is the universe 13.8 billion years old no matter what direction we're detecting?
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Here are the astronomer Edwin Hubble’s two hypotheses.
“If the red shifts are a Doppler shift ( evidence of expansion, yvilletom ) . . . the observations as they stand lead to the anomaly of a closed universe, curiously small and dense, and, it may be added, suspiciously young.
“On the other hand, if red shifts are not Doppler effects, these anomalies disappear and the region observed appears as a small, homogeneous, but insignificant portion of a universe extended indefinitely in both space and time.“
Source: — E. Hubble, 1937 Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.
yvilletom
Level 8
Nov 19, 2021
1
@hankster If you are a tiny fish somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, do you want to measure the oceanin any direction? You probably want to escape predators, eat and mate.
If you become human, have survived predators, and have eaten, science requires you to observe something, write a hypothesis you can test, and design the test.
Choose a direction, do the measuring, write a hypothesis you can test for that direction, design and do the test, and report your results in a comment here.
Word:
@hankster, @yvilletom I purpose the conceptual understanding of infinity be applied to all directions from all infinate points.
I have to wonder, this red shift possibly very observable, but why must it be assumed "all" matter was involved in an explosion/expansion that gives for the apparence of this red shift observation?
My brain can't hold the concept of 13.8 billion years. That's more than all of my fingers and toes combined.
Charles1971
Level 7
Nov 19, 2021
3
That assumes that the universe has a starting time and point. Why assume that?
wordywalt
Level 9
Nov 19, 2021
1
That's right. The figure was extrapolated.
@Wordywalt @Hankster I don't claim to understand it, but... When one looks at the farthest reaches, one is looking back, or seeing back, in time. Scientific findings indicate our Universe began 13.8 billion years ago by looking at the expansion based on red shifting of light, Cepheid Variables and other features that demonstrate universal expansion. The 13.8 comes from winding the clock back to the point when all the matter began expanding. One might expect that the universe should be no more than twice the 13.8 billion years, or 27.6 billion light years in 'diameter.' Sources can be sought out on this, but the figure is much greater (something like 70 billion light years).
@hankster It would be nice not to have to resort to the incomprehensible, but the reality is that just as our senses are limited, so is our ability to visualize. Beyond that caveat... The expansion is what we see. We also see the far infrared radiation believed to be the remnant energy glow from the Big Bang. These were mapped by COBE, the Cosmic Background Explorer, and it showed surprising uniformity of the Big Bang, which cosmologists have used to calibrate their models.
I've heard the analogy of points on a balloon expanding away from each other as the balloon is inflated. The point being that even within our seeming 3 dimensional perception, at least one more dimension is in play. Rather than being a sphere, it's something we can't imagine, so that everyone has a similar perspective, a Universe expanding or inflating from an initial point, but without a center. Some physicists suggest space-time may be saddle-shaped. Ultimately, visualization fails, but the equations are often very successful and provide startlingly good predictions. That's when they think they're on the right track. Except that answering one question just creates several more.
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