Can you explain to this simpleton why the CC is explained as a proposal by Einstein as a pressure “to counteract gravity and keep the universe from imploding,” when, actually, without it, the Einstein theoretical universe expands? It seems to me, given the explanation that it was intended to prevent an implosion, setting it to zero would lead to a contracting universe, not an expanding one. When Einstein found out that the universe was actually expanding, wouldn’t that have just called for a CC that exceeded gravity, not just balanced it? In other words, wouldn’t it have required an increase in the value of the constant?

It’s stupidity beyond imagination if one talks about having to survey the whole sky and accumulate terabytes of data just to identify a few supernovaes happening at the edge of the universe.

The point is such events are NOT rare at all. If you are talking about supernovaes within no more than a few thousand light years away, it may be as rare as once in a couple hundred years. But when you are talking about any supernovae that can be as far as 10 or 14 billion light years away, then there’s plenty of such events happening every split second at any patch of the sky you look at. So why do you have to survey the whole sky for such signals?

The universe contains roughly 200 billion galaxies, each contain roughly 200 billion stars, and each has a good chance at a supernovae at the end of the star lifetime. So counting for the whole age of the universe, there has been roughly 200 billion X 200 billion supernovaes, about 4×10^22. That number is at least correct in terms of order of magnitude. The age of the universe is about 14 billion years, or about 4.4×10^17 seconds. So within any one second time period, there’s roughtly 10^5 newly occured supernovaes some where in the universe, within a distance no more than 14 billion light years.

If you look at just one small patch of the sky, roughly “10 square degree”, that’s 2.5×10^-4 of the whole sky. It figures into roughly 40 new supernovaes per second just within the small patch of sky the LSST looks at. So it should instantaneously discover many many remote supernovaes, any patch of sky it looks at, any time it looks at, without the need to accumulate terabytes of data.

And certainly, with such a huge collection of samples of terabyte scale, you can ALWAYS find data of ANY conceiveable particular strange patterns that fits ANY speculative theory you may have. But such data mining can hardly be considered convincing scientific evidences.

Quantoken

Will the reduced dataset really be a Petabyte, though? Searching raw data doesn’t seem that likely to me.