Do you think it illogical on my part to assume that you posting the words, “citing any source that seemingly supports the positions you feel are required” and, “requires promoting substandard sources or even outright misinformation” when you did applied to the things being said about me concerning Colin Patterson?
I don’t. But if your words truly didn’t refer to me in any way whatsoever, then despite me having no clue what else they could have referred to in that particular context, I apologize for my mistake.
And if not responding to posts here unless you are explicitly asked a question is a rule of the forum, I will happily oblige in the future. Is that a rule here?
It’s not my assumption, but yes, I am basing my understanding on how BB has been described by scientists for many decades. This is the first I’m hearing about every single point being a center of expansion. Can you source that claim so I can check it out?
I was responding to @Klax’s suggestion that it wasn’t rational to argue as you do. I wasn’t trying to provoke you but many people think the idea of creating a competing alternative science built on the way you read the Bible is peculiar, myself included. But I don’t think it is irrational.
This is a little bit of a weird thread jumping all over the place it seems, and I’m not so sure how fruitful any dialogue could possibly be regarding questions that you have here @MikeBoll about the Big Bang theory.
I guess I say this for a few reasons. I do wonder first of all if the questions that you have are in good faith. Meaning are you honestly trying to figure out answers to your questions or do you already have your mind up that the Big Bang idea is wrong? In the case of the latter, typically the sorts of questions someone would be asking are kind of like gotcha questions- where the lack of an explanation is seen as good evidence against the scientific theory or idea. I.e. can’t answer this, then “gotcha” your theory is wrong. And then of course the logical extension of this approach is if the Big Bang model is wrong then the alternative is God’s supernaturally made the universe 6,000 years ago.
It’s certainly fine and good to have various questions about different scientific models to try and genuinely understand them. So I do encourage you to ask questions in good faith and I try to really understand different scientific ideas. The thing that I don’t think is good is how a lot of a lot of younger creationists point out something they think scientists can’t explain with the implication that the alternative is God’s supernaturally made the universe. That’s not a very good argument as it could be used for literally any alternative hypothesis. Someone could say well if the big bang model is wrong then I think a giant crystal on the outskirts of the visible universe emanating its frequencies into the cosmos that led to the creation of galaxies. That’s really no different than the argument that many young earth creationists make with regard to scientific theories.
Anyways to address part of your particular question,
One premise of this question is not quite how a modern cosmologist would think about it. So for example whenever you talk about expanding from a center point, that’s not quite good a cosmologist would say. If the universe originally had a central point, and then every point in space expanded around that central point then of course it would have a central point in the future.
Instead, a cosmologist might use the framing that given the uniform expansion of space in all directions, any observer anywhere in the universe would see The universe expanding away from them. So consider the following diagram:
We are in the center of this picture in the Virgo Supercluster. From our perspective, all of these other superclusters appear to be moving away from us, at increasingly fast speeds. For example the coma supercluster is moving away from us at approximately 6.9 kilometers per second, but the leo superclusters that are approximately twice as far away are moving away from us at ~13-15 kilometers per second. Or take something even closer like something in the Virgo supercluster like galaxy NGC 3631 which has a recessional velocity of just 1 km/s.
So that’s fine and dandy I suppose, but the interesting thing is that if we see the coma supercluster moving away from us at 7 km/s, then an observer in the coma supercluster would also see us moving away from them at 7 km/s. Interestingly they would see someone in the Leo supercluster moving away from them, not at 14 km/s like we do, but only at 7 km/s. And then, an observer in the coma supercluster would see someone in the copernican supercluster (in the upper left of the picture) moving away from them at over 20 km/s (much faster than we see the copernican supercluster moving away)! In fact, they would conclude that everyone else appears to be moving away from them as if they are at the center of the universe. So thanks to this expansion of space, an observer anywhere in the universe would equally conclude they are at the “center” of the universe, but really the center is nowhere since anyone anywhere would conclude the same thing.
@jpm just shared a nice example I’m going to add to my post. Here would be the expansion from our perspective:
This would be the expansion from someone in the coma supercluster:
It used to say that it was a hot dense singularity IN space. Then we were told that space itself is a product OF the big bang. Who knows what story they’re telling these days?
But what happened to change our universe from the hot, dense one you described into the one we live in now? Isn’t it claimed to have been an inflation event by which the stuff of the singularity expanded out equally in all directions from the singularity? If so, then the obvious center would be where the singularity used to be, right?
Anyway, it doesn’t matter because the story keeps changing yearly as it has done since its inception.
No. Space itself expanded and the hot, dense matter went with it. As the density of matter decreased it cooled. At some point it cooled enough that it switched from being a plasma to whole atoms. In other words, it went from being bare atomic nuclei and electrons to atoms that have protons and electron shells around them. This is the moment that produced the cosmic microwave background because this is the first moment when light could travel without being absorbed by plasma.
As does all science, as it follows the data, and as new information becomes available, it changes to reflect that information.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
192
You’re welcome Mike. But your analogy of the analogy doesn’t work either. There was no singularity due to quantum gravity dominating general relativity. From the inflationary epoch on, at the end of which the universe was a grapefruit, it was fully ergodic, geodesic; a sphere of energy quanta each expanding randomly in any direction from every Planck point in the grapefruit, not exploding radially from a point singularity. The grapefruit has grown a little in the 13.8 ga since. By 46 gly in every direction from Earth alone. Earth being the centre of that Hubble sphere observable universe, which is maximally 0.4% of the volume of the universe. Some grapefruit. Still a sphere mind. But as far as virtually any observer in any of it goes, they are the centre. There is a centre of all that expansion, but there is no way of knowing in which direction and how far. And the expansion of our Hubble sphere centres on us. As it does on all observers no matter how close to the edge.
