I really need to get around to writing it up properly.

(any assistance persuing this idea and formalising it would be greatly appreaciated).

Re:Intelligent Design

[Sgt York]

I've heard both the baloon and raisin cake analogies before, and they both seemed overly simplistic. I guess it's just the constant referral to the expansion that gets me. If something expands, it is exanding froma point; even the balloon is expanding from a point, it's just not a point on the 2D surface.

You're probably right; as these things get more complex, they must be understood on their own terms. I guess I need to get off my butt and find a good book on the subject, then get back on my butt and read it. Any suggestions?

Re:Intelligent Design

[Alsee]

Thanx for your post, once again proving that "Intelligent Design" advocates have no understanding of science. If you get the science wrong then it is very easy to use it as part of some bogus and supposedly "scientific" argument.

As any good evolutionist knows

First of all evolution and the big bang have absolutely nothing in common aside from the fact that they are both science. You may as well have said "As any good gravitationist knows..."

after the "Big Bang" all the matter in the universe, which had been compressed (through forces and mechanisms unknowable) into a very tiny ball, exploded outward

All of the matter and energy was evenly spread through out the entire universe, all the way back to the big bang. Matter did not "explode". Space expanded. Bits of matter got farther from other bits of matter because the space between them expanded. Everything was densely packed in a miniscule space because there was only miniscule amout of space in the universe. And that miniscule amount of space had no "outer edge".

(spherically, with planar tendencies)

Sphereically? No. You are imagining some exploding ball, and that is an absolutely totally wrong image. The best way to explain it would be as the skin of an expanding 4 dimentional hyper-sphere, but I really don't relish the prospect of trying to stretch your mind around that concept.

No "planar tendancies" either. Aside from random fluctuations everything was smooth and equal throughout the universe. Everywhere was just like everywhere else. No edge, no center, no fast, no slow. The good old balloon analogy - when you blow up a ballon the surface expands, but every point on the surface is exactly like every other point. The surface of a balloon has no edge, no center, no explosion, no part moving any faster or any differently than any other part.

with tremendous force.

You are reffering to some imaginary explosive force of matter pushing out. There was no explosion and there was no "out" to push to. Expanding space dragged the matter apart. No explosive force at all. It expanded like the surface of a balloon, not like a stick of dynamite.

All of this random matter eventually coagulated into more and more complicated forms until stars, planets, and the like were formed.

Hey! You got that part right!

This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense

Chuckle. You're quite right that what you said makes absolutely no sense.

There is no "assumed center" of the big bang, at least not within our 3-dimentional universe. At any given time every point in the universe is the same "distance" from the big bang.

Those galaxies are far from us, but you are completely wrong to imagine they are "FAR OUT" at the edge of the big bang. To the extent that it makes sense to reffer to the "distance to the center of the big bang", those galaxies are extremely CLOSE to the center because you are looking back in time. You are imagining them out at some low-density surface of an explosion, these galaxies are actually in a HIGH DENSITY region, they are much closer to the big bang itself.

You are making the classic mistake of picturing the Earth as the center of the universe. From our point of view the Earth is at the outermost edge of the big bang from every direction. No matter which direction you look from the Earth you are looking back towards the "center" of the big bang because you are looking back in time. As you look billions of light years away in every direction you see increasing mass density and you are looking closer and closer to the "center" of the big bang.

From our point of view we see ourselves at the oldest lowest density outermost edge of the big bang - the outermost edge from every direction.

since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greate

Re:Intelligent Design

[Alsee]

I just thought of an interesting twist to explain the ballon analogy without "expansion".

Imagine space is the surface of the balloon. There is no inside or outside, the surface is all there is. It can't moving or expand because that "outward" direction doesn't exist. It is just this surface sitting there. It has dots painted on it, the various galaxies.

Now imagine the rubber of the balloon. It starts out hot and soft. You can quickly run from one point to another in one second. One light-second is the "distance" between the points. Then the rubber cools and gets stiff. It keeps aging and gets hard. It then takes you an entire year to get from one point to another through this old hard stiff rubber. The two points are now one light-year apart, even though nothing has moved. As the rubber ages it just keeps taking longer and longer to get from one place to another.

It seems like all of the other galaxies are getting farther away because it takes longer to get there. It seems like space is expanding because we can only cross it more slowly.

From that simple view you might thing the Earth would seem to be expanding too - but gravity is always trying to pull all of the parts of the earth closer together. The atoms of the Earth press eachother a certain light-time apart. The Earth would actually look like a shrinking circle on the surface of the balloon. The older and tougher the rubber gets, the smaller the light-time gets and the closer together the atoms of the Earth can fall together under gravity.

If everything on the balloon shrinks then it seems like the balloon is expanding.

-

Re:Intelligent Design

[barakn]

Thanks for the link to the Intelligent Design site. There I learned this:

Specified complexity is displayed by any object or event that has an extremely low probability of occurring by chance, and matches a discernable pattern. According to contemporary design theory, the presence of highly specified complexity is an indicator of an intelligent cause.

and also

When a design theorist says that a string of letters is specified, he's saying that it fits a recognizable pattern. And when he says it's complex, he's saying there are so many different ways the object could have turned out that the chance of getting any particular outcome by accident is hopelessly small.

Which led me to conjecture..... God is obviously complex, because He was able to create a complex Universe filled with complex beings. And He is a specific God, getting very angry if you try to worship just any god. Our God is the god with the specific abilities to create this Universe. So obviously God is a creation of Intelligent Design, and we can conclude in a similar manner that all Intelligent Designers are the products of Intelligent Designers. This implies an infinitely old chain of Gods creating each other.

Alternatively, God's creator was Man. This at least avoids the infinite cycle of Gods.

Re:Intelligent Design

[Sgt York]

I think I finally get it now. Imagining it as a 2D surface alone, with no edges and no 3rd dimension made it a lot easier (waiting for a rational time to be awake helped, too).

So, everything moves apart, but there is no overall center. Any given set of objects will seem to be moving away from a given point, but if you add more objects, that apparent convergence point will change. The same thing if you watch them for very long.

That was my problem; I was always imagining from the exterior. There is no exterior, so you can't look at it that way.

I hope I got it right; it all makes more sense now...thanks.

Re:Intelligent Design

[LinuxParanoid]

The expansion of the Universe is an expansion of space itself.

That concept I understand. Your simple restatement of it though makes me wonder... has there been any thinking/investigation of whether the Plank constant could have (gradually) changed during some stage of the Big Bang and/or what the consequences of such a change would entail?

--LP

Re:Intelligent Design

[barawn]

I can't make up my mind whether this is the most straightforward explanation or not. It's true that we have very little observational data about galaxy formation. And I don't put too much stock into the semi-empirical galaxy formation models (e.g. the Kauffman et. al. stuff); too many ways to tweak them. But at the same time, you're constrained in what you can do in the Universe before decoupling by anisotropy observations, while the tiny value of the Compton y-parameter in the CBR constrains pushing stuff around by energy imput after decoupling.

