My last cosmological idea was pretty quickly shown (with the proper search) to be an idea others have already had years ago. I hate when that happens (but it usually does, since an original thought which has never been thought before is probably extremely rare). I expect the same from this one, but I'll post it before I research it.
Red shift shows the expansion of the Universe. Unless such ideas as "tired light" have any validity (which seems highly doubtful to me) every point in the Universe (beyond local gravitational "groups") seems to be moving away from every other point. And, the farther away two points are from each other the faster they are moving apart.
This can be viewed like raisins in a rising loaf of bread- as the whole loaf expands, each raisin gets farther from all other raisins, but the effect is greatest (taking into account the rigid nature of the bread pan) for a raisin touching the bottom of the pan and one poking out the top of the loaf. Two adjacent raisins might not move apart noticeably, and if two are stuck together- like galaxies gravitationally bound together- the expansion won't affect their relative positioning at all.
You can read up on it to see how this shifts absorption lines toward the red end of the spectrum, if you care to learn more.
Back to the expanding Universe... Run this measurable expansion backwards and you reach a time about 13.8 billion years ago to see when the entire Universe would have occupied a single point. The "explosion" of this point is what is called the Big Bang and causes all sorts of speculation about what might have caused it. Lots of ideas- some plausible- but none confirmed or even universally accepted (and I mean by scientists who study such things, not Creationists).
But, maybe there's another answer that would explain the observations. Could the Universe be always expanding, but not actually getting larger? Might this do away with the need of "What made it Bang?"
Maybe, sorta.
Spacetime is curved- and this has been experimentally observed many times. This means the shortest distance between two points, on a cosmological scale, is a curve. And here I am speaking of a spacetime (4-dimensional) curve, not a 2- or 3- dimensional curve of the sort you can probably picture in your head. If the Universe is curved enough (which it doesn't seem to be), going in a straight line far enough would bring you back to the place you began.
So, here's my thought: What if the red shift actually does show the Universe/spacetime to be expanding, but the curvature of spacetime is always bringing the "outer" edge back to the "center"?
A lower-dimensional visual aid would be a fountain where the water flowing out the top is sucked in at the bottom to be sent back out the top again- ad infinitum. Well, try to visualize the Universe as a 4-dimensional fountain.
It would solve the problem of "what happened before the beginning" ("What is north of the North Pole?"), and put to rest the problem of what made it all begin.
It should one day be possible to test this hypothesis, since it is falsifiable. For that matter, it may have already been falsified.
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I think science pretty much explains how God operates. It's amazing!
ReplyDeleteBlog roll exchange maybe?
http://www.thelasttradition.com/
Pretty sure it's leprechauns who do it all. Just as much evidence- maybe more- for them, after all.
DeleteOne name to research, Halton Arp.
ReplyDeleteMy most pertinent thought here is that the cosmic microwave background seems to disprove this. If I'm understanding your idea correctly, you're suggesting that matter "leaving" the universe comes back in at some central point or points (or it could be an effect distributed throughout space). But the microwave background is quite uniform (down to about 0.1%) and comes from all directions, suggesting that the radiation field is a "stretched" version of one generated when the universe dropped below the point at which it becomes opaque to E/M waves. There's a timeframe for this, suggesting it was some few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.
ReplyDeleteIf there were such a source operating, we would likely observe radiation coming from the source. If the source were "everywhere," it would look a lot like the discredited (I think) "steady state" hypothesis, which suggested that a few hydrogen atoms pop into existence per cubic light-year every so often to keep space "populated" as it expands. You may want to look at how that hypothesis was discredited.
I was trying to figure out how the microwave background radiation would fit into this hypothesis, and wasn't successful, so that may be the nail in the coffin.
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