Most Distant Object in Universe Spotted?

reply to post by ExistenceUnknown


They would be looking back in time toward the Big Bang regardless of what direction they look. The significant factor here is sheer distance, not direction. The Big Bang happened everywhere. The Big Bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, corresponding to a current distance of about 78 billion light years. The universe is uniform and symmetrical on its largest scale. Anywhere we look, a given distance out into the void corresponds to a given interval back into time. I have found that this is one of the most difficult ideas for people to grasp. The Big Bang did not occur at a point in space. It was the origin of space, as well as time.

Originally posted by MillionEyedMask
reply to post by ExistenceUnknown

 

...I have found that this is one of the most difficult ideas for people to grasp. The Big Bang did not occur at a point in space. It was the origin of space, as well as time.

Because it goes against every common, verifiable experience you've ever had. So no wonder people perceive it as implausible.


Here's whats bugging me with the current Big Bang theory:
The Universe, time and space came into existence some 13.7 billion years ago when something unimaginably small that held all the mass of the Universe exploded everywhere at once because everything that is something is inside it.

Before this there is no before, because time did not exist, and there is no something, anything, because 3d space did not exists until only after it went bang. Yes? So how can there even be an "it" (the source of the big bang) if it doesn't even exist until it explodes. It occupies no dimensions because there aren't any yet, it has no history because time is not time yet. Only thing it has is mass. One dimension.

Then ( well actually not then, because "then" does not yet exist ) Boom and taaa-daaa "I have exploded into Universe"

This sounds suspiciously like a religion. "That which has no beginning or end and which doesn't have a maker or reason for existence made the Universe and all living things." Hardly anyone can understand the concept upon anything they can verify on their own and only a handfull of people posses the math skills to mathematically prove the theory is correct. Everyone else has to take their word for it.

Apart from calling myself stupid just now, I do believe I am capable of at least some logical thinking and the entire theory seems wrong.

BUT... there's always a but.


But, on the other side, I can think of a place where existence comes into being from seemingly nothing and time does not exist before of after. And the bang only has one dimension before it bangs.

I've given this a lot of thought, but feel free to call me nuts at any time. The only place I can think of that fits the description is computer memory.

Think about it.

Until it is powered down, the only dimension it has is it's size, capacity, mass. Even that is indistinguishable until the CPU is powered up. There is no time, there is no space, there is only capacity.

Click - or Bang if you prefer.

The computer is powered up and memory is allocated almost instantly practically defying all laws of physics when viewed from the inside. Suddenly there IS.

Time start as the CPU begins to cycle in flops, but before that there was no time. Not if you're experiencing life from the inside of the machine.

Memory is a one dimensional gadget so dimensions appear to be created out of nothing, but only when memory is instructed to do so by the CPU. 3, 4, 5 dimensions... it doesn't matter how many. Ask any competent programmer and you'll be told that there is no limit to the number of dimensions. It's only one number in one line of code, but from the inside of the computer these numbers appear to be the Laws of Physics upon which the entire Universe is balanced.

I imagine the background radiation we hold so dear as proof of the Big Bang is only the empty regions of memory still being fed minuscule amounts of energy by the system.

Everything living inside computer memory would appear to be made of finely arranged energy. And the speed limitation would be the the speed of transfer of said energy i.e. the speed of light. But, the allocation of memory i.e. the expansion of the Universe, can and does happen much faster than that. There is no "outside the universe", because everything inside memory is a construct and can not exist outside memory. There is no outside for such a form.

So if the Big Bang theory is spot on, I'd be interest about who's SIM City, woops pardon, Sim Universe, we're inside and if it has a broadband connection to the interwebs.


Kind regards, M.


More on simulated reality in this thread.


Edit: So many spelling mistakes. Grrr.

[edit on 30-4-2009 by Manawydan]

reply to post by Manawydan


That's an interesting analogy Manawydan, and I have to agree that I've struggled to get to grips with the idea of the Big Bang as well.

But maybe we're thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe the problem lies in our rigid concept of time. Let me explain my reasoning...

We all know that time is elastic right? A few minutes if you're sat on a beach can seem like hours if you're sat on a cold, wet train platform. Time seems to go faster as you get older. We can extrapolate this to assume that time for a mayfly (which only lives up to one day in its adult form) experiences a completely different scale of time than us slow, bumbling humans.

So maybe, there is no point before the big bang at all. Maybe the closer and closer you get to the point of singularity, the slower time becomes. All you can do is cut those first few moments of the universe into increasingly small units of observable time, but you can keep doing this for ever and you'd still never reach the moment "before" the big bang.