Definitely agreed on the galaxy formation bit. I remember talking to a few cosmologists and asking them what they had changed to get results that looked believable (because back when I was an undergrad, the timescales and distribution of galaxies in the universe were nowhere *close* to reality) and it was basically that they had tweaked a whole bunch of different parameters and gotten something that looked right. Yah. Right. Then again, they do have more input parameters now - dark matter/dark energy density so it may be a little better.

I really do wonder about the whole "string formation" bit, because that sort of formation is exactly what you would expect from a cosmic string, which everyone used to invoke to try for galaxy formation before dark matter became everyone's favorite baby. Makes you wonder.

It would make me laugh if this did turn out to be an outlier - it's *always* possible, even with ridiculously low probabilities. You have to form *some* distribution, so why not a string? :) That'd make galaxy formation people really annoyed, wouldn't it? A chance formation hinting at some greater possibility. Heh.

Re:Intelligent Design

[barawn]

I have my own theory that also accounts for the observed quantization of the red shift of light

There are science trolls on Slashdot now? That's new!

Well, I like to feed trolls to make sure that someone perusing /. doesn't think that things are real...

The quantization of red shift was an artifact. There's a paper in MNRAS from quite some time ago which shows no periodicity in redshifts as was thought before.

The rest of your post is pretty much pure troll, as photons can't interact with photons without a virtual electron/positron set. Y'know, the whole "fundamental vertex of QED" bit. This is the little bit that few people know about -photons need stray charges around to interact with each other.

Its Imposible...

[Slick_Snake]

It doesn't fit our Model!

Well maybe the model is wrong.

Re:Its Imposible...

[n1ywb]

I think that's their point, the model is wrong.

Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[curious.corn]

... and they were even denied the 'scope to perform the observations!? (yeah, like the "Kid, don't bother us with that Lun'ux on our NT Backoffice" crap I was given 3 years ago...)
Ah, like all other human things, politics, jealousy and orthodoxy are science's greatest pain in the ass. It's a real shame that you have to wait for the white beards to retire or die before scrapping their pet theories or get out of the basement and have a real lab...
Now, I wonder what kind of superforce, string, lace, lasso, wimp, buga-uaba will jump out of the hat to save the BB this time... hmm... stars just minutes after the blast?... He, he...

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[Black Parrot]

What makes you interpret this as a nail into the Big Bang's heart? There's nothing in the article that suggests that the Big Bang didn't happen. In fact it gives the known date of the Big Bang.

The scientist comments -

To explain our results the dark matter clouds that lie in strings must have formed galaxies, while the dark matter clouds elsewhere have not done so. We've no idea why this happened - it's not what the models predict

Does that sound like a denial of the Big Bang?

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[curious.corn]

It's just yet-another-inconsistency in the n-th hack to the BB theory introduced to clean up previous gripes. Undoubtedly some smart uberphysicist armed with pencil & paper (no lab mind you...) will find some toruous equation and shut up those not smart enough; it's been going on for decades. But, after all... do I care? Well, as long as they don't waste too much money chasing their glory I don't mind; I'm just worried that their sacerdotal attitude and pretence to know "God's mind" might dilute the distinction between Science and Faith.

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[Bootsy Collins]

It's just yet-another-inconsistency in the n-th hack to the BB theory introduced to clean up previous gripes.

Can you be more specific? What's the inconsistency here, with what is it inconsistent, and how does that inconsistency speak to the Big Bang model as a whole, specifically? I'm not saying you're wrong (yet); I just can't address your statement directly because it's too vague.

There are without question unsolved problems in cosmology (thank heavens; otherwise, cosmologists would have little to do). I'm interested in your careful argument as to why those problems cannot be solved in the context of the Big Bang model, and therefore falsify it. To me, it seems like you're saying "Since we don't understand how tornadoes form, it's time to realize that the `spherical Earth' model is a failure." That analogy probably seems silly to you, since we have lots of evidence to support the idea of a (nearly) spherical Earth. But we have lots of evidence that supports the Big Bang model as well, including non-trivial advance predictions borne out by subsequent observation.

The Big Bang model will be falsified if and when a prediction it makes is shown to be false. But that hasn't happened here: the Big Bang model does not make predictions about the specifics of the mass distribution or galaxy formation. Those are topics of importance in cosmology, but they do not directly speak to the veracity of the Big Bang model. Only if the general constraints the Big Bang model places upon galaxy formation are such that these observations should be impossible is there a problem for the Big Bang. Nobody's shown this to be true.

It is true that these observations, if correct, pose a challenge to the standard cosmological model. But there's more to the standard cosmological model than just the Big Bang model.

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[curious.corn]

Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent. Some new research threatens boatloads of papers, ok... mop it under the rug. Average, uninitiated scientists can't make heads or tails of the nasty slew of hypotherical particles and their family relations (that HAS to be true because it fits the model!)... oh, they're just ignorant. Hmm, I've grocked EM and some quantum physics (the basics: Schroedinger, Fermi and the avg undergraduate stuff in a Solid State Phy course) and never got the Alice in Wonderland feeling. If anything, I cound whip up some experimental paper and read the numbers. All this cosmology doesn't fit my vision of experimental science. You might argue that modern cosmology can account for all the data (or just give it enough time and it will) but anyone can shoehorn a dataset in a model... just add some epicycles, a nudge here, a constant there... it'll all fit. Well, if you're a cosmologist I have no chance holding up my opinion, these guys really know serious math, much more than I do. I've also moved along, I've dedicated myself to other fields but when I had my jab at the subject I had this uneasy feeling of numerical philosophy. So, I just wished these guys proposed something that didn't postulate unreproducible conditions (like +1 us in time since BB) or misterious events (inflation?) Why is there only G in the cosmos? Where has EM gone? Why does it look like The First Seven Days writ in scientific notation? Is H concentration and Hubble shift such a damning evidence? BTW, I'm biased... I'm italian (roman actually) and I've seen too many priests 'reconciling faith & science' under the BB theory ;-)

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[Bootsy Collins]

Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent.

Can you give an example?

Some new research threatens boatloads of papers, ok... mop it under the rug.

Can you give an example?

Average, uninitiated scientists can't make heads or tails of the nasty slew of hypotherical particles and their family relations (that HAS to be true because it fits the model!)... oh, they're just ignorant.

The Big Bang model makes no predictions whatsoever about the existence of any hypothetical particles, let alone a "nasty slew." The only particles required to be present for the Big Bang model to make accurate predictions are those expected to still be relativistic at the time of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis: namely, the three families of baryons and leptons that we've already detected in experiments here on Earth. In fact, when the BBN calculations were first done, it was discovered that the predictions only made sense if there were three or fewer families of fundamental particles. At that time, we only knew of two for sure. We've since discovered the third in particle accelerators, and measurements of the decay width of the Z0 particle 13 years ago confirmed that no more than three such families could exist. So, contrary to your statement, the Big Bang model not only doesn't predict a "nasty slew of hypothetical particles," but at this point it doesn't predict any hypothetical particles at all, and indeed sets a limit on how many light ones can exist.

