Comments on: The galaxy that shouldn't be there

By: scribbler

scribbler — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 17:27:08 +0000

@ 86, You’re good!

By: Sakari A. Maaranen

Sakari A. Maaranen — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 07:05:44 +0000

@84, okay, we just used the word “accelerating” in a slightly different meaning. By the way, I had a typo in my equation. The ratio I mentioned earlier would be of course (x-1) to 1.

@85, read for example: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=312375

By: BerndB

BerndB — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 03:28:32 +0000

How can we be sure that the galaxy whose light is being bent is more distant than the cluster doing the gravitational lensing? I mean, if the cluster is really that massive, is it not possible that light passing it is bent more than just a few degrees? Say, 150 or 160 degrees? Like the path of a comet passing close to the sun and then being flung back in a similar direction to where it came from. Wouldn’t that mean that the “lensed” object is actually closer than the lens and we are in fact looking “back” this way? So far, I have not read anything here that would rule this out.

By: scribbler

scribbler — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 20:16:12 +0000

I don’t buy into dark energy at all so I couldn’t direct you to any sites expressing an opinion one way or the other. I simply observed that while what you expressed is certainly expansion, it is not indicative of ACCELERATING expansion. The way you laid it out, the expansion is constant and unchanging.

YES, the number of “packets” is increasing exponentially but the increase between any object in your example is always an increase by a factor of 2x…

For the increase to accelerate, just to keep the math simple, it would have to be something akin to 2x+1.

I don’t believe in dark energy any more than I do in inflation. I a certain though that this theory will displace the theory of inflation because it is “new”…

I thank you for a pleasant exchange!

By: Phillip Helbig

Phillip Helbig — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 14:03:20 +0000

Some scepticism is called for: http://telescoper.wordpress.com/2012/06/26/clusters-splines-and-peer-review/ .

See also http://telescoper.wordpress.com/tag/extreme-value-statistics/ which is from the same blog and discusses another thing to keep in mind in cases like this.

By: Sakari A. Maaranen

Sakari A. Maaranen — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 07:17:25 +0000

@80, Okay, perhaps I have misunderstood something, but according to what I have read, if the dark energy is modeled as a cosmological constant(a, the universe would expand exponentially, i.e. similarly to what I described earlier. Could you point me to an online source that explains the faster than exponential growth that you seem to be referring to? I was talking about x^t , where x>1, and t is time. The ratio of (x-1) to x would be the amount of “bits” generated per one unit of space over one unit of time. Isn’t this the kind of exponential (accelerating) growth that those models (a) are about?

By: scribbler

scribbler — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 05:35:47 +0000

@79, You hit upon what I see as a potential flaw in the idea that space itself is “Inflating”. I assert that IF space is inflating then it “should” inflate in all direction, more or less evenly. That would mean that to us, everything would remain more or less relative to everything else, or put simply, there would be no observable change. So, when those who adhere to this theory use the word “space”, they don’t really mean space as in space/time, they mean that the more or less “empty” space between planets and galaxies and such is inflating.

In the balloon analogy, not only are the distances between the dots expanding, the dots are expanding. No relative change…

This idea is very, very problematic and has begun to be rejected. I can even name the death knell: Dark Energy…

As for the idea that all of space time inflated at some point in the past to even out our mathematics and to preserve our cosmological model, I don’t buy into that at all…

By: scribbler

scribbler — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 03:35:19 +0000

@ 79,

In your example, yes the “bits” would be represented by: n 2n 4n 8n. That is no acceleration. An accelerating Universe would be: n 2n 5n 12n…

By: Sakari A. Maaranen

Sakari A. Maaranen — Wed, 04 Jul 2012 01:28:55 +0000

@78, But even if these bits of new space and probabilities were approximately the “same size” and “same in numbers” per amount of already existing space, wouldn’t the universe appear to be expanding at an accelerating rate, because the more space you have between any two points, the more bits would be generated between them? There’s simply more space to generate the bits in. It would be kind of “interest on interest”. For example, if two points in space, X and Y, had a million miles between them, and in a period of time, N new bits formed between them to double the distance to two million miles, then in the next similar period, approximately 2N bits would form between the same points, X and Y, because they were now double the distance apart. This would mean that the observed distancing velocity had doubled. Now, this hypothetical space and probabilities generation could be accompanied by or be related to other spontaneous generation phenomena, such as vacuum energy, and could behave differently depending on whether it happened around dense energy fields, matter, or in free space. I would like to know what, if anything, is wrong with this idea?

By: scribbler

scribbler — Tue, 03 Jul 2012 07:29:02 +0000

@ 75, if you have a relatively constant number of tiny bits of space being produced all around us, you would have the appearance and the reality of a Universe expanding at a constant rate. If these “packets” were increasingly larger or increasingly more in number, then you would have the appearance and the reality of an accelerating expansion. If the rate of increase was constant, the acceleration would be constant. If the rate varied, the acceleration would vary as well…