If time and space is infinite now, then presumably it must have been zero before the Big Bang. But the opposite to infinity is not zero - it's 1/infinity, which converges on zero but can never reach it.

If, for argument's sake, the Big Bang was a theoretical T0, then asking what was before the Big Bang (T-1) is the equivalent to asking what is Infinity+1. There's just no such thing

Originally posted by mattpryor
reply to post by Manawydan

 

If, for argument's sake, the Big Bang was a theoretical T0, then asking what was before the Big Bang (T-1) is the equivalent to asking what is Infinity+1. There's just no such thing

That actually makes a lot of sense, thank you.

Originally posted by MillionEyedMask
The Big Bang did not occur at a point in space. It was the origin of space, as well as time.

Every description of the theoretical Big Bang insists that the event started from a point and "expanded" from there to its present dimensions. When the many "experts" in this particular theory attempt to explain it, they always refer to the expansion of space/time from a point — but relative to what, exactly?

For example, they say that the Big Bang started from an infinitesimal point...relative to what? In the first 300 nanoseconds of the Big Bang, the event expanded to the size of a grapefruit...relative to what?

Relative to itself? Relative to their imaginations?


— Doc Velocity

reply to post by Kryties

The explosion occurred 600 million years after the big bang. It no longer exists, what we are seeing is the time-delayed light from that explosion finally reaching our planet billions of years later due to the fact that light can only travel at a certain speed.

here's what i get a little hazy

I can stand on the bank of a river and shine a flash light up to an airplane....they will never see my flash light because the light dissipates as it goes further out.

So if light travels at 186,282 miles per second, and it took, lets just round and say 1 billion years to reach earth

Whatever # of miles that would be would be the result of:

1,000,000,000
x
186,282
________________

???????????? big number


Lets just called it a "bagillion"

So that explosion was a bagillion miles away, and somehow the light stayed unaffected for 600 million years?...it wasnt obstructed by other planets or comets/asteroids/meteors?

It never dissipated and now we're able to see it?
It just does not make sense to me.

[edit on 30-4-2009 by Fremd]

reply to post by Fremd


But if they had a telescope on-board the aeroplane then they would see your flash light

reply to post by mattpryor


true
but at what point are you even unable to see it.

The telescope just magnifies things so your eye can collect the light and you see things you normally could not see.

i understand the fundamentals of a telescope...

But if i were to shine my flash light for 1/10th of a second, that light would not shine on for eternity, you couldn't be looking at my light from space and continue seeing it after i turned it off.

and if in that 1/10th of a second, lets say another airplane flew between you and me, obstructed the light

once the airplane moved away, you couldn't see the light anymore, because my flash light was already turned off.



if X is the explosion, and O is the earth


X_________________________________________O

and the line represents the bagillion miles

it's unfathomable to me that in that bagillion miles, there was nothing to block the light.

reply to post by Fremd


Well I suppose the light that reaches your eye (or in this case the telescope) comprises of the few surviving photons that haven't been scattered or converted to other types of energy such as heat.

If as another poster pointed out there is enough light energy to cook anything within 1,000,000 light years I would expect a few light particles to find their way to us eventually.

Originally posted by Fremd
reply to post by mattpryor

 

it's unfathomable to me that in that bagillion miles, there was nothing to block the light.

Perhaps unfathomable, but true none the less.

It's outer space. It's really really big and really really empty. Those are two of its main defining characteristics.

Of course there will be those instances when the light is blocked by something. In those cases, we won't see it. But for every case like that, there will be 100 billion others where the light does reach us. Another feature of outer space: there is an inconceivable number of events occurring in it all the time.

The vastness of the universe should never be underestimated. Whatever your grandest conception of it, simply trust that it is infinitely more grand than that.

Originally posted by Fremd
it's unfathomable to me that in that bagillion miles, there was nothing to block the light.

You're being deceived by our modern depictions of space, crowded with fields of asteroids, dense clouds of polychromatic gas, etc. That's Star Trek. That's Star Wars. Those fanciful depictions are provided to give our feeble minds a point of reference, a backdrop for our space fantasies.

In actuality, Space is 99% empty. In actuality, you could hop in your space ship, cruise right through the Asteroid Belt, the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud without ever encountering or even seeing an obstacle. The odds of your running into another object are astronomically slim.

Because Space is 99% empty, and Space is incomprehensibly vast.

And, certainly, over the incomprehensibly vast distances we're discussing, a certain amount of light from a given source may be obstructed or warped away from our line of vision; but when that happens we're not aware of it, right, because it never reaches our eyes.

In this case, we're talking about the light that does reach our eyes; so, it sort of goes without saying, that light was not obstructed from reaching us. Not so unfathomable.

— Doc Velocity

Now here is my question:

where is the most distance object in the universe ?

is it in the middle of the universe , or is it at the edge of it after it hit the border or the wall or what ever it is ?

just my question

nice post

Originally posted by Doc Velocity

Originally posted by MillionEyedMask
The Big Bang did not occur at a point in space. It was the origin of space, as well as time.

Every description of the theoretical Big Bang insists that the event started from a point and "expanded" from there to its present dimensions. When the many "experts" in this particular theory attempt to explain it, they always refer to the expansion of space/time from a point — but relative to what, exactly?

For example, they say that the Big Bang started from an infinitesimal point...relative to what? In the first 300 nanoseconds of the Big Bang, the event expanded to the size of a grapefruit...relative to what?

Relative to itself? Relative to their imaginations?


— Doc Velocity

I have to say I find your implicit mistrust in science puzzling. You seem to equate it with religion, but I am confident that any scientist worth his salt will tell you: a scientist who takes his discipline as dogma is no scientist at all. Astronomers and cosmologists will readily admit that there is much they do not know, especially when it comes to events of extreme physics such as the Big Bang. The theory is simply what fits the math and the observed evidence most closely. If evidence came along that strongly challenged the Big Bang Theory or overturned some key tenet of the theory, then science would have to re-evaluate and reformulate the working theory to accommodate the new evidence. This is, after all, how science works. It is not religion, however much that line is thrown around.

To address the topic of your post though, it's true. There are a lot of major elements that don't make sense about the theory, or at least its popular conception. But this mostly arises from attempts to make it accessible to laymen such as ourselves. The theory is fundamentally a mathematical theory, describing bizarre, non-euclidean warping of space-time in higher dimensions. Naturally, any attempt to make it comprehensible in words rather than its native calculus is going to overlook some key facts that don't translate. But put simply, the original object of the Big Bang was a singularity. There is not doubt that singularities exist. There is now so much astronomical evidence for their reality that it is virtually incontrovertible. There are millions of them in this galaxy alone, including one whose rotation powers its very heart.

One of the main features of a singularity is that it can not be observed, as it is permanently shrouded behind an event horizon. The singularity of the Big Bang similarly has an event horizon: the present moment. One odd feature of a common black hole is that while it does not possess infinite mass, it does possess infinite density: finite mass packed into zero volume. Sound familiar? These are places where the calculus of physics breaks down. There are values of zero and infinity that have no place in the formal maths. All that means though is that our model is incomplete. The objects exist regardless.

You are correct to put the word "experts" in quotes. There are no experts in this theory, only experts in working with the model that describes it. But when the model breaks down, these experts can say no more, and they admit as much. It is possible that the singularity that became the Big Bang existed in a pre-existing space-time. That universe may even still exist. But we are separated from it by the event horizon of the Big Bang. We can never see it or know anything about it, as singularities destroy information. A good scientist will never profess "belief" in such a scenario, only propose it as a hypothesis, and until said hypothesis can be experimentally supported, it is simply conjecture.

Originally posted by Dr UAE
Now here is my question:

where is the most distance object in the universe ?

is it in the middle of the universe , or is it at the edge of it after it hit the border or the wall or what ever it is ?

just my question

nice post

There is no border and no center.

By our definition, the "most distant" object is actually the earliest visible object. There is a radius in a sphere all around us, comprising the greatest known distance, the volume of space defined by light that has had time to reach us since the Big Bang.

Spatially, the universe goes on forever. You could travel in a straight line in any direction, never reaching an edge and never looping back around to your starting point.

The Big Bang is the most distant object in the universe. It is 13.7 billion years in the past and appears to be 78 billion light years distant in all directions. Weird, no?

Originally posted by MillionEyedMask
I have to say I find your implicit mistrust in science puzzling. You seem to equate it with religion...

Inasmuch as both Science and Religion were concocted by the eminently fallible Human mind, yes, I do equate them as eminently fallible constructs for interpreting our Human experience of Reality (whatever reality is).

I am a child of the Space Age, I grew up with Kennedy's mandate to go to the Moon and do the other things, not because they're easy but because they are hard. I was a Science junkie as a child — while other kids were reading Dr. Seuss, I was reading William K. Hartmann and Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia.

It wasn't until I reached a certain level of maturity — late 20s or early 30s — that I finally began to question our blind adherence to Science and its one-sided contributions to our progress as a species. As I now see it, Science is responsible for everything that is wrong in the Human sphere of existence. Humanity's catastrophic overpopulation is directly attributable to advances in immunization — we've tampered with natural selection, and the result is that we've pushed our planet's natural resources to the breaking point. Everything about "manmade global warming" (if it exists) is directly attributable to half-baked Science as it drove our explosive industrialization for the last century. And, of course, Science continues to provide ever-more-ingenious weapons for facilitating our territorial slaughter of each other.