It looks to me like you don't know what the Big Bang model actually says. And it looks to me like you don't know what's not the Big Bang model -- that is, what are other ideas that are taken seriously as part of the standard cosmology but are not part of the Big Bang model itself because they deal with cosmological topics that the Big Bang model does not directly address.

Hmm, I've grocked EM and some quantum physics (the basics: Schroedinger, Fermi and the avg undergraduate stuff in a Solid State Phy course) and never got the Alice in Wonderland feeling.

Really? Wow. One of the reasons I loved quantum so much, through undergrad and grad school, was how something that seemed so "Alice in Wonderland"-y to me could be so solidly borne out by experiment. I mean, tunnelling through potential barriers? Come on. But amazingly enough, the answers come out right.

You might argue that modern cosmology can account for all the data (or just give it enough time and it will) but anyone can shoehorn a dataset in a model... just add some epicycles, a nudge here, a constant there... it'll all fit.

But can you give me some examples of how this has gone on, with respect to the Big Bang model?

Our cosmological understanding has undergone a tremendous amount of change in the last 20-25 years, as cosmology has gone from a data-starved science to a data-rich one. Lots of ideas have been put forward, "tweaked" (as you say), shot down, resuscitated, etc. None of that has to do with the Big Bang model. People have definitely tried to massage pet theories when data has come in that didn't quite fit (the topological defect folks -- cosmic strings, etc. -- come to mind); but those theories were not the Big Bang model.

It really seems to me like you don't know, of the set of ideas that make up the standard cosmology and those additional ideas that are taken seriously but not yet fully accepted, what's part of the Big Bang model and what isn't. The popular press carries some of the blame for this -- the phrase "the Big Bang model" is all the cosmology most newspaper science writers know, so when results have challenged cosmological orthodoxy, they've sometimes been described as challenges to the Big Bang model, even though in actuality they've typically said nothing whatsoever one way or the other about the Big Bang model.

So, I just wished these guys p

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[nimblebrain]

> Well, the BB story has gone along for so much time... some new data whacks it, ok... small nudge and it's consistent.

Can you give an example?

*laugh* I'll bite :) Here are a few:

* The "flat universe" case gives a Hubble constant of 65 km/s/Mpc (megaparsec). This amounts to an age of the universe of ~10 billion years. This is one of the "age paradoxes" that have led to some of the more interesting revisions and proposed revisions.

* The temperature of the cosmic background radiation was a retrodiction, not a prediction. Alpher and Herman got the closest, with a prediction of 5 Kelvins, but what you don't often hear is that the prediction was later adjusted to 28 Kelvins.

* Inflation theory was introduced by Linde in the mid 80's to help solve the "bubble" problem by having a massive FTL expansion in space for 10^-30 s, and co-opted to help squeeze in some extra universe age. The theory, as it got refined, placed more constraints on the universe (e.g. it has to be flat, not open or closed, for inflation theory to work), and gives us our "refined" universe age of 13.7 billion years

* The age problem, in light of recent Hubble observations, has caused a few new proposals to sprout. The "cosmological constant" as a repulsive force has sprouted up on a few a occasions. It has been proposed in the past year that the universe may have decelerated in the past and is now accelerating.

There's a lot more, and I can get you sources :)

The Big Bang model makes no predictions whatsoever about the existence of any hypothetical particles, let alone a "nasty slew."

I think what he's referring to is the tack a number of scientists have gone off on in the search for enough dark energy to make the universe "flat" or "closed", and they have invoked a nasty number of theoretical particles. He might also be referring to the slew of theoretical particles some scientists are hypothesizing to explain how galaxies managed to form so soon after the big bang (with quotes like "The majority, perhaps a sea of "non-baryonic," exotic particles, is likely to have played the key role in assembling the first galaxy-sized masses." from NASA's Origins page).

I love quantum physics, myself. It makes some pretty interesting (and good!) predictions, but (as you say), the Big Bang Theory doesn't 'predict' them per se.

Personally, I find it strange that the particles from quantum physics and its forces have been been apportioned a timeline in Big Bang Theory for times of creation and symmetry-breaking. I've seen some folks imply that the two line up well, and by implication that the successes of quantum physics should prop up the Big Bang Theory as well. However, Big Bang Theory just apportions particles a time closer to t=0, the more MeV they require to manufacture in a cyclotron, so it's a lot more 'arbitrary' than would be implied. What it means for me is that quantum physics cannot 'falsify' BBT, by definition.

H, He, and Li concentrations

These are also numbers that have "floated" with time, and the baryonic numbers have been kept consistent with observations. Observed deuterium levels are ten times below BBT predictions, and distant young stars have proved out to have much too much boron and beryllium (which are not in BBT nucleosynthesis as a general rule) in them.

Hubble expansion

Most cosmologists selectively quote Hubble from around 1929. If you read some of his later work, you'll find more of an emphasis on the "apparent velocities" from the redshift not being actual velocities. He had a graph from one of his presentations in the early 1940s showing how luminosities would have to decl

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[Bootsy Collins]

First of all, thanks for coming in with some specifics. Not that I agree with them, but at least now there are things which are not vaguaries to which I can respond.

Unfortunately, responding adequately is going to take a lot of time and a lot of space. I don't know who's still reading this at this point, but I'm going to have to do this over several replies and over time. I hope that's OK.

The "flat universe" case gives a Hubble constant of 65 km/s/Mpc (megaparsec). This amounts to an age of the universe of ~10 billion years. This is one of the "age paradoxes" that have led to some of the more interesting revisions and proposed revisions.

No, this is a false representation of things. It is not the case that an assumption of a flat universe requires a Hubble parameter of 65 km/s/Mpc; it is not the case that a flat universe with a Hubble parameter of 65 km/s/Mpc necessarily indicates an age of 10 Gyr. There was an "age problem" at one point -- a discrepancy between the age of some of the oldest objects in the Universe (globular clusters) with the age of the Universe inferred from its expansion -- but that problem has been resolved, and without any revision to the Big Bang model at all.

To elaborate:

In the Big Bang model, estimating the age of the Universe through the expansion is possible because the age is functionally related to three things: the Hubble parameter; the large-scale geometry of space (the curvature), induced by the mean energy density; and the relative contributions to the mean energy density from components which scale differently with the expansion of the Universe (e.g. radiation, which scales inversely with the fourth power of the expansion; matter, which scales inversely with the third power of the expansion, and vacuum energy/cosmological constant, which does not change with the expansion). Knowledge of all of these things is required to make a prediction of the age of the Universe from the expansion.

It's true that through the 80's and much of the 90's, there was a perception that there was an age problem: globular cluster ages were suggesting you needed the Universe to have been around for as much as 15 Gyr; requiring an expansion age at least that long seemed (based on what we knew of the other parameters) to require a Hubble parameter as low as 50 km/s/Mpc, which observations did not favor. But in the last 7-8 years, three observational results have occurred which have caused the age problem to disappear. Note that I said observational; no adjustment of the Big Bang model was involved at all.

