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User: Dr.+Curmudgeon

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  1. Re:How does that work? on Theory-Affirming Evidence About the Universe · · Score: 1

    Good Question! I have the same sort of question, with just the same starting issue. I am a physicist, albeit circa 1965, with postgrad work in Gen Relativity, Gravitation, etc. just for the love of it, but I'm afraid it doesn't help much.
    However, here are some putative facts: (1) the universe is expanding at a very small fraction of the speed of light (say 20%; if it were expanding at the speed of light the red shift would be 100% for light from the edge and we wouldn't see it at all, i.e. it would be oscillating so slow that it would be a very low frequency signal!), the last time I read a lot about Big Bang Theory, it was necessary to assume an INFLATIONARY period for the early universe for the first few gazillionths of a second during which the infant universe expanded at many thousands times the speed of light (this was OK, they said, because the laws of physics hadn't come into being yet), so by the time it was one second old it was a few hundred light years wide. But after that, it had to slow way down because the lightspeed limit law had been passed, so it was forever after limited to C. However, even if you add that 100 million light year instantaneous diameter into the question, the same problem you stated arises. 14 billion years ago the universe should have been somewhere around 1 to 5 billion light years in radius (depending on which estimate for the age you buy), and since we don't appear to be anywhere near the outer edge, we would have been maybe 2 billion light years from the center, putting us say 7 billion light years from the far edge. If we were moving in the exact opposite direction at 10% of light speed, in the 7 billion years it would take to reach where we were when the light from the far edge started out, we would have gone 0.7 Billion light years farther. So the light takes 0.7 billion years to get there, while we have moved .07 billion light years farther away. This series rapidly converges, so the light should have passed us at about 8 billion years from when it started out, or 6 billion years ago!
    Maybe it stopped off for a few drinks on the way?