Defying the Deity
POSTED BY: AnthonyT
UPDATED: Tuesday, December 27, 2011 18:15
VIEWED: 9122
PAGE 6 of 11
My take would be that the universe is much larger than we think, and what we see is limited by the lifespan of light.
There would be a center of a bang that created the black hole our universe is in, but it is undoubtedly not the entirety of that black hole.
But also, any diffusion of matter will be chaotic. As in chaos theory. The distribution of matter according to chaos theory would be uneven, perhaps not dissimilar to what we see.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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HK: That sounds like Gnosticism.
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Quote:
My take would be that the universe is much larger than we think, and what we see is limited by the lifespan of light.
Very possible. If we could see every star and galaxy in the universe, the night sky would be white (or maybe beige...)
I can understand a hesitance to embrace the big bang as a theory, and people who consider it western theological stuff. But the steady state universe doesn't work for me, even with red shift caused by extinction.
For me, the idea that our universe might have burst out of a white hole on the other side of a black hole makes a lot of sense, and at least doesn't leave the why behind the big bang unexplained (and also uses known principles and observations as a basis). I'm undecided on the ultimate end fate, myself.
Agreed on chaos theory and diffusion, and I also suggest that localized accumulations of matter might have enough gravity to overcome at least somewhat the expansion energy. Apparently there's a supercluster out past Virgo that us and a number of other nearby galaxies are actually moving towards even though it's far away.
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
My take would be that the universe is much larger than we think, and what we see is limited by the lifespan of light.
The lifespan of light?
I do not fear God, I fear the ignorance of man.
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Space has dust. Dust plus light = diffusion and/or electron excitation and absorption, therefore a finite distance light can travel. He might be talking about something else though, there's a few other scientific hypotheses I've heard about limitations of light and distance.
There is a slight problem with JUST this explanation in that depending on how much dust there is you could expect that far away objects should appear more blurry than they do, but I'm forgetting the other explanations involved.
However, there is also the curvature of the universe to consider.
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Anthony's book analogy is interesting. I think of it like God is a room and time is a piece of thread floating in that room. God experiences it all at once, it is happening, it happened, it will happen, its all the same at once. God isn't constrained by the mundainities of time. But we are, we are born and then we live and we die and stuff happens after we die and at that point we're sort of not stuck in time anymore, but not in the way that God is not stuck in time.
The universe is too big and amazing for me to figure out how it works.
"A completely coherant River means writers don't deliver" KatTaya
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Byte,
When I have more time, I can logically get to there from nowhere, but I think there ultimately are some things which ultimately I suspect cannot be determined with certainty.
Okay, briefly trying.
Tired light, the light travels 16 billion light years, and it is crossing strands of space time, getting reabsorbed and re-emitted in less than absolute perfection but with no measurable difference. However, over billions of years, there is a redshift that will ultimately reduce everything to 21 cm. This creates the illusion that we are at the center of the universe.
Outside of that, there might be more stars, but they do not make our sky white because their light cannot reach us. since we do appear to be in the center, there is only one alternative to the tired light, which is that 16 billion years ago existence didn't exist. This seems illogical to me, especially when you look at the universe, and the speed at which things develop. The Solar System, for example, was born out of the nebula of the collision of two stars. This background already burns almost the entirety of the 16 billion years without explaining where those stars came from. To make matters worse, even looking back close to 16 billion years we see no primodial goo but rather a universe behaving exactly like our own full of a similar matter distribution and development of galaxies and stars, all states can be seen at the edge as can be seen at the center, and all states are available.
Far more logical to me is that the universe is infinite in age, or at least so close that we cannot measure it from here. This so called static state universe ties in to the world as we know it: creation is not an event, but an ongoing ever turning process. As the wheel turns, our creation and destruction is always occurring.
So, all of that said, where did we come from?
In the world according to dreamtrove, we live in a black hole. This is because the matter in the universe when added up fits the density equation for a black hole, meaning that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.
What is the size of that black hole? I don't know. More than 32 billion light years across. That's the only thing I can say for sure. Possibly much larger.
Does it shrink, expand, or stay steady?
It probably expands. This assumes that there is an "outside" and that as a black hole we draw from it.
So, what's it like inside? The same as inside any black hole: there is a universe. This has to be so because the black hole has no center. Since gravity seeks to collapse to a center, and it can never reach the so called singularity, it will immediately fall into orbit around it. Which is basically how all other systems operate anyway. But, as it does so, as stuff collapses into the whole it draws in the fabric of space time, the tangled weave of threads. So, the collapse into the hole is not matter, but threads. Thus, space itself is being drawn in, which increases the amount of space inside the black hole.