The first observational result was the lowering of globular cluster ages estimated from observations. This occurred for a number of reasons, the most significant of which was the recalibration of the distance ladder that came from better parallax distance measures to local reference stars from the Hipparcos satellite. Hipparcos observations determined that local reference stars were about 10% farther away than previously thought; this increased the distances to globular clusters, and therefore the luminosities of main sequence turnoff on their HR diagrams. By the summer of 1998, the globular cluster folks were going to conferences quoting maximum ages of just above 13 Gyr.

The second observational result was the lowering of estimates of the Hubble parameter that also came from recalibrations of the distance ladder, which in turn came from two things: the Hipparcos results mentioned previously; and the excellent observations of Cepheid variables that were the main objective of the Hubble Key Project. These brought the observed value of the Hubble parameter down from its previously favored value of around 75 km/s/Mpc or so to values of 65-67 km/s/Mpc, increasing ages estimated through the expansion by 11-15%. These two results dealt with much of the discrepancy between the two ages, but did not resolve it completely.

The third observational result was a dramatic improvement in the determination of th

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[nimblebrain]

I can appreciate that that took a few-hour chunk out of the middle of the day; you've given me a few things to track down.

There is a most excellent paper by Xinhe Ming and Peng Wang from August 31, 2003 that led to the decelerated-then-accelerating model that has raised my eyebrows so much located here.

The equations of state resemble (to me) the way computers use polynomials to approximate sines and other trigonometric functions (with less terms, mind you, but we already know the infinite polynomial sequences for sine). There are plenty of constants and terms to tweak, and a number of the equations are unstable (which reminds me a little of the limited polynomial sequences - taking sin(100*pi) with direct substitution would give the wrong value, but here it gives more the effect of tweaking a polynomial to fit an observed curve).

In summary, adding a R^-1 or the like terms to the Einstein-Hilbert action is an interesting idea, which may originate from some String/M-theory, and looks like a possible candidate for the explanation of recent cosmic expansion acceleration fact

For all I know, they could be right. I'll admit my current prejudice, though. It has the feel of tweakery, though, for BBT to have that much "play" in it. Equations aside, much of the current consternation appears to come from "tests of reasonability", (which are being stretched by observations) such as "galaxy string X couldn't have formed Y years after photon decoupling".

I don't think the theorists were trying to solve the age problem back in the day; the announcements in Omni were simply along the lines of "the universe is 10 billion years old". The cosmological constant was rejected as a 'hack' by Einstein himself - it was originally introduced as a term to keep a static universe from collapsing due to gravity; it was set to zero in early BBT. *laugh* I wouldn't ascribe nobility to the difficulty of accepting a nonzero cosmological constant in the face of observation; that's like asking software folks to refactor - it's grudgingly, not heroically, done, even though folks are happy about the results in retrospect :)

*laugh* Sorry, didn't mean to get on a rant here - thank you for a well-crafted response, Bootsy; I'm looking forward to more!

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[Bootsy Collins]

OK, here's a batch more response. I hope this is interesting . . .

The temperature of the cosmic background radiation was a retrodiction, not a prediction. Alpher and Herman got the closest, with a prediction of 5 Kelvins, but what you don't often hear is that the prediction was later adjusted to 28 Kelvins.

This is pretty commonly brought up by proponents of alternative cosmologies. I've had discussions with proponents of several in the past, and this frequently gets mentioned. It's unfortunate, because most people realize that this is pretty much a red herring. No prediction of the cosmic microwave background's blackbody temperature prior to the CMBR's discovery was ever thought very likely correct, since making the prediction required as mathematical input other cosmological parameters which had not yet been measured with any precision at all. The mere existence of the microwave background, and that it should be so uniform and such an incredibly good blackbody (at this point, the best blackbody ever observed anywhere) were the real predictions; and their success actually is pretty impressive -- more impressive than they might seem at first glance.

To elaborate . . .we know what temperature the background radiation would have had to be at at the time of decoupling/recombination, just because of atomic physics. In order to predict what the temperature is now, one has to know how much the Universe has expanded since then. How do you know that? How do you know how much the Universe has expanded since recombination? (phrased differently, how do we know what the redshift of the surface of last scattering is?) We know it now from the current microwave background temperature; but that's of course pretty useless if what you're trying to do is predict the current CMBR temperature. Well, there are ways you can guess. For instance, if you think you know that the Universe is flat, and that the contribution from vacuum energy is zero; and presuming you know what the Hubble constant is now; and presuming you know what the energy density of the Universe in matter is now; and given the fact that you know what the radiation energy density had to have been at recombination (because you know what its temperature had to be, from atomic physics); from these things, you can calculate what the microwave background temperature now ought to be.

How well do you think those things were known then?

And suggesting that that implies a mark against the Big Bang model makes no logical sense. It would be analogous to the following: suppose I'm building a circuit from scratch, having first designed it using what I know of circuit theory from classical electromagnetism. I build it, and my circuit doesn't work as I expected. I then learn that the dielectric constant I'd assumed for a material I used in my homemade capacitors was wrong, and consequently I'd figured them to have a different capacitance than what they actually had when I built them . . .so of course my circuit didn't work like I thought it would. Apparently, the people who find fault with early guesses at the current CMBR temperature would conclude that the failure of my circuit indicates that circuit theory is incorrect; but that's false. Like circuit theory, the Big Bang model establishes mathematical relationships between physical parameters of the system it describes. Put the wrong values into the equations, and you'll get wrong values out, which then won't match subsequent observations. Of course, with what we know now of the cosmological parameters, everything is perfectly consistent, without any tweaking of the Big Bang model whatsoever.

It is the mere existence of the microwave background -- its omnidirectional uniformity and amazing blackbody spectrum -- that is the prediction of interest. And contrary to assertions from people, these are extremely hard to contrive in other ways. Such alternative sources for the CMBR typically involve a local origin, in

Re: Yet another nail into Big Bang's heart...

[nimblebrain]

No prediction of the cosmic microwave background's blackbody temperature prior to the CMBR's discovery was ever thought very likely correct

Predictions were made, though, from Steffan-Boltzmann laws, of blackbody cosmic background radiation in an infinite/static universe configuration by Guillaume in 1896 (5-6K), Eddington in 1926 (3.18K), Regener (2.8K) and Nernst (0.75K on a tired light model).

It is the mere existence of the microwave background -- its omnidirectional uniformity and amazing blackbody spectrum -- that is the prediction of interest. And contrary to assertions from people, these are extremely hard to contrive in other ways. Such alternative sources for the CMBR typically involve a local origin, in which starlight is thermalized by e.g. the intergalactic medium.

I had gathered that inflationary theory was employed to explain the uniformity due to horizon considerations; fluctuations contributing to the anisotropy would have had to be in contact. Without inflationary theory, it would/will be much harder to explain, at least on that basis.

I wasn't aware of a localized requirement for alternate explanations of the CMB, although many of the proponents in the early part of the last century employed them. I've heard in passing of the "whiskers and grains" afficionados, but don't know what to think of them. So the limitations of an alternate explanation would be: high density IGM so that it can be isotropic with an explanation of how it can avoid absorbing extragalactic signals, or low density IGM and a very old universe and an explanation of what would thermalize radiation independently of distance.

