[PatrickHenry]

How many times will the analogy to evolution be mis-quoted, or mis-understood? Doesn't matter. Also, our own Physicist has used the Annie Hall line: "Brooklyn is not expanding!"

[VadeRetro]

An accelerating universe, then, resembles a black hole in that it has an event horizon, an edge beyond which we cannot see. The current distance to our cosmic event horizon is 16 billion light-years, well within our observable range. Light emitted from galaxies that are now beyond the event horizon will never be able to reach us; the distance that currently corresponds to 16 billion light-years will expand too quickly. We will still be able to see events that took place in those galaxies before they crossed the horizon, but subsequent events will be forever beyond our view.

I think this means that things we can see now are going to wink out of sight as the universe expandes and ages. We will actually see things appear to recede from us and leave us alone in the dark.

Makes me not want to stick around.

[NavyCanDo]

My favorite Big Band was Glenn Miller with Benny Goodman coming in a close 2nd. And don't forget Tommy Dorsey and Les Brown, Duke Ellington, and boy could that Harry James play a hard-singing riff.
Wait a minute - your talking "BIG BANG"?

Ahhhhhh NEVERMIND

[Doc Savage]

The ant analogy is wrong. An ant standing on the surface of a balloon has height from the surface of the balloon. Therefor, he DOES have a sense of up and down. He has to.
As for the specious use of Darwinism in this piece, give it a rest!

[2ndreconmarine]

Great article. Thank you.

[ThinkDifferent]

Bookmark to go over in more detail later. Like somebody else said, I thought I somewhat understood this but now it looks like I don't.

[jwalsh07]

I don't like the balloon analogy. Tough for the layman to get wrap his arms around it. I prefer the dough and raisin deal.

Maybe I'm just hungry though.

[patriot_wes]

"biologists still debate the mechanisms and implications (though not the reality) of Darwinism, while much of the public still flounders in pre-Darwinian cluelessness"

Now your talking my language...I've always been clueless as to how "nothing" exploded into everything.

[PhilipFreneau]

>> Hubble's law predicts that galaxies beyond a certain distance, known as the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light. For the measured value of the Hubble constant, this distance is about 14 billion light-years.

If Hubble's "Law" is correct we will never see those galaxies because they are moving away from us faster than their light is moving toward us. That would be strange, indeed, except for the fact that the speed of light is nothing to our all-powerful God -- He who created the heaven and the earth and all its host -- He whose power is beyond our comprehension since we are mere men with no power, to speak of. Hubble's "Law" is certainly possible. Of course, if the appropriately named Hubble Telescope or some future device proves Hubble wrong, then maybe his calculations were wrong -- maybe he meant 20 billion light years, give or take a few, or a bunch. Or maybe he was a mere dreamer who had no clue about the creation of the universe, though he pretended so and wanted so much to be right. But, no matter, he was certainly fascinated by its incredible beauty and unimaginable vastness, as am I.

[SuziQ]

Printed this out for Sir SuziQ. He LOVES this stuff!

[NonLinear]

Cosmologists sometimes state that the universe used to be the size of a grapefruit, but what they mean is that the part of the universe we can now see--our observable universe--used to be the size of a grapefruit.

Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions.

Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was "small" is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still infinite.

So the universe was infinite prior to the big bang, and is infinite now, only more so....

I gues the big bang just got bigger.

[js1138]

placemarker

[DennisR]

The Big Bang! Or, as I like to call it, "The Big Hoax!"

[perfect stranger]

Bump