Larry Molnar spent years with his astronomy students studying a contact binary star system. Their observations and data eventually led them to make the claim that the stars were headed toward an explosion called a luminous red nova, a major discovery. The story of these stars and of the scientists who study them highlight the ways that science leads to knowledge about the world, and not always in straightforward ways.
Have you heard his story before?
Iāve not heard his story before but I listened to it today. Itās a subject I donāt know much about and for whatever reason Iāve never caught the ā astronomy ā bug outside of wanting to learn the constellations as a way to get more out of the season I hate the most lol. Cold and dark by 5pm. Only thing worse than the Christian hell is the Viking one xd. A frozen wasteland is just a colder deep dark chaotic ocean.
I thought it was a really good story though about the how and why the scientific method is trustable. But back to chainsaw man.
But I did find it very interesting about how the voyager is headed towards a star 40k years away. I took it at face value though. How could it even travel that far? Even an inch off here would put you way off target then. Would it even be able to send back info that in time and distance? No one actually has to answer. Itās a fleeting curiosity.
I quite enjoyed this podcast. Dr. Molnar showed great humility in working to uncover his mistake. That is a scientist who shows respect for the scientific enterprise. I hope it points him to new and interesting lines of further research.
Over time, the scientific process has also tended to correct both conscious and unconscious bias of all scientists.
This is what makes astronomy fun!
Itās like playing a game of Mastermind, and you have a hypothesis that fits everything you know, but it turns out to not be right anyway, and when you think about it for a while itās plain that the problem is that youāre assuming there are just four slots for pegs when there must be five, or maybe even six.
No kidding, I thought I had it figured out about how the universe appears to be moving away from you at an optical center, but then I just saw this and it appears to be in direct contradiction to what the evidence was supposed to show. Go figure?
If you were to measure the recession speed and distance of every galaxy in the Universe, you could trace everything back to a single point, and find, perhaps surprisingly, that point isnāt centered on us.
Thanks for posting. That article does a great job of explaining how it all fits together, and the raisins in bread dough visual for me was the best example of how to visualize things. Even the calulation of the true center makes sense, although in the end, the true center is different for every place of reference as I understand it.
I donāt think it can be explained how it fits together, but this bit with cosmic microwave background indicating that we appear to be slightly off center is a very interesting piece to the puzzle
But the more sober truth is not that weāre near the center, but that any observer in any galaxy would conclude that they were at (or very near) the center as well.
i went back and read the transcript of the podcast, which I had missed when it came out before, and it was really interesting as well as being a great explanation of how science works. I particularly like the way Molnar put it:
āā¦ This is what I love as far as students learning about science. Itās not about getting the answer thatās in the book. Itās not even about getting the answer that the professor has in his head. Itās about getting the answer that nature hasā¦ā
If everyone understood that, there would be a lot less conflict in the faith-science debate.
I read the article and it says the same thing weāve been saying here: any observers anywhere in the universe will conclude they are at the center:
"But the more sober truth is not that weāre near the center, but that any observer in any galaxy would conclude that they were at (or very near) the center as well. No matter where in the Universe youāre located, youāll find yourself existing at this particular moment in time: a certain, finite amount of time after the Big Bang. "
The only difference is that the article notes that we see a very subtle difference in one direction that tells us our galaxy is moving in that direction relative to everything on a larger scale. Whether thatās also the movement of our local galactic cluster or is due to our movement within that cluster is not stated. Itās known that our cluster is moving towards a larger cluster, but that doesnāt necessarily mean that our local motion isnāt also involved.
The difference from the apparent true center and an observerās location will be due to local (in terms of the universe) motion relative to everything else. Thatās to be expected since galaxy clusters draw galaxies together and clusters that are close enough also draw each other, so every galaxy is undergoing some motion relative to the whole.
Thatās due to the relative motion of our galaxy compared to the overall observable structure of the universe.
Iām not sure if it was assumed that we are at the visual center because the red shift was somewhat uniform around us, and it was assumed that the expansion must be uniform or that the red shift exactly places us at the visual center. But for the cosmic background to specifically indicate that we are not at the visual center, thatās a big piece that a wave of the hand doesnāt neutralize. Thatās a really big piece. That the expansion is increasing at a rate greater than expected is another important piece. These theorists really have their hands full and the state of cosmology is probably far worse than the experts are letting on to.
And to compound the problemā¦if the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and the various methods used to date the earth say it is 4.5 billion years old, then that places the earth about 1/3 of the way through the big bang expansion.
Thats a long way from the centre in time, and i think it is a rather large problem when considering the background microwave results.
The optical center of space can be quite different from its place in time 
Thatās because what we conventionally think of as the Big Bang didnāt occur at a single point in space, but rather long ago and everywhere at once: at a moment in time.
Yes, thatās a useful way of thinking about it. Itās a kind of obvious way of thinking about it when you do though, since it was the beginning of space, not a beginning in space.
How fast weāre moving towards anything else ālocalā is significant (probably not very) with respect to the expect to the rate of expansion of the universe, and the acceleration of that rate.
Wow. Obviously missing it last year (I donāt listen to a lot of podcasts), I just now listened to and concurrently read the transcript of that podcast, and what a great example of how āsecularā science works with Christians and others working āside-by-sideā, so to speak. It strikes me as important.
Would that all YECs, and maybe especially @adamjedgar here, could listen/read it to see how real science works, the humility and honesty required by all parties involved, and how bogus accusations of conspiracies are! Obviously all commenters do not listen to the podcast before commenting in a thread, myself being an obvious example and Iām pretty certain @adamjedgar as well. (In listening to it, you get to know the personalities of the participants a bit in a way that you couldnāt merely reading it, through their prosody and occasional chuckles. ; - )
āLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.ā -Colossians 4:6
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