Such theories also tend to neglect the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect

One thing I found particularly odd about the effect was its independence from redshift. From an alternate standpoint, I would ask why it could not be considered a constant effect on a constant temperature of background radiation.

(On a side note: I must thank you for giving me some very interesting topics to look up. Here's one link for the S-Z effect for those watching the conversation not in the know. :)

Third, inflation does not give us an age of 13.7 Gyr for the Universe.

Fair enough.

From the WMAP data, NASA scientists precise estimate of 13.7 Gyr +/- 0.2 Gyr. It is said to discount certain models of inflationary theory, but appears to rely on it.

One gets an age of 13.7 Gyr if the Universe is flat, if its energy content is basically all matter, and if the Hubble constant is 50 km/s/Mpc.

The values from NASA give 4% visible matter, 23% dark matter, 73% dark energy, at a Hubble constant of between 68-75 km/s/Mpc, and indicate a flat universe.

If inflation turns out to be complete and utter crap, that does not say anything for or against the Big Bang model, since the Big Bang model does not have inflation as one of its components.

Perhaps not, but a lot has been invested in the inflationary path. It would look bad :)

And when it specifically comes to the acceleration of the expansion, that's been observationally detected, since 1997, by independent groups, and is one of the key pieces of evidence arguing for a nonzero vacuum energy density.

I can imagine how accelerating expansion could be deduced, but I've seen nothing (point me in the right direction?) to indicate that there are observations that would indicate acceleration independently of the current BBT models and equations.

I don't doubt that BBT is self-consistent, but for convincing "outsiders", stock must be taken of which observations whose interpretations shift depending on context, and which ones are more "static". If you've ever argued with a orthodoxie/fundie, you

outside force creating the universe

[slithytove]

Does the concept of a "universe" leave room for anything "outside" of it?
Intiution tells me that the universe didn't start with a big bang (at least nothing like big bang theory), but it also tells me that the only possible "God"-like thing that could exist will exist in the future (from our perspective) rather than having been around all along but not doing anything overt since second 0 (or the end of day 6 if you want to get silly).
I have had experiences that I took to be confirmations of my previously adhered-to organized faith, but I have had many more since going my own way. What these experiences tell me is that the universe is caused by what we might think of as its eventual end. Causality flows, at the most fundamental level, backwards to our perception. And furthermore, as quantum physics seems (to me) to shout from the rooftops: Our perceptions operate at a very fundamental level of physics, allowing us to perceive time, though it is not really any different from so called spatial dimensions.

Re:outside force creating the universe

[barawn]

Does the concept of a "universe" leave room for anything "outside" of it?


Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.

There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.

Intiution tells me that the universe didn't start with a big bang

Sigh. Your intuition is wrong. If you had eyes in the microwave you wouldn't doubt the Big Bang at all. Giant, uniform fireball. Hmm.

than having been around all along but not doing anything overt since second 0 (or the end of day 6 if you want to get silly).


A deity doing something overt, externally, to a creation that it created would be impossible to discern from an act naturally occuring inside the creation itself.

Said simpler, the difference between a miracle and a coincidence is whether or not you believe it was a miracle.

Our perceptions operate at a very fundamental level of physics, allowing us to perceive time, though it is not really any different from so called spatial dimensions.


Ooh yes, it is quite different! It's got a negative signature in the metric tensor. Therefore, motion backwards in time requires unbounded energy, whereas motion in all directions in space requires none.

This is why many people say that "space and time switch roles" inside an event horizon: because motion backwards in time (while remaining inside the event horizon) becomes virtually free, whereas motion radially outward becomes unbounded in energy.

There's no way we could move freely in time without violating nasty bad things, or doing weird things with wormholes or negative matter density.

Re:outside force creating the universe

[Carnildo]

Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe. The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense, regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.

There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed", which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness, because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.

Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us? You can say that they were, but not that they are. There's no such thing as an instantaneous "now" snapshot of the universe, just a snapshot of the current surface of the backwards light cone. In practice, "everything that I can observe" and "everything that is connected to me" refer to the same thing.

Re:outside force creating the universe

[Bootsy Collins]

> Yes, and no: depending on who you talk to, and the definition of Universe.
> The best one I can come up with is "all space which is connected (in a
> mathematical sense) and includes me at the present time". In that sense,
> regions of black holes are another Universe, for instance.
>
> There are other statements like "the Universe is everything that can be observed",
> which is a much more limiting definition (fundamentally, there's a ton of
> spacetime outside all of humanity's forward and backward light cones), or "the
> Universe is everything", which, well, pretty much occludes all "outside"-ness,
> because as soon as you find something outside, it's not outside. Oookay.

Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us? You can say that they were, but not that they are. There's no such thing as an instantaneous "now" snapshot of the universe, just a snapshot of the current surface of the backwards light cone. In practice, "everything that I can observe" and "everything that is connected to me" refer to the same thing.

I shouldn't speak for the poster to whom you were replying, but I'm pretty sure that he was using the phrase "mathematically connected" in a topological sense, rather than referring to causal connection. If one meant connected in a causal sense, then you're absolutely correct that that means the backwards light cone by definition, and therefore means what I can observe. But you can also talk about the topology of space, and whether the Universe is simply connected, connected, etc. I think that's how it was meant; and that definition is different from what's observable.

Re:outside force creating the universe

[Alsee]

Is it meaningful to talk about the portions of the universe that are outside our light cones as being mathematically connected to us?

I think "mathematically connected" was reffering to trasitive connectivity. We are in the same universe as a star 10 billion light years away. We are in the same universe with everything it sees in its universe, even if some of those things are outside our light cones.

Light cones is a reasonable definition of universe, but in most cases it makes more sense to say that you and I live in the same universe even though our light cones are imperceptibly diffeent.

-

Warped space?

[klui]

What's the chance that space is warped in such a way that we're seeing something that's not as far away, kinda like the old Asteroids game where if you go off the screen on one side, you return from the other?

Re:Warped space?

[El]

I think it's more likely that the universe wraps around, and we're actually looking at ourselves, only 300 million years ago...

Re:Warped space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Possible Theory, What proof is there to state otherwise?

Remember the article on heresy earlier?

[SmallFurryCreature]

It was an article on heresy or what we consider heresy in this age. Well these guys said something different from the accepted wisdom and were shunned.

Good to see human kind have progressed so much since the days of Galileo. Kidding ofcourse. They did not have to wait centuries for people to stop trying to burn them at the cross.

Anyone in Atlanta or who knows these guys?

[Bootsy Collins]

The NASA page on this quotes a redshift of 2.38. Do they say how they got it? Did they take full spectra from all these objects? Are some of them Lyman break galaxies? Are any of the redshifts photometric rather than spectroscopic?

Re:Anyone in Atlanta or who knows these guys?

[drudd]

From poking around on their website, here's a preprint article, and there's another paper which discusses spectroscopic confirmation.

These are Lyman emitting galaxies, initially identified using a special camera with narrow band filters targeted at this redshift (a previously known z = 2.38 cluster was in the field which I think is why they picked it). They then used a multi-object spectrograph (2dF) to spectroscopically confirm the redshifts (second paper).

Doug

Re:Anyone in Atlanta or who knows these guys?

[mbrother]

Good answer, Doug. I know these guys but skipped Atlanta this year.

Re:Anyone in Atlanta or who knows these guys?

[drudd]

Thanks... I had to be a little careful with the details, I'm a theorist by training ;)

Doug

A Bad Theory

[Shihar]

The problem with ID is that a universe that does not comply with the ID theory would not be able to be observed. ID basically states that the universe is so well put together and that things fit so perfectly to allow certain things, most notably life, that there must be some force behind it.

What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it. In other words, there could have been a billion big bangs all that developed different laws. In all of these big bangs there might have been only one where all the laws arrived to allow for intelligence (humans) to observe it.

ID theory also suffers from the simple fact that a good theory can devise be disproved. You can never prove a good theory, but you can always find a way to disprove it. If you develop a theory that can not be disproved, then you have not added much. You have just engaged a logic exercise, not any sort of true science.

ID has no place in science. ID is a just a catch all for things we don't understand. It might very well come that one day we discover through science some intelligent power that created everything, however, until that time ID is very much a premature. ID is based upon the observation that the universe is elegant in its construction. To automatically assume that this means that some higher power is at work is utterly foolish.

As to the topic at hand, the only thing that this proves is that current theories could be potentially incomplete. It very well could be that the universe is older then it appears, and this would of course require modifying or scrapping the current theories. It isn't a death blow by any stretch of the imagination. It also is still need a great deal more scientific validation before it can be shown that what we are looking at is as old as these scientist claim.

Re:A Bad Theory

[barawn]

What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it. In other words, there could have been a billion big bangs all that developed different laws. In all of these big bangs there might have been only one where all the laws arrived to allow for intelligence (humans) to observe it.


Exactly correct. Intelligent design (and likewise the similarly-worded strong anthropic principle) are unprovable because their contrapositive and its opposite are unprovably identical.

The best way to show this is to use the strong anthropic principle, which states that the Universe evolved to allow humans to exist (note "to", not "such that": this implies the purpose of the Universe is to create humans).

(bear with me, I'm munging logic definitions because the original assertion is poorly worded.)

Its contrapositive is "it is not possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist".

Its opposite is "it is possible for the Universe to have evolved in such a way that humans could not exist."

By the weak anthropic principle (the Universe evolved in such a way that humans could exist), we can see that the opposite cannot apply to our current Universe (obviously!). Since I can't disprove the negative, and there aren't really any other options for proving the positive (even brute force "exhausting all other possibilities" wouldn't work: you don't have another Universe to try it out on, and any work you do is bounded by this one, so all you've really stated is "it is not possible in this Universe to end up with a Universe that isn't like this Universe." Duh.) So the strong anthropic principle is unprovable.

The only thing you could eventually show is that the Universe had to evolve in exactly the way it did, which still doesn't prove the strong anthropic principle because there are no other examples to compare it to, and you don't know the full range of "possibilities" for this Universe, because you're inside it.

It might very well come that one day we discover through science some intelligent power that created everything

A lot of scientists use this argument as a catchall to somewhat placate people who are upset that we seem to be disturbing their (naively-created) worldview. I don't understand it, though. We fundamentally have no way of proving that an intelligent power outside the Universe created everything. If a giant head appeared in front of me now and said "I created the Universe", and I said "Prove it", fundamentally everything it does has to be explainable by physics that is possible to learn. If something happens outside of known physics, by definition, known physics isn't good enough, and I've simply encountered a being who understands the physics of the Universe better than me. And if all he does show is physics that's explainable to me, then I can explain everything he does, and that simply says that I've encountered another being in the Universe who understands physics. (The "Columbus scares the natives with an eclipse" example)

A god simply can't prove his own existence - regardless of what the Babel Fish argument tries to show. No god could show any evidence to convince a good, skeptic scientist. It's just a matter of faith (which is why all the religious people who try to claim that it's their faith that makes them believe amuses me: apparently their faith was pretty weak if it forces them to ignore facts rather than question and adapt their own beliefs). If I believe that a god exists (or doesn't exist!), recognizing all of the above, my faith is stronger than those who don't, because I would believe it despite the fact that I know it can't be proven.

Laugh! Re:Impossible

[samjam]

I know people don't normally read the article before posting, but you didn't even read the comments!

I didn't single out American Science I commented on Italian Science too.

I mentioned American Science because it was American Scientists who denied use of the telescope. The poitn was that they were turned down, but the reason.

Seriously; I think you can see the difference between having a "theory" that the universe is made of cheese and observing something that looks like a galaxy in an unusual place and wanted to use a better telescope to check it.

Sam

Re:Laugh! Re:Impossible

[FesterDaFelcher]

No, you used Italian Science as backup for your comment on American Science. But anyway:

You said "the difference between having a "theory" that the universe is made of cheese and observing something that looks like a galaxy in an unusual place and wanted to use a better telescope to check it."

There was no first telscope. It was all speculation. The article is a little ambiguous, it should say that they hadnt observed something that looks like a galaxy in the wrong place, in fact they hadnt observed anything yet. I quote another slashdotter who says it better than myself: "This has nothing to do with theory [is right or wrong]. It has to do with trying to take very deep spectra of a whole lot of very faint objects spread over a relatively large area of sky. It's really hard."

So the reason they were turned down is because the American Scientists didnt think it was possible to detect it, even if it was there.

Blame it on the monkeys.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember a story -- I think I read it on Slashdot -- about a group of scientists who did a study with a bunch of monkeys and typewriters. While they didn't produce anything intelligible, the possibility for them to do so was still there.

Likewise, while there may be an infinite number of finite variables when dealing with the Big Bang, there are certainly an infinite number of possibilities. It's possible that this just happened to ... happen. (I feel like I'm repeating a lot of words here.) I could flip a quarter, and while we would normally call heads or tails, it's possible that it could land on its edge.

What I'm trying to say is that while it's surprising, it shouldn't be immediately discounted as false merely because it seems impossible.

Silly scientists.

Units please

[Anonymous Coward]

How many Seattle to Miami trip or football fields? You've got to put in terms people understand, like parsecs.

Re:Units please

[Llywelyn]

I'm bored and google is your friend ;-)

3.1038479 * 10^22 football fields.
91.9783741 * 10^6 parsecs.

Pathway to another "universe"?

[dankjones]

I suspect that the area of space we know as "the universe" is just a bubble at the end of a branchand that somewhere out there is a dim speck of light that is another so-called universe.

This trail of galaxies may be a path leading to our closest neighboring universe.

Re:Pathway to another "universe"?

[Anonymous Coward]

good thought. Like a big interstella city. If this could be proven , how would the big bang theory stand?

Re:Pathway to another "universe"?

[glorf]

Yes, bubble at the end of a branch theory has been widely published.