PS I see the flaws straight away. There are a practically infinite number of observable universes depending on the, what, 10^30 observers in it [cuh, fuh, i.e. the universe]. Each one being the centre of their Hubble sphere of observation. Where that Hubble sphere actually sits in the volume of the actual universe, which is at least 250 times bigger, we haven’t the faintest idea. Apart from that it cannot be near the actual edge of the actual universe as it looks the same in all directions. We’re mediocre.
I suppose those lucky folks who see any anisotropy in one direction because they’re on the edge could work out in which direction and even how far the actual centre of it all is.
When Phil told you about spectrographs of radiation from supernovae, what he was quoting from authorities was evidence. Objective facts, precise measurements, data, maps and charts. Much of the stuff that you have been quoting from authorities, on the other hand, has been opinion. Subjective interpretation, philosophical musings, and the like.
When authorities present you with evidence and measurements, the alternative to hearing from them and believing them is to insist that they are making stuff up. That might be the case if you were only dealing with one or two of them, but when you are dealing with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of different authorities, all of them presenting data, measurements and evidence that all lead to the same conclusion, to insist that they have all been making stuff up on an industrial scale for over a century is a conspiracy theory that goes from the implausible to the outright ridiculous.
@MikeBoll, I’m not a scientist, and I certainly don’t pretend to be one around here, where there are a lot of real scientists, who know what they’re talking about. I have a background in language, literature, some critical theory, teaching, parenting and librarianship. I’m also a Christian with a theologically conservative, although not personally fundamentalistic, background. I stick to those areas, unless I’m asking questions of people I trust to know what they’re talking about and who will give me truthful answers.
My comments, while directed toward Randy and Klax, were not specifically about their comments on the thread, or about any particular post of yours, but the entire thread itself, particularly in regard to rhetorical strategies and logic employed, as well as the theological constraints your views impose on reality.
In the post just below, I was not questioning your truthfulness but the problem of going over so many claims in a thread like this and so many resources quoted to determine what is reliable and what is not, particularly, when one is out of one’s field, as I am.
My other interests in this and similar threads have to do with the nature of the arguments, what is actually stated, what is assumed, what kind of bait is used, how information is received and processed and the like.
While you said this
And this:
I see evidence of different goals than what are stated, even from the OP.
In spite of lots of bait in the OP, making clear you find consensus science dubious at best, you’ve gotten solid, reliable answers with back up from people who know this field.
Your restated mission, that I quoted just a few lines above, was accomplished way up the thread. So, why all the arguing and contesting the answers you’ve gotten from people speaking from those fields?
That’s my interest in this thread. I think you actually summed up the issue I’m interested in in this reply to T_aquaticus:
And in other places, but one is enough.
Having taught and parented and answered reference questions as a librarian, I understand the frustration of giving an honest, well-informed answers that are received with suspicion and contempt from people outside the field, because the answers don’t fit the model the asker has in mind.
I haven’t had to put up with mild threats, though, invoking God’s condemnation the way you brought up with Randy:
[edit: Oh, wait, there was that one student who DID threaten me. Oh, and the other one that cursed me. Yeah. They were teen-agers.]
So, as usual, my interests are how to rightly handle information as well the thought processes people employ, when receiving information, particularly information they don’t want from real experts in the field.
I’m sorry you were misinformed, but the Big Bang model has always been about the expansion of space, not the expansion of matter in space. The model was introduced by Georges Lemaître in a paper published (in French) in 1927; the English translation is titled ‘A homogeneous universe of constant mass and increasing radius accounting for the radial velocity of extra-galactic nebulae’. The paper is quite clear that it is about the behavior of space, not matter, e.g. (from just after equation 1 in the paper), ‘the radius of space R is a function of time.’
2 Likes
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
196
So are we saying that there was no pressure in the primordial egg (or grapefruit) and that the expansion of space is the only expansion there is? That Bernoulli’s static and dynamic pressures are not analogous?
Nice to hear some one higher up the lay to expert ladder than myself express the same as I feel. I don’t think either of us will lose any sleep over it as the expertise we all count on is in good hands … for the most part.
I didn’t say it was impossible, or that natural selection isn’t legit. You are the one who pointed out that it’s a tautology. But can you give an example of where you’ve used empirical science to verify natural selection in the past?
Please also give an example of this “true thing” if you don’t mind.
ToE and the Bible are contradictory. However, since they are both faith-based beliefs, one cannot “disprove” the other.
That is not an accurate statement from science, but from naturalism. There are intelligent design models that fit the scientific evidence much better.
We observe and empirically verify a world that is precisely tuned and filled with living things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. Some conclude that this verifiable fine tuning and appearance of design indicates a designer outside of our world. Others conclude that this fine tuning and appearance of design indicates a long string of random accidents that began when something exploded, and it’s not important to wonder why that thing was there and what caused it to explode.
@glipsnort said the exact opposite, that natural selection is not a tautology. In fact, that is the conclusion Popper came to as well once he learned more about genetics and biology. I would suggest rereading his posts.
There are tools on the internet that are quite useful. Here is a Google Scholar search for @glipsnort’s peer reviewed papers:
