Big bang moving 3 time the speed of light?

originally posted by: circuitsports
It used to be common knowledge that the speed of light is dependent on gravity, I was taught that in school

Erm, no, that's not true at all. Speed of light doesn't change (unless in a dense medium). Gravity affects the wavelength, not the speed.

Any of that has nothing to do with the expansion of the universe, btw.

originally posted by: circuitsports
It used to be common knowledge that the speed of light is dependent on gravity, I was taught that in school - if the universe is expanding out into nothing then it should be able to travel faster.

You either had a bad teacher or have a bad memory. The theory of relativity has been around for over 100 years and for most of that time we have known that experiments are consistent with it, and it says that gravity doesn't change the speed of light but it does change the frequency of the light. So if a competent teacher told you anything about gravity and light it should have been that and not what you said, though I suppose you might have had an incompetent teacher.

That aspect of relativity was experimentally verified in 1959 in the Pound-Rebka Experiment

Id like to add a couple ideas to the expanding balloon idea.
The universe is not so much the expanding surface of the ballon, as it is an expanding spacetime bubble whose outer surface is a spacetime foam.
The "pressure" that drives the inflation is time.
The mistake that is being made about the universe is very idea that matter is erupting into a void, no,
Time erupted in space, pushing space ahead of it.
And spacetime is a foam on the surface/space of the expanding time bubble.
The visible universe we can see, is contained within one of the bubbles in that expanding foam

a reply to: punkinworks10

It's a hard thing to visualise or conceive of. People automatically seem to 'observe' from 'outside' the universe and add a forced perspective of space filling the 'void' like you say. I can see the appeal of bubbles and balloons as analogies and yet they still invite us to picture a leading edge expanding outwards into something...even 'nothing.'

The popular models have space expanding and there's no 'outside' to speak of.

@ Arbitrageur - check your PMs

a reply to: Kandinsky

Yes, there is no "void" for "space" to expand into, as was said before "existance" itself is "expanding".
What is "outside" of exsistance is not "nothningness" but is actually undefined, two very different concepts.
The foam bubble idea help reconcile some observational data with some of the more esoteric spacetime ponderings, and kind of falls in line with some ideas a particularly brilliant math professor I had.
He was aphysics PHD that "retired" to teach math. I had him for the last section of Calculas, Diff E, Multivariable Calc and Linear Algebra classes.
One day in the MC/LA class he threw a set of matrices of the board and broke the class up into groups and had us solve the various matrices then use our solutions to solve another multivariable matrix.
We spent the better part of the week working on the equations. At one point he asked the class what we were doing, pretty much we all thought we were just working junk equations, but no, it was real deal high end stuff, we were defining "spacetime", in terms of various "distilled" mathematical solutons, stripped of their philisophical mumbo jumbo as he put it.
It was his contention that without time, space is undefined, and it was the expansion of time that forced the expasion of existance, but then again he stated, that is philosophical mumbo jumbo as there is no way to prove it.

a reply to: buddha

hahah great observation. Each seeker is obliged to read into science on their own, rather than trusting the supposed experts. Same thing with religion, once you start blindly trusting the "experts" the entire fruit of the matter is spoiled.

An interesting observation that astronomers see is that the big bang didn't just happen in one location, it apparently happened everywhere in the universe at once. So you are the center of the universe just as much as some distant point in the universe. To me, this strongly insists that things came to be quickly and in working order.

Just like all the pixels turn on simultaneously in a flat screen TV, so too did all the points in the universe simultaneously commit to the generation of the universe.

a reply to: punkinworks10

Interesting. The foam bubble is easy to internalize and get the picture.

They teach closed form solutions and matrix algebra in high school? We’re you schooled in the USofA?

I sure as hell didn’t have any teachers nearly as cool.

a reply to: punkinworks10

I can dig the foam bubble idea and have read about it in the past. There was an idea about many universes side by side in a bubbly, frothy and hard to comprehend way. Not that we can't conceive of multiple universes vying for position with their 'bubbly' neighbours. That part is easy in its abstraction and maybe they jostle for the most room in the same way Earthly bubbles do?



It's hard enough contending with the uncertainties of our own known universe without having to factor in the possibility of a few more! All of the same conjectures are present only on a scale that gives me a headache...a bigger headache.

Turtles all the way down and turtles all the way up.

a reply to: Cravens
Certainly not highschool, though I did have calculas as a senior, had to re take at college for my engineering major, the MC/LA class was for my math minor.
I came about the foam bubble analogy after reading an article, many years ago by a then young upcoming physicist, about how he and his brewmaster friend realized that they were essentially using the same equations to descride the formation of foam in a beer and the distribution of matter in the universe.
The physicist had met the brewmaster friend for lunch, and while the he was waiting for the physicist he was doodling some equating he used to decribe foam formation in a visous liquid, and the physicist asked why he was working some blah blah blah quantum physics equations. They realized that like many equation forms, the form could be used for seemingly unrelated diciplines just by substituting certain terms, much in the way dynamics shares forms with elctromagnatism.
Recent observational data shows that matter is not uniformely distributed in the observable universe, but is concentrated in filaments of matter.
Part of the idea these two guys had was that, our observable universe is the boundry solutions of several spacetime bubbles that abutt each other.
The other thing my proffessor imprssed on us was the idea that time is an operational function that is applied to space, and without time space has no dimensionality.

a reply to: Kandinsky

Kandinsky,
Now take that foam imagery, and make the bubbles uniformish in size, and evenly distribute them on a "surface" of a larger bubble. That large central bubble represents the inflationary phase of the early universe and the cosmic background radiation is the wall of that bubble.

a reply to: punkinworks10

I'm going to have to let the idea digest for a while before attempting a thoughtful response. Thanks for stretching my imagination.

originally posted by: Kandinsky
That part is easy in its abstraction and maybe they jostle for the most room in the same way Earthly bubbles do?

I imagine that they overlap and are not entirely separate. More like clouds that intermingle in various dimensions.