Yop!

-1, Tard

[Anonymous Coward]

tu eres un tardo.

Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[shubert1966]

Why do we all think that we're looking back at the beginning of the Universe when we see these things? Sure, I'm no astronomer or cosmologist, but isn't this a panoramic view of floating-point calculation? Wave/particle theory? Will we ever actually 'see' the beginning of it all? What is all this Time nonsense? What if the Universe expands and collapses many times? Gosh, can't God create evolution AND be made up of our own collective extra-consiousnesses(sp?) anymore - geeze. Maybe that's the perpetual motion thingy we're looking for - that everything simply is. They are pretty pictures to look at though aren't they!

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[Alsee]

Why do we all think that we're looking back at the beginning of the Universe when we see these things?

You know when you see lightening and hear the thunder anywhere from a split second later up to a few seconds later? The farther away the lightning is the longer it takes the sound to reach you.

If you built a microphone (telescope) to pick up thunder from 12 miles away you'd be hearing lightning from about a minute in the past.

If you built a microphone (telescope) to pick up thunder from 6 million miles away you'd be hearing lightning from about a year in the past.

If you built a microphone (telescope) to pick up thunder from 80,000 trillion miles away you'd be hearing lightning from about a 13 billion years ago, at the dawn of the universe.

-

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that "shubert1966" is confused about several sides of the issue, none so fraught with agonizing angst as that of the genesis of the universe. Curiously, he drags in the issue of God and creation when the article does not at all touch on metaphysical issues.

Just an observation: That the more one avoids an issue, the more one talks about it.

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[shubert1966]

Yeah - I dig the relativity of perspective, but that's my point - we'll never have every perspective - and whose to say that the Universe doesn't oscillate? Perhaps we're just looking at the most recent 'flip'. Just conjecture mixed with aesthetic stuff. I am thankful that you took the time to present your examples! S

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[Alsee]

You're welcome :)

and whose to say that the Universe doesn't oscillate?

That possibility is still definitely on the table, but it's losing support. A universe that slows, stops, and falls back in a "Big Crunch" is a negative curvature universe. A universe that expands infinitely is a positive curvature universe. Between them you have a precise zero-point, a "flat" zero curvature universe where the expansion rate slows infinitely close to zero.

There are very strong theoretical reasons to think that the universe has exactly zero curvature - precisely on the balancing point. On the other hand recent observations seem to suggest accelerating expansion, possibly runaway positive curvature taht would eventually rip apart everything - the Earth, atoms, even protons.

-

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[Bootsy Collins]

> and whose to say that the Universe doesn't oscillate?

That possibility is still definitely on the table, but it's losing support.

It has almost no support in the mainstream cosmological community, and hasn't for quite a while.

A universe that slows, stops, and falls back in a "Big Crunch" is a negative curvature universe. A universe that expands infinitely is a positive curvature universe. Between them you have a precise zero-point, a "flat" zero curvature universe where the expansion rate slows infinitely close to zero.

Actually, this is backwards. Traditionally, it's been positively curved universes that recollapse, while negatively curved universes converge towards a free expansion where the expansion scales linearly with time (that is, as the age of the Universe doubles, everything expands by a factor of two). So that's backwards. But also, in that traditional view, flat universes expand infinitely as well; they simply asymptotically approach (but never quite reach) an end to the expansion (I think you were trying to say that, but I wanted to make it clear).

But importantly, this view has neglected the possibility of a nonzero vacuum energy, or cosmological constant. That's why I used the adverb "traditionally" above -- traditionally, we've assumed there to be no vacuum energy, and set the cosmological constant to zero. We now have significant observational evidence that this was wrong. In the presence of a cosmological constant, it's no longer possible to simply say "negative curvature = expands forever, zero curvature = expands forever but asymptotically approaches stopping, positive curvature = recollapse." Those simple relations between curvature and fate no longer hold if there's a cosmological constant. It's true that the energy content of the Universe drives the time-evolution of its expansion; it's also true that the energy content of the Universe determines its curvature. But the presence of a cosmological constant changes the Friedmann equations in such a way that that simplistic correlation between curvature and how the expansion will proceed no longer holds true. This is illustrated by the apparent situation with our own Universe (see below).

There are very strong theoretical reasons to think that the universe has exactly zero curvature - precisely on the balancing point. On the other hand recent observations seem to suggest accelerating expansion, possibly runaway positive curvature taht would eventually rip apart everything - the Earth, atoms, even protons.

Actually, we have strong observational evidence that the Universe is flat (that is, has zero curvature), from observations of the primary anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background. At the same time, you're correct that recent observations indicate an acceleration to the expansion. But this is not contradictory when a vacuum energy exists. In fact, a vacuum energy is the only way to get an accelerating expansion; a negative curvature universe with no cosmological constant does expand infinitely, but that expansion does not accelerate.

Re:Beginning of the Universe - Prove it!

[Alsee]

positively curved... negatively curved... that's backwards.

Yep, I made a silly reversal. Spheres are positive, saddles are negative, and my brain wasn't paying attention to what I typed :)

flat universes... (I think you were trying to say that

Right. A limited amount of expansion, but taking forever to slow to a stop. Hmmm, now that I think about it that is a pain in the ass concept to communicate simply and clearly and exactly in "plain" non-math non-science english.

Re: cosmological constant / vacuum energy/ dark energy

I'm not in the field, but I have the impression that is still kinda tenative or speculative as theories go, without much detail or evidence. Not that I am saying it is wrong, just that it doesn't rate nearly as high as, for example, dark matter stuff.

-

What is impossible

[samjam]

Hmmm, does that mean they American astronomers thought the observed observations were technically impossible or that the planned observations were technically impossible.

I thought the former, you make me think it might mean the latter, in which case: fair enough - it would be like some kid wanting to borrow my multi-meter to stick on the end of an antenna and measure signal strength.

Re:What is impossible

[TMB]

Since not giving them telescope time had to happen before they'd actually done the observations, and therefore the TAC (Time Allocation Committee, that allocates the telescope time for a given telescope) doesn't know yet what the results are going to be, the decision had to be based on the planned observations. ;-) The Australian team didn't know when they planned the observations that they were going to find a structure bigger than predicted by CDM models.

[TMB]

Science = Religion

[DigiShaman]

It's not just with scientist in America. It's an issue revolving around human nature. When one is so convenced in what one believes in, it becomes a point that what you believe in is now no different then religious faith. It's at that point, that you never question...but asume to hold true.

Remember when people thought the world was still flat? And that was durring a time before America was around.

string of galaxies

[tbonefrog]

So a bunch of galaxies are in a line. We need to watch for a few billion years to see if they were formed in a line or randomly moved until they lined up. Sometimes my alphabits spell words when I'm eating breakfast, but when that happens I don't go looking on the box for some kind of word processing engine. I didn't see anything about whether coincidence was ruled out for this configuration.

Some perspective, maybe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's put it this way:

I own a telescope.

It costs money to let people use my telescope.

If my telescope doesn't deliver results, I lose my funding.

Ten people want to use my telescope.