That's what I mean by "one-sided" and "half-baked" contributions to our highly questionable progress as a species. Seemingly, Science locks onto these immediate objectives and pursues them haphazardly without regard for the long-term consequences, in no less detrimental a manner than Religion locks onto long-term objectives and pursues them without regard for the immediate consequences.

Both Religion and Science exhibit a fundamental lack of common sense (arguably the hallmark of Human intelligence), and both should be approached only with a great deal of skepticism.

— Doc Velocity

reply to post by Doc Velocity


Your disenchantment is understandable, and I agree with you, up to a point. Our condition as a species and a civilization is beyond deplorable, and our long history of scientific and technological advancement is undeniably the culprit, especially as exacerbated by our gross misunderstanding and extravagant misapplication (eg. the atomic bomb) of the principles we have discovered. No argument there.

However, we are a young and a callow species, and any elder will tell you that wisdom and understanding come only through experience. It is our curious minds and our unassailable drive to seek frontier which set us apart fundamentally from other animals. These traits are a mixed blessing. In our youth, they may cause us to stumble horribly. The law of unintended consequences has caused our desire to discover new land and to ease the suffering of our loved ones to result in our global, viral spread and our disturbing, unchecked population growth. These are major problems, no doubt. But we can not grow or evolve as a species if we do not face and live through these trials. If we survive them (and that is a big if) we will be the better for it. It is humanity's deepest directive to mess with things, often until they break. But like any evolutionary process, it relies on trial and error. We are entering a time when the consequences of error are becoming world-threatening. But there is no going back. We can only press onward.

More to the point, you are correct in thinking that both science and religion, as epiphenomena of the human mind, are both inherently fallible. However, they are fallible in different ways, and they can not be directly equated to one another. Religion is fallible in that it flatly denies evidence, rejecting anything that does not fit its model. Science strives to incorporate new evidence, and when a model does not fit the evidence it is reworked or discarded. Science's main fallibility is the fallibility of the individual human beings working in its service. Science itself is mainly the scientific method. This is merely a method, not a dogma of any sort. It is fluid and flexible, its applications infinite. Scientists on the other hand are human, and therefore subject to human error. Evidence can be strong and a theory sound, but if the humans championing said theory misinterpret its relationship to the world at large, the results can be disastrous.

But keep in mind, there is no austere Grecian edifice in Washington DC or anywhere else with the word "SCIENCE" inscribed above the entrance... you know, except maybe on a university campus. Science is malleable. It changes. The science of today is very different from the science of 100 years ago. Our scientific tools have changed, our knowledge base increased by magnitudes, despite an unchanging method. The method is the same now as then because it works. Religion on the other hand remains the same despite its ever-increasing disagreement with our scientific knowledge. Religion operates on circular reasoning, new evidence being twisted to reinforce an existing model, however illogical the attempt. Science lets itself be changed by new evidence. This is the big difference.

@ Doc Velocity@: Your reply's in this thread do you a great credit, I found them well thought out and to very easy to understand. Kudos Sir.

On the subject of our universe and the 'Big Bang' theory, I must confess I have this nagging 'awareness' dating back to my earliest memories of childhood and maybe even before that, that our universe is in fact, much bigger by many magnitudes to that what we currently believe it to be. I have never had any problem seeing our solar system contained witjin the later part of a huge spiral that is part of a barred spiral galaxy of which, our Galaxy is one amongst many billions so far detected. In fact I knew this before I ever saw any satillite pictures showing our position within our galaxy. I cant tell you how weird this felt seeing this confirmed!

The Big Bang theory, while plausable according to our present way of thinking causes me to think this theory is not applicable when looking for the point of origin of our universe, since it doesnt exist in the way we can understand.

Now I have lost a few people, my oppologies, I often run out of words when trying to 'see' the true scope of the universe and often find myself resorting to a sense of feeling to find my way round the expanse of the Universe.

Anyway, in basic terms, my 'awareness' tells me that the 'Big Bang' everyone is looking for will be nothing more than a VERY big star that has exploded, and because of its extrem size and properties, does NOT turn into a blackhole.

By big I mean a real whopper of a 'star'..

By then scientists will then get a inkling of the true size of our universe. Imagine that, the 'big bang' theory is attributed to but one of many billions more BIG STARS exploding and creating further smaller star systems in our universe!. We are in fact, trying to find the origin of the 'star' that created our known universe, and NOT the orgin of the universe itself!



[edit on 30/4/2009 by Freelancer]