Hubble snaps stunning baby pic of cosmos Galactic whirls from 12 billion years ago

http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/06/19/bigbang.view.reut/index.html ^ | Thursday, June 19, 2003 Posted: 2:19 PM EDT (1819 GMT)

[DannyTN]

New Hubble peers deep in cosmic past and future (2002)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- A new wide-angle view of the universe looks back to a mere billion years after the Big Bang, revealing secrets about the lives of galaxies and the black holes at their hearts, scientists reported on Thursday.

[DannyTN]

"It's the intersection of unrestrained spatio-temporal geodesic lines, which are perfectly straight in generalized Hamiltonian continuum coordinates. "

That's going to take a little while to digest.

[RightWhale]

That's going to take a little while to digest.

Yes, each word probably needs a graduate course in itself to get the full flavor. Or maybe the little book 'One, Two, Three, Infinity' by George Gamow.

[kjam22]

Just search google for "Hamiltonian continuum coordinates gravity"

And I thought music theory was complex. Sheesh

[The Shootist]

Light travels at the speed of light, and it has mass. Why else would be affected by gravity?

If light had mass e would not = mc2 and atomic fission and fusion would not be possible. See A. Einstein, a prominant patent clerk and all around great guy.

[RoughDobermann]

If light had mass e would not = mc2 and atomic fission and fusion would not be possible. See A. Einstein, a prominant patent clerk and all around great guy.

I realize that. Can you explain why if light has no mass it is affected by gravity?

[Bryan24]

Hmm.

- We don't know where the universe started.

- We don't know when the universe started.

- We've never witnessed the birth, life and death of a star.

- We've never been out of the gravitational field of our sun to know if light speed is constant.

But we can pinpoint the birth of the universe (Big Bang). It's not 12 Billion years old. It's not 14 billion years old. It's 13 Billion years old. That is a pretty neat trick, using 4 unknown variable and computing the age of the earth.

Personally, I lean to the idea that God created an enormous and vast universe and put all the light "in place". But that is just me.

[The Shootist]

Should have been in my last post.

Light is not affected by gravity because of any mass inherent Light is affected by gravity because gravity bends space-time.

Stretch a sheet of rubber taut. Place a marble in the middle of the sheet. The sheet barely deflects. Remove the marble. Place a bowling ball in the middle of the sheet. The sheet deflects (bends, warps, whatever) to a greater degree.

The sheet of rubber is a two dimensional representation of what happens in three dimensional space-time when a mass is present.

When Einstein predicted that space-time would bend due to the presence of mass, scientists initially scoffed at the idea. Then someone happened to watch the Sun occlude a star (the earth's orbital movement caused a visible star to appear to move behind the Sun). The light of the star continued to be visible even though a line passing from the star to an observer on Earth passed through the Sun itself. Einstein's prediction about the curvature of space-time, by gravity, was and continues to be, accurate to within the error of our instruments.

[RoughDobermann]

OK, I think I get it, thanks. So, light is affected by gravity, but not because light has mass. It is affected because gravity bends space-time and light is "traveling" in/on space-time?

[Pagey]

OMG, Look at that Grill on Hitlary!Gaaaaaawwwwwddd!I've never seen that pic and I thought I'd seen them all.

[Pagey]

Upon further reflection, That Horrible Picture deserves its own "Caption This".

[Pagey]

Oops.That previous post was actually to you.

[VadeRetro]

B - Location of the Big Bang

The Big Bang was everywhere. We're still stuck in it. Any direction we look, we're looking back toward it.

[RightWhale]

The Big Bang was everywhere. We're still stuck in it.

That's right. The BB was right here, some time ago.

[CyberAnt]

Hmmmm? God said, "Let there be light" and light was. That could have been the "big bang". I mean, if you think about it, what happens when you get up in the middle of the night and flip on a bright light! BANG!! It's so bright you have to peer through slits for several seconds before your eyes adjust to the light.

[go star go]

not necessarily. scientist have recently arrived at a new theory that the speed of light varies and this throws a monkey wrench into the theory of relativity.

[DannyTN]

"there is no "distance to the Big Bang" It was everywhere, in a certain sense. Sort of like the light being everywhere as reported in Genesis. The light (or energy) of the big bang filled the entire universe as it then existed. Took a while for the universe to "cool" enough that matter could even exist."

So how does that change anything? Light fills the universe. Universe begins expanding. 13 billion years later the Earth receives light from a galaxy 12 billion lightyears away.

Are you claiming when that galaxy and our galaxy were formed during the big bang they were already 12 billion light years away?

And if so, how did the light suddenly fill the universe everywhere simulataneously. Didn't that energy still need to propogate through the universe?

[FastCoyote]

PS to you. What part of "a waste of breath" do you not understand?

[spunkets]

" Like in the Matrix where 'there is no spoon': there is no gravity."

DOes that mean that w/o a spoon, Rosie would be weightless?

[spunkets]

"It is affected because gravity bends space-time and light is "traveling" in/on space-time?"

That's right. It might be more insightful to consider it as propagating in space-time. The presence of the gravitational field results in curved world lines, or paths particles will follow. The effect of the field on the particles is on the momentum of the particles. The presence of mass results in the field, the field effects the momentum of particles. Force is dp/dt, or the change of momentum with time. Time of course, is a coordinate in 4-space. For photons in a gravitational field, the speed is c, but the momentum, p=h/wavelength, is effected by the field, so that c remains constant.

[The Shootist]

not necessarily. scientist have recently arrived at a new theory that the speed of light varies and this throws a monkey wrench into the theory of relativity.

Except for one little point. If the velocity of light were "wrong" by more than a tiny tiny amount (< .000000001 or so) the stars wouldn't shine and fusion and fission bombs wouldn't work. e=mc2. Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Since stars evidently DID shine through hydrogen fusion a billion years, plus or minus an eon or two, after the creation of the universe, and did so in a manner extremely similiar (identical as far as we can measure) to how stars fuse hydrogen today there can be little doubt that c2 (speed of light squared) is the same now as it was then.

I don't doubt that c was different at a time < 300,000 years after creation because the universe, had yet to become transparent, and was so hot that protons and neutrons didn't exists and all 4 forces (gravity, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and electro-magnetic) were combined as one force.

See Unified Field Theory and Grand Unified Field Theory, String and Super-string Theory. Read Stephen Hawkings' "A Brief History of Time" and Micheo Kaku's "Beyond Einstein: The Cosmic Quest for the Theory of the Universe" and "Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension". Absolute great stuff.