ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Daniel Harper]

On Friday 06 April 2007 08:10, you wrote:
> On 4/5/07, Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.org> wrote:
> >  > And we're talking about travel through universal  space relative to
> >  > some starting point?
> >
> > No. There is no such thing as a starting point. That is the hardest part
> > to grasp, for me, anyway. The universe has no edge. At least that is the
> > situation currently. Perhaps tomorrow or next week cosmologists will
> > hypothesize an edge and a starting point.
>
> Hmm...  I was under the impression that the starting point of the
> universe was the "spot" where the Big Bang occurred, and that Hubble
> allows us to peer back in time to the early days after that Bang
> (although I've no idea what direction one should point the telescope).

This is incorrect. It's space _itself_ that is expanding. Your vision makes 
sense if space is being "added" either at the "center" or "edge" of the 
universe, but instead it's more like self-rising flour in a cake -- can you 
point to a particular point in that cake that contains the "center" of the 
originally flat surface? (Of course, the universe expands in three dimensions 
while the cake only expands in two, but it's just a metaphor.)

>  I was also under the impression that the universe does have an edge,

The idea that the universe is finite but edgeless is one of those things that 
keeps cosmologists up at night. Apparently you can work out the mathematics 
somehow with non-Euclidean geometries, but that's a bit beyond my 
comprehension.

> like a great big expanding bubble, and that until recently one working
> theory was that at some point the expanding point the universe would
> stop expanding and begin to contract, until it was once again a single
> mass waiting to do another Big Bang, thus forming an eternal
> expand/contract cycle.  But the current thought is that it will only
> continue to expand and cool, with Entropy ruling all.

Current observations indicate that there's not enough mass to cause the 
universe to shrink back on itself. 

> The funny thing 
> about this current single Big Bang theory is that it implies (to me)
> that there was/is some Creator that started it all.  The previous
> expand contract cycle theory implied (to me) that "Nature" was eternal
> and needed no Creator.
>

This doesn't really make sense to me, although I've heard it before in many 
places. Why does a single Big Bang require a Creator, if a series of Big 
Bangs does not? Isn't the whole "system" of Big Bangs in an expand/contract 
universe just as needing of theological explanation as the single Big Bang? 
(Conversely, wouldn't a single Big Bang require as little Creative input as 
the eternal cycle of Big Bangs?) And doesn't the Creator, itself, require 
some sort of explanation as to how It got there?

(This last bit was not science related in the slightest, of course. 
Theological speculation can be fun and all, but it's not scientific in the 
slightest, despite what certain elements would have us believe.)

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com