New cosmology model without a Big Bang

You just hit a big red hot button. It also doesn’t mean that they can and do exist.The rest of this is (somewhat) off-topic.Theodor Kaluza took the equations of General Relativity and, as an intellectual exercise, manipulated them in a 5d spacetime. To his surprise his manipulations turned up equations that mimicked Maxwell’s differential equations. Since GR is the general state of SR and SR is a more robust and exact follow-on of Maxwell hindsight says this should not be all that surprising, but it was a big hit at the time and then was promptly forgotten.Along come string theory, which isn’t a theory at all, and in order to get the equations of the vibrating strings to mimic the quantum values of the standard model of particles, which they wouldn’t do in 4d spacetime, string theorists took a page from Kaluza and added more and more dimensions for the strings to vibrate in to get the numbers to come out right.First, since the strings are speculated to be planck-sized objects there is no known, nor even reasonably speculated, way to detect their existence. Second, the shapes of the extra dimensions vary greatly and the shape to be chosen in any working of the string equations must be chosen carefully to achieve the desired results. The extra dimensions and their shapes do not flow naturally from any formulation of string equation. They must be chosen and forced upon the situation. To their benefit, if chosen appropriately, the equations do produce models roughly equivalent to the standard model of particles with the addition of a spin-2 particle for the graviton, as posited in Quantum Field Theory, and a whole slew of additional particles (supersymmetric particles) not known in the standard model.None of these dimensions or particles from any of the complicated models from string theory (or, more accurately these days, M-theory) have been shown to be real. They may indeed be found in the new higher energies of the Large Hadron Collider, and if not it may be because the LHC is still under-powered to find them, but at present none of the predictions of M-theory has been verified.The only reason M-theory has been elevated above speculation to hypothesis is because the math, even as complex as it presently is, can be manipulated to produce models of what we presently know to exist. By strict scientific standards M-theory is not a theory at all. None of its predictions have been verified.Someone once said, Observation over theory. Except theory is a well-substantiated explanation based on a body of facts that have been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experiment. In science theory explains observation and experiment. M-theory does neither.Still, we shall see.[abe]Just thought of something I said that may be misinterpreted."Observation over theory", mickechell, is correct. I did not mean to be seen as challenging that. If an observation conflicts with a theory, the observation wins. I just thought it was a nice segue into ending my personal rant.Edited by AZPaul3, : clarifyEdited by AZPaul3, : No reason given.Edited by AZPaul3, : spln

Seems to me that you are questioning the idea that the Big Bang did NOT expand from a central point. Not expanding from a central point is the main stream idea. You seem to want a central point inside the balloon.I suspect that one source of confusion is that your question assumes a geometry of space at the time of the explosion, which may not have existed given that space and time were created in the Big Bang. The metaphor is used to explain what our understanding and is not the basis of anything. The universe as viewed from our vantage appears as if we are the center of everything. But it also seems that the same thing is true from other view points. The balloon is used to show how such a thing might be. Other people like to use a raisin cake rising in an oven.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

You kinda need to be a bit of a mathematician to get to postulate your own model. Otherwise, why would your's be any better or more interesting than the following one? If it expanded from multiple points then we would have evidence of that. The evidence we do have suggests that it did exand from a single point - like the relative uniformity of the CMBR. The "balloon metaphor" isn't presumed, its derived. Explosions slow down, the expansion of the Universe is speeding up.

Just to mention a few details about the explosion analogy, the Big Bang wasn't an explosion of matter into existing space. It was a rapid expansion of space itself. That's why the 2d expanding balloon surface analogy is so apt, because the expanding balloon surface creates new 2d space, in a way analogous to the expanding universe creating new 3d space. The expanding raisin cake analogy is good, too.Explosions on Earth slow down because they encounter air.Explosions in a vacuum will speed up or slow down according to the force of gravity. An explosion in our solar system but not near a planet's gravity will speed up in the direction of the sun and slow down in the direction away from the sun.The universe's expansion was originally assumed to be slowing because of gravity. Dark energy is just a name for an unknown phenomenon working against gravity to cause the acceleration of the universe's expansion.--Percy

Yeh, but what is it expanding into?(Don't even try....)

"You kinda need to be a bit of a mathematician to get to postulate your own model. Otherwise, why would your's be any better or more interesting than the following one?"I am a technical instructor. One thing I've learned from my students ... sometimes, the most perceptive questions come from the least experienced person. Since I don't know all the existing theories, maybe mine comes from a new direction.I am not vain enough to believe that, but if I don't put it out there, I'll never know.For example. I have no problem believing that space is infinite. I do not believe space and time popped into existence with the Big Bang. One cannot travel back in time. Time is decay and once decayed, it cannot be revisited. Thus, time was moving right along in an infinite space before the universe as we know it began expanding.

Not to change the subject, 'cause I don't ... but I don't have a button allowing me to reply with a quote. My reply button is "without a quote" only.Nevermind ... this was answered on another thread ... I'm good.Edited by mikechell, : No reason given.

