Size of the universe

No, Panda, what was correct in 1939 is still correct. The only progress made since then has been that of piling up erroneous concepts higher and higher still. Einstein knew and had shown in the paper that gravity and radiation are two sides of the same coin. What does not radiate may not possibly gravitate either was his conclusion and it still stands. It takes two to tango. Two objects at least interacting. Concept of mass may not gravitate by itself. Concepts, infinities and singularities may not be capable of doing anything other than on a theoretical paper. Nothing to do with my or any one else's beliefs. That's just iron physical necessity, sorry.

Inadequate, on the contrary your underhand tactics show indeed that your black bunk concept is in dire need of a lawyer. Your message insinuates that no sane person could doubt the black holes and big bunk. The cat is not impressed. He is from Russia so knows well that such tactics is a sign of desperation and lack of rational argument. All failing ideologies resort to such methods. Whether he is mad or not is irrelevant, Inadequate. In either case you'd still need to explain to yourself how it is possible to pack inside something much smaller than a pea all the matter in motion that is currently present in the Universe. And what contoured that dense object allegedly ready to expand. Questions like that, Inadequate.

Your opinions merely make me think that you're vain, lazy, and ill-educated. It is the manner in which you express them that gives me graver cause for concern. For example, have you noticed that you're referring to yourself in the third person and pretending to be a cat? I am only a layman in matters psychiatric, but I cannot think that this is a good sign.

No nukes, I would not know who Einstein would rather agree with. Of course, it's correct that he re-ified space but I am never taking that literally. I am taking the warping space and so on as just a metaphor for the trajectories of objects in motion. Not very good as explanations go, but still better than the alternative of aether he needed to discard.
I don't find that his theories imply that space alone without objects present can be full of fields and gravitate. Not literally. Metric, fields, energy, tensors and so on is something existing to mediate the interaction of objects and is not conceivable without those objects is my understanding of what Einstein was driving at.
One never knows though, I might be wrong and he might have really believed like Crankdriver does that metric can gravitate alone just through interaction with tensors and without any objects present.

Inadequate, nobody gives a damn what you and I think and whether we are both mad or one of us is only kidding. I repeat: that, my or your vanity, my industriousness, our finances, the state of anyone's education - it's all something completely irrelevant to the issue at hand which is the validity of the cosmological hypothesis you and others here defend against me and my cat. The things listed are all red herrings you use to muddy the water and to elude the questions you need to answer to yourself.
Who are you fooling, Inadequate?

Perhaps you could produce a scrap of a shred of a scintilla of evidence against the Big Bang, then. So far as I can see, your argument against it so far seems to boil down to the fact that you don't understand it; which is not much of an argument, since things can happen without you being able to understand them.

And with that single sentence you show just how delusional you are.If ~70 years of scientific/technological advancement is not enough to convince you - then you are beyond help.

Couldn't put it better myself. Ok, I could, but it's close enough. That would be rather incredible if true, given that Einstein died in '55 and John (Wheeler) didn't coin the term Black Hole until '67 (although there are reports of the term as early as '64)In 1939, when Einstein wrote the paper of which you are so fond, it had only recently been appreciated that the Schwarzschild "singularity" (at r=2M in geometric units) was not actually a real singularity, but merely a coordinate singularity (such as r=0 in polar coordinates) and later became known as the Schwarzschild radius. Oppenheimer with his student Snyder started looking at collapse to and through the Schwarzschild radius, but Einstein was dubious as to such an extreme area existing physically.Einstein attacks the problem by building the mass for his Schwarzschild solution out of orbiting bodies. He discovers that even before the Schwarzschild radius could be reached, his orbiting bodies were being forced to orbit at the speed of light, which of course is impossible. He reasons that this behaviour amongst others will prevent collapse down to the radii in the region of the Schwarzschild radius.His error is assuming that he can build such a mass out of orbiting bodies in the vicinity of the Schwarzschild radius. It is not possible as there are no stable orbits for massive objects close to the Schwarzschild radius. So his reasoning is incomplete and incorrect.Next?

On the topic of GR and Einstein's methods, you are wrong. Of that there is no question.The answer to your seemingly difficult question of what Einstein believed and the question of whether only objects that can radiate can gravitate can be found in Einstein's equations and in his writings. There really isn't any need to speculate on what Einstein thought about that issue.Further, I spent some time with Einstein's 1939 paper. I find Einstein's reasoning in the paper to be quite a bit different from your attempts to summarize the paper here.And my question to you remains unanswered. If you think Einstein was some kind of kook, why are you invoking his paper anyway? Einstein was wrong. He was also on the wrong side of the issue on quantum mechanics. Einstein was well past his prime in 1939.There are plenty of physics crackpots and wild theories re: physics on the internet. Is it your goal to find and adopt every one of those theories? As if dude. As if.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

I don't see why all the technological progress should not be the same or even greater in total absence of all the untestable in principle concepts like singularities, black holes, big bunks, crunches and rips. Anything dark could be safely dropped without hurting a single gadget in existence. All of the technology could thrive just fine without all the dark matters, energies and butters. They all are safe from any possibility of verification and beyond the event horizons making them irrelevant to the applied science.
In what way the physically impossible idea that the Universe is a finite, relative object that is accelerating its expansion, whatever that may possibly mean, can possibly influence the expansion of technology? No way anybody can point to. Edited by Alfred Maddenstein, : No reason given.

Panda said 'science/technology' and not just technology. Your statement that every accepted scientific advance since 1939 is wrong suggests that you are not a person that one ought to have a science discussion with.In fact, both GR and SR are associated with real world technology that seems to function quite well regardless of your impression about them.

An argument from self-knowing is not a valid argument.
70 years of scientific advancement has passed you by.As I said: "you are beyond help".

Hello good people. Thank you for this thread. I especially liked the OP scale of the universe and dogma’s question about the universe’s middle.Got a question for you...sorry if it’s childish....i'm just a manual labourer, hey.So, Q: If we could magically break our bodies down into a cloud of the smallest particles possible, then trace all those bits back through space time — say to when the universe was the size of a tennis ball — and then magically reassemble ourselves there, how big would it all look?Wait, a follow up question. In a sense, all of us were there at the time, right? Eg i love the thought that there is a lineage line going from me all the way back to that first single cell organism....i'm asking is there a similar lineage line from my atoms (or whatever) all the way back to the origin of the universe?Thanks again,Lurkey

Welcome to EvC, Lurkey! So much for lurking Thanks for joining up and posting. I guess it would look to be the size of a tennis ball, but the pressure from the density would be so great that you be crused to death. Not really. Back then there weren't the same kinds of matter as there is today. Heavier elements are fused inside of stars and then blasted across the universe via supernova. It'd be a very convoluted path back to the origin. I'm picturing it quite a bit differently than a genetic lineage.

Probably no meaningful tracing. Almost certainly all of the matter present today was converted back and forth between matter and energy multiple times.