This means the black hole is dimensionally transcendental, and outside, should there be an outside, it will appear far smaller than it does to us. Were we ever to reach our universal event horizon, and escape it, we might look back to see a small dark storm circled furiously by the destruction of spacetime, and outwards, an infinite field of who knows what. More stars and galaxies? other black whole universes? Something that never occurred to us at all?
When the matter splashes into the hole in creates a vibration in the goo in which it lands, instantly creating a vibration, frequency, which creates the uncertainty between A and B, which in turn defines the limits of said thread, which in turn will create sympathetic vibrations in others, leading to a complex network of threads which will later cross to create sub atomic particles and energies, and in so doing create space itself, and therein lies your big bang, but I can't see how we can be at all assured of having any idea when, or how fast, or how large, but my off hand guess would
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Quote:
Originally posted by dreamtrove:
In the world according to dreamtrove, we live in a black hole. This is because the matter in the universe when added up fits the density equation for a black hole, meaning that the escape velocity exceeds the speed of light.
Could you please be specific about the "density equation" for a black hole? I know very well the equation for escape speed, and how it involves the distance from and mass of the object to be escaped from. However, that equation in no way applies to the total matter in the universe. ie: the density of the entire universe is nowhere near what's required of a black hole.
For example, to make the sun a black hole, you'd have to fit the entire mass of the sun, every bit of it, into a sphere 3 km across. Think about that. You're saying the universe as a whole is this dense? Nonsense!
Anyway, I'm very curious as to where you got this idea of yours. Please do share that equation.
As for the whole universe being inside a black hole - I love the idea in a sci-fi way, but as for actual science I'm afraid it's more nonsense. The laws of physics break down inside a black hole because the gravity is so strong that regular matter and energy as we understand it cannot exist. The empty space inside atoms collapses. The empty space between quarks collapses. This is not a place where well ordered existence can happen.
Now, if you want to picture black holes as portals to another plane... ok. Sci-fi is fun, and I like that idea. Black holes are weird and mysterious enough that it makes for a good tale. But it sure as hell doesn't gel with any physics equations that I know.
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hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left
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And back to the point of thread (although I'd love to go on talking about black holes for a while - I just got to these in my classes before winter vacation, and there's never enough time to talk about all the weirdnesses of black holes!)
My view of religion has been somewhat altered by discussions I've had here in RWED. First, my background: my mom grew up Mormon and escaped (her words), and so I grew up with no religion except a few church-goings with friends. I didn't think about it much except to be happy that I had my Sundays free, and no Bible school in the summer. So I'm perhaps a bit biased that I didn't have the "training" that most westerners have.
Actually, I always find it somewhat confusing that people feel uplifted by religion. It must be all that training I didn't get, because any mention of Bible and Jesus and holy ghost and all that makes me feel completely stifled, like I can't breathe properly. All that sin and guilt and stuff. Ick! I just can't see any joy in that.
Whatever - my experience on these threads, some time ago, was relating to evolution. Anyone remember those threads? In those, I began to see that Western religion is a continuation of the need for humans to see ourselves as the center of the universe. OK, we've been forced to admit that the earth isn't the center of everything, but the human way of being and of thinking is, right? It *has* to be, right?
Certain posters on RWED (no longer here, and I miss them) could not imagine that any process other than that of a human-like diety could have brought life into being. I think this mentality applies to a whole lot of people out there. They need the universe to be run by a idealized human form who feels emotion - love, jealousy, anger - just the way they do. They have to believe that nature was "engineered" in the same way that humans would engineer something. The can't imagine that any other creative process could do it.
So, in order to feel powerful and in control of their lives, people need to believe that all of nature is controlled by a being like them. They cannot fathom a "natural" process that is capable of doing more than they can do -- by which I mean the laws of physics and chemistry and biology. This is not a human-like intelligence, but I believe it is quite capable of creating all that we see and all that we are.
Maybe that's frightening, because this form of "god" - the machine of nature - doesn't feel love or pity. And maybe it's not useful, because it doesn't care who we sleep with or whether we put cash in the bucket on Sunday.
It's more comforting and more useful to create a God in the form of a human being - a male authoritarian human being, of course - so that we can feel that the proper kind of power is in charge.
It's quite self-centered of us, I think.
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hmm-burble-blah, blah-blah-blah, take a left
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Mal
It's not my idea, it's a widely circulated one, and I learned it in astronomy many years ago. I will dig it up.
But before going further I will echo Byte's statement earlier: I have no desire to threadjack Anthony's religion thread into a discussion of cosmology, so I'll start a separate thread for this discussion.
That's what a ship is, you know - it's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, that's what a ship needs.
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