I think it's simpler to believe we just live in a simulation, or, if you prefer, the dream of a God. Then we push all this bizarre stuff off to whatever runs the dreamer. Don't you agree?
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.I love how the author slips in the part about "size set by a compromise among forces". Existence as a committee deliberation. I definitely don't understand any of this.
...Does this prediction of faster-than-light galaxies mean that Hubble's law is wrong? Doesn't Einstein's special theory of relativity say that nothing can have a velocity exceeding that of light? This question has confused generations of students. The solution is that special relativity applies only to "normal" velocities--motion through space. The velocity in Hubble's law is a recession velocity caused by the expansion of space, not a motion through space. It is a general relativistic effect and is not bound by the special relativistic limit. Having a recession velocity greater than the speed of light does not violate special relativity.
...Astronomers have observed about 1,000 galaxies with redshifts larger than 1.5. That is, they have observed about 1,000 objects receding from us faster than the speed of light. Equivalently, we are receding from those galaxies faster than the speed of light. The radiation of the cosmic microwave background has traveled even farther and has a redshift of about 1,000. When the hot plasma of the early universe emitted the radiation we now see, it was receding from our location at about 50 times the speed of light
...Thus, we can observe light from galaxies that have always been and will always be receding faster than the speed of light. Another way to put it is that the Hubble distance is not fixed and does not mark the edge of the observable universe.
...If space were not expanding, the most distant object we could see would now be about 14 billion light-years away from us, the distance light could have traveled in the 14 billion years since the big bang...the current distance to the most distant object we can see is about three times farther, or 46 billion light-years.
... People often assume that as space expands, everything in it expands as well. But this is not true. Expansion by itself--that is, a coasting expansion neither accelerating nor decelerating--produces no force. Photon wavelengths expand with the universe because, unlike atoms and cities, photons are not coherent objects whose size has been set by a compromise among forces. A changing rate of expansion does add a new force to the mix, but even this new force does not make objects expand or contract.
...In fact, in our universe the expansion is accelerating, and that exerts a gentle outward force on bodies. Consequently, bound objects are slightly larger than they would be in a nonaccelerating universe, because the equilibrium among forces is reached at a slightly larger size. At Earth's surface, the outward acceleration away from the planet's center equals a tiny fraction (10–30) of the normal inward gravitational acceleration. If this acceleration is constant, it does not make Earth expand; rather the planet simply settles into a static equilibrium size slightly larger than the size it would have attained.
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