Neat, what kind of techniques? I used to do that as one part of my last job. That's all fine and dandy for technical stuff that can be stumbled across intuitively, but cosmology and astrophysics gets really fucking weird, and its not really stuff that you're just gonna find a new direction to form a perspective from.The concepts in those fields are spoken about in the language of math, and without the skills to speak it you cannot really even begin to form an actual perspective. Seriously, and no offense, I'm just sayin'... and I don't mean to imply that I do have the necessary skills.Even the English language explanations and analogies can only just fall short of actually and truly explaining the concepts.That's why you get misunderstandings like thinking the Big Bang is anything like an "explosion". They both describe an expansion, but that's about it. Sure. Your theory is most likely wrong. The best explanation we currently have is the Big Bang Theory.There's no doubt that it isn't exactly correct, but its the closing thing we got. Your model is contradicted by the evidence we have for the Big Bang.Your best bet is to learn more about it. Did you read and understand my Message 14?That's the best technical instruction that I've come up with for beginning to talk about the Big Bang.Are you good with the concept of reducing dimensions? Like:4D > 3D > 2D > 1D > 0D=Tesseract > Cube > Plane > Line > PointDo you understand why asking about going inside the balloon, as opposed to being limited to the 2D surface, is simply out of bounds?That 2D surface represents all three of our spatial dimensions, i.e. our 3D world. We can't leave it.The blowing up of the balloon, a 2D surface expanding into the third dimension we can perceive, represents our 3D world expanding through the fourth dimension that we call time. Make sense?If it was a polka-dotted balloon, and you were a 2D being on one of the dots, then every dot on the balloon would look like it was moving away from you as it was being blown up and it would look like you were in the center of them all.But it doesn't matter what dot you're on, it would always looks like that from any one of the dots. (you gotta give some leeway to the analogy in that its a spherical balloon without a mouthpiece)The reason for that is that a balloon like that is a surface that is finite yet unbounded. Its finite in that there's only so much ballon, but its unbounded in that the surface never ends. Like how with being on Earth and you can go in the west direction an infinite distance and never leave the planet. The surface is unbounded, there is no edge, but its still a finite planet.And example of a bounded surface would be a cylinder. You can go in a direction where you'll find an edge.Another example of an unbounded surface, that isn't a sphere, is a torus. You can believe whatever you want, and I'm not going to tell you that you can't be right (probably).But I can do a decent job of explaining the Big Bang theory if you want to go through it. Its just that, when you type about it I can tell that you have some misunderstanding about what it actually says.You keep talking about it as if space and time are separate things instead of treating them as one combined thing. We have tons of evidence that a lot of our world can be explained with a finite, yet unbounded, 4D manifold. We call that spacetime.We'll have to discuss this next time, if you're interested, but let leave with an analogy: if you press the rewind button on the universe, and go back in time, then it just keeps getting smaller and smaller until you get to a point where the VCR stops working.As I understand it: Einstein's relativity was kinda like a whole "universe generating program", where you can plug in values and crunch out various types of universes. With the right values, you can map out a universe that behaves in ways that match empirical evidence that we can gather from our universe. From that, you can see the theory/program describing how the universe must have behaved to get to the point where we're at.That's where we got the idea for the Big Bang, in that as you go backwards in time it keeps getting smaller and smaller. Played back in forwards it would have been one hell of an expansion early one, as if it "popped" or went "bang"...It was determined that it came from one single "point", which is actually more like an asymptote in my opinion, but the theory/program, itself, breaks down and stops working the closer you crunch the math towards it.Its like how the plot of 1/X approaches zero as X approaches infinity, but it never actually gets to zero. That's where the north pole of the Earth is in that analogy. The closer you zoom in, its just the more closer you know how far off you are.Whelp, I gotta go.

Then fear not! I don't believe any field of science attracts more amateurs and crackpots that do cosmology and general relativity. There is no lack of 'independent thinkers' out there. Quite a few of them know a considerable amount of math.Unfortunately though, the 'pure idea men' who don't know math have no way to put their ideas out there even for ridicule, let alone criticism by scientists.

For an alternate view, look into 'brane theory:http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077357/

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... But two theorists have just fired their latest volley at that belief, saying there could be a timeless cycle of expansion and contraction. It’s an idea as old as Hinduism, updated for the 21st century.

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In the cyclic model, our three-dimensional universe is one of two surfaces, or "branes," separated by an extra dimension. The two branes bounce off each other to give rise to matter and radiation, and then expand and dissipate due to dark energy. Click for more information from Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, including a Flash animation.

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The cyclic model, developed by Princeton University’s Paul Steinhardt and Cambridge University’s Neil Turok, made its highest-profile appearance yet Thursday on Science Express, the Web site for the journal Science. But past incarnations of the idea have been hotly debated within the cosmological community for the past year and Steinhardt acknowledges that he and Turok have an uphill battle on their hands.

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'Brane-Storm' Challenges Part of Big Bang Theory

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Think parallel branes and five dimensions. Science never sounded so cool.

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The new idea would not replace the Big Bang, which has for more than 50 years dominated cosmologists' thinking over how the universe began and evolved. But instead of a universe springing forth in a violent instant from an infinitely small point of infinite density, the new view argues that our universe was created when two parallel "membranes" collided cataclysmically after evolving slowly in five-dimensional space over an exceedingly long period of time.

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Mario Livio, who heads up the science division of the Space Telescope Science Institute, said it's way too early to predict whether the theory will withstand scrutiny by other researchers. But he called the concept very important and exciting: "We're talking about a new idea about the origin of our universe."

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and also see Did a 5-D black hole brane event horizon make the universe?, which makes the balloon analogy come to life, as it were.Enjoy