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An Older, Larger Universe
Josh Fink writes "Space.com has a very interesting article as part their weekly mystery Monday series about a new calculation that shows that the Universe is actually much older than than the 14.3 billion years old that was established in 2003. From the article, "...the universe is instead about 15.8 billion years old and about 180 billion light-years wide." The calculations were based off of a recalculation of the Hubble Constant which dictates how fast the universe is expanding, and they found it is actually 15% slower than previously thought. The findings will be printed in an upcoming edition of Astrophysical Journal."
Some time read, "The Day The Universe Changed," by James Burke. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316117048/002-07 01003-8544823?v=glance&n=283155 or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_ Changed
Just because Einstein turned Newtonian physics on its ear doesn't make Newton any less of a genius. Whenever Einstein is superceded, it won't make him less of a genious, either. It just means that someone else has stood on his shoulders, like he stood on Newton's, and has seen even further.
Newton and Einstein both "changed the Universe" because they changed how we view it and how we relate to it. Or the example Burke uses is Galileo, and how he shifted the center of the Universe from the Earth to the Sun. (I know you could argue that it was really Copernicus, and that neither was really correct.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Space is stretching out between the matter. There are galaxies receding faster than light, but you'll never be able to observe them in any sort of experiment, or measure their speed, so there is no problem. The only reason we know they exist is from inferring their existence, and it's a different kind of existence, one that can never be proven by direct observation and measurement. It's like the singularity of a black hole- you can infer it's in there, but you can't observe anything inside the event horizon in an experiment anyway, so it doesn't upset theory.
When a galaxy is receding almost at the speed of light it will appear with a large redshift. Occasionally astronomers find a galaxy that sets a redshift record, and they get all excited. If the faster-than-light galaxies appeared redshifted, they would cover the sky! The astronomers wouldn't be getting so excited. But those galaxies don't appear at all- they're outside the observable universe. The distance to them is so great that more than 300,000 km of brand new space is being shoehorned in between us and them every second. So we won't even see them redshifted because the photons never even reach us.
The huge-redshift galaxies exist just inside a thin shell around us, about 15 billion light years in radius, that defines the observable universe. The observable universe and the universe sound like the same thing but are not. Most of the universe is outside the observable part- outside the shell. If a galaxy is outside the shell, we'll never see it. If a galaxy is just inside the shell they eventually find it and it might set a new z record depending on its redshift (i.e. how close it is to the inside of the shell). In theory if they found a galaxy that straddled the shell itself it would be redshifted from microwaves down through radio all the way to infinite wavelengths. In reality you'll never see that- the furthest thing you see is the cosmic microwave background, which is still coming from 400000 light years inside the shell. Even closer to the shell, you can "see" the early universe just along the inner surface, and the early universe was more opaque- light coming from there would have to have been emitted shortly after the Big Bang, when scattering was much more efficient, so that light doesn't make it here. FYI IANAA.