There's only enough time in a day for five of them to use my telescope.

Six of them are observing known objects.

Three of them are observing objects that have been seen, but it isn't known what they are.

One of them wants to take a few pictures of a supposedly empty section of deep-sky.

Now, which five get time?

The three are making observations that are most likely to yield significant discovery, and get first dibs - after all, if the figure out what some mysterious object is, I get at least some attention out of it.

The last two slots are still open, but let's see:

Five of the remainder are looking at known objects.

One of the remainder are taking a blind potshot in the dark.

Which group are the lucky two going to be picked from?

Big Bang

[nycsubway]

I may be wrong... but believe the big bang did not actually happen. I say this because of something I've believed since I was younger, and which is constantly being proven by astronomers as they peer farther and farther out into what should be the "edge" of the universe... but they dont find it, so they extend the age of the universe to compensate.

Re:Big Bang

[mbrother]

The universe doesn't care what you believe! Seriously though, this isn't a valid argument. First, we certainly do butt up against an "edge in time" as we peer back -- the universe has certainly evolved, with things smaller, hotter, and closer together in the distant past. *That* is really the crux of the Big Bang. The actual value of the age isn't relevent to basics of the theory itself. Google up "Ned Wright cosmology tutorial" for an excellent set of pages and FAQs regarding common misconceptions.

whoa, you just blew my mind!

[slithytove]

Its rather amazing to me that you can just lay these facts out with lots of "it is" and a little you're wrong. Out of what grand unified theory do these facts come? How do they explain the results in the article? Why did galaxies arrise out of the "uniform fireball" in the first place?
Actually I'm much more interested in how you combine relativity and quantum mechanics- do you have testable predictions?
Then lets hear whether multiple worlds actually exist or whether there are non-subjective collapses. Have you investigated penrose and hammeroff's conjectures about quantum conciousness?
Have you ever tried DMT?
Try realizing that neither of us have ANY of the answers when it really comes down to it- and if we did, they would be impossible to express to an unenlightened being in english.

Re:whoa, you just blew my mind!

[barawn]

Its rather amazing to me that you can just lay these facts out with lots of "it is" and a little you're wrong.

("it is" is contracted as "it's", not its. Its is the possessive of it.)

Er? Most of what I said was just logic. No grand unified theory is needed to show that the strong anthropic principle is unprovable. Look at its contrapositive and inverse: the two are untestably equal.

Now, if you're talking about me saying that the Big Bang had to happen because of the CMBR, read up on Big Bang theory. It's simple enough: the CMBR shows that the Universe was a tightly confined, uniform body. It is now not a tightly confined, nor uniform body. It grew to several orders of magnitude times its size, and it cooled immensely. That's virtually the definition of "explosion" in my book.

Why did galaxies arrise out of the "uniform fireball" in the first place?

The only reason we can see the CMBR is because photons and electrons decoupled, so light then travelled freely through space (as it does now). We can't see anything before then because it's too dense.

Galaxies arose out of the CMBR because the Universe was expanding and cooling. Galaxy was hot and small once - now it's big and cool. Use the midpoint theorem. :) Once it cooled enough for molecules, and gasses to form, it would only be a matter of time until galaxies form. The question is how long did it take, and how exactly they formed.

Actually I'm much more interested in how you combine relativity and quantum mechanics

Why does everyone think that relativity + quantum mechanics can't be joined? Relativity + quantum mechanics = quantum field theory. Fifty years old or so at this point. If you're talking about GR + QM, no, I can't combine those, and again, it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference, as I never alluded to GR (or QM, for that matter).

Most of what I said is logic. You don't need advanced physics to be able to comprehend bad logic. Trying to state that you can ever prove intelligent design is bad logic, because the two predictions will produce exactly the same results. In effect, they're the same prediction - they both predict "the Universe will form in exactly the way to produce the Universe" - a modified form of the weak anthropic principle. The way they differ is in "why", and science does not concern itself with that question, only "how".

Try realizing that neither of us have ANY of the answers when it really comes down to it- and if we did, they would be impossible to express to an unenlightened being in english.

I never said I had any answers. What I did say is that the statements linked to above were poorly formed, and that the fundamental question which they were trying to debate, with science, is unprovable, with science. That, I can have the answer for.

And I think it's naive to think that you can't find any answers for metaphysical questions. You can definitely logically restrict certain questions based on logical fallacies and frame out the basic structure of the questions. The fact that metaphysics is so riddled with emotional hotheads and crackpots is, in my opinion, a serious weakness of our current society.

How far away did you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now, I am not an Astrophysicist, but...
The usual way to determine the distance between the observer and an object, on these scales, has something to do with measuring the "Red-Shift" of the light, right?
That means that you need to know - not just the part of the spectrum that the light you are observing fits into, but what part it started out in, in the first place, and what the relative velocity was, between the observer, and the observed object...
How does one *know* that the light, which one is observing @ 560 nm, began it's life with a wavelength of 130 nm?
Isn't this something like estimating the amount of C14 that was in a bone, when the critter died, b4 you determine it's [the bone's] age, only more so?

A pox on both your houses

[Anonymous Coward]

What ID completely ignores is the fact that any universe that would have rules that would be shitty for life and intelligence would never realize it.

I don't think ID ignores this possibility, it just claims that it is equally provable/disprovable as the notion that there are many independent universes out there which we can't detect or measure but we happen to live in a lucky one. The anthropic principle is philosophy, not science. (Although I'd agree with you also that ID is philosophy, not science.)

If you are postulating something other than the anthropic principle, state it. If you are proposing faith in future science, let's just remember to label that what it is...

Re:A pox on both your houses

[barawn]

I don't think ID ignores this possibility, it just claims that it is equally provable/disprovable as the notion that there are many independent universes out there which we can't detect or measure but we happen to live in a lucky one. The anthropic principle is philosophy, not science. (Although I'd agree with you also that ID is philosophy, not science.)

If ID would claim that it is equally provable/disprovable as chance development, it's crap still. They're not "equally" provable or disprovable. Chance development and ID are both unprovable - moreover, they're the same bloody thing! (Take the example of a painter who splats paint on a thousand canvases, and creates a masterpiece on one of them. Who created the art - the painter, or chance?) It's a perfect example of a journalistic error - assuming that the answer to one direction of a question can answer another.

See, this is the problem that I have: philosophy isn't exempt from science. Science is founded on logic, and so is philosophy, and anyone can trivially show using logic that the strong anthropic principle is unprovable, so it's complete crap to talk about the strong anthropic principle at all, and likewise intelligent design. It's also crap to talk about "chance creation of the Universe", which is why I hate scientists who talk about it. You can't - absolutely can't talk about "why" the Universe was created, or "who" created the Universe, because such a question involves information outside this Universe.

Intelligent design versus chance design isn't even a question of philosophy. Metaphysics, maybe, or properly theology (if theology would ever become a real damned science like it should be). Philosophy is the study of human thought, and it's meaningless to talk about things in that context outside of human thought. Whether or not you can build a consistent framework outside of human thought is another question.