Beautiful YouTube treatment of Kalam cosmological argument by skydivephil

[Marshall]

There's no middle ground for discussion. The 1915 law of gravity (involving dynamically changing geometry) has been well-demonstrated in many ways over many years. All the alternative explanation for observed redshift have be raised and refuted ad nauseam.
The law of gravity tells us to expect distances to be expanding (or contracting, which they evidently are not) and tells us therefore to expect a pattern of redshift, which we in fact observe.

The basic classic expansion model cosmology is not challenged any more.

But you are saying that distances do not expand and that the observed redshifts are due to something else.

You can SAY this and it is in fact moderately entertaining to have you do so. But it is impossible to have a rational discussion. My perspective is just too different to connect on a middle ground.

I would say today's challenge is to improve the expansion cosmo model so that it makes the same successful predictions as the classic one, but is better because it does not suffer from a singularity and is able to crank on back in time to before expansion started---to a highly dense state and possibly on back before that. And then the followon challenge of how to test and verify or falsify that improved expansion model. those are interesting challenges. I like very much to follow the current research on that.
Pretty much all after 2008.

Anyone who wants to learn something about cosmology needs to pay attention to recent research, post 2007 or 2008 basically. There are no popular books that I know of.

So it is a different perspective on things, Leumas. We just have very different points of view and there is little if anything to be gained by discussing.

You dont even accept the premise that distances are expanding

I don't see that anything would be accomplished by arguing, nor do I see that any harm could result from simply disagreeing as to our basic viewpoints.

 

[RandFan]

The bloody big bang is nothing but a SCIENTIFIC ALTERNATIVE TO GOD.

No. For a very good reason. God isn't an explanation of anything. "God" tells us absolutely nothing. The God hypothesis does not have any mathmatics in support of it. It offers no explanatory power. It offers no predictive power. It does absolutely nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. Don't know what god is. Don't now what mechanisms god uses. God is the ultimate violation of parsimony.

All you have to suppose god is to attack various hypothesis

Dark Matter that we cannot observe
Singularities that we cannot explain
Something from nothing
Beginning and Ending
Other dimensional REALMS

All have explanatory power. All fit within a hypothetical framework and doing so answers some important questions to solve a number of problems. They help explore various possibilities and they get us to think of ways to falsify them. They may ultimately prove wrong but they are something we can work with.

God? Well, god is the same as magic. Magic is an alterative to god.

 

[Leumas]

The basic classic expansion model cosmology is not challenged any more.

Not true…. But there is a major resistance to alternate theories due to VESTED INTEREST in the mainstream theory and egos etc.….. they tend to not fund or grant chairs for researchers who challenge the NORM….we all know about that in academia.

But you are saying that distances do not expand and that the observed redshifts are due to something else.

Now…. where did I say this? A book I pointed to says this…..I don’t say anything…. I have read the books for the normal line and the books that have alternate theories…. Did you?

All I am saying is that the Big Bang is WRONG….which the mainstream theorists are NOW saying is the case…..even black holes are now not REALLY black holes since they emit stuff and will eventually disappear.

Now…what is the CORRECT theory ….I have no idea…. I leave that to the scientists….but so far they have not got a theory …. But a while back they said Big Bang…Singularity…. Beginning …. End….

Now they have changed their minds and are now searching for how to CONTORT the big bang to make it so that there is none of that stuff…..GOOD…. I am not objecting at all….whatever theory they want to have that eventually supports an infinite universe (time and space) one way or another is good with me….. whether it is a modified big bang or some other theory I do not mind at all.

The only thing I can support LOGICALLY is an infinite universe in time and space…… Traditional Big bang violated LOGIC…. Contorted big bang theories are now BEGRUDGINGLY supporting the infinite universe in some way or another….FINE….GREAT.

Pretty much all after 2008.
Anyone who wants to learn something about cosmology needs to pay attention to recent research, post 2007 or 2008 basically. There are no popular books that I know of.

The second book I pointed to is (I think) 2010….. and since there are no books…. That means that the research is still not at a LAYMAN level (mine).

So it is a different perspective on things, Leumas. We just have very different points of view and there is little if anything to be gained by discussing.

Write a book….

You dont even accept the premise that distances are expanding

Now…again…where did I say that? You again ASS U ME things…..

I don't see that anything would be accomplished by arguing, nor do I see that any harm could result from simply disagreeing as to our basic viewpoints.

AGAIN….I think we are NOT disagreeing…. If you say there is NO BIG BANG….. then you are AFFIRMING the title of the first book (Big Bang Never Happened).

I also do not disagree with whatever details you used to arrive at that conclusion….. I am not even saying I agree with the references I pointed out….. all I did was point them out as references for the LAYMAN…. that is people who are not MATH MAGICIANS. But if your math magicians disagree with the math magicians of the books I read but STILL come to the SAME CONCLUSION then all is well.

What you are saying is that there is NO BIG BANG….but your methods for coming to that conclusion are more valid than the ones in the books I read…..OK…. I accept your word for it…..I may even read some stuff that I can understand if you give links to them….THE MORE THE BETTER.

BUT ….BUT…. we are NOT in disagreement…. We both agree that there is NO BIG BANG….. the universe is INFINITE in time and space….. you may define the universe as multiverses or as oscillatory or whatever ….but I define the universe as a HYPERVERSE…. i.e. I expand my definition of the universe to ENCOMPASS all multiverses or all pre-time verses etc.

My universe is INFINITE IN TIME AND SPACE….. and if there are localized “big” bangs or universes creating other universes or multidimentsional realms or whatever ….. my DEFINITION is such that it ENCOMPASSES ALL OF THAT……i.e. the universe (hyperverse) is infinite.

I think you will find that most cosmologist are now in agreement when their theories or definitions are finally aligned with the infinite universe.

 

[Leumas]

No. For a very good reason. God isn't an explanation of anything. "God" tells us absolutely nothing. The God hypothesis does not have any mathmatics in support of it. It offers no explanatory power. It offers no predictive power. It does absolutely nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. Don't know what god is. Don't now what mechanisms god uses. God is the ultimate violation of parsimony.

All you have to suppose god is to attack various hypothesis

Dark Matter that we cannot observe
Singularities that we cannot explain
Something from nothing
Beginning and Ending
Other dimensional REALMS

All have explanatory power. All fit within a hypothetical framework and doing so answers some important questions to solve a number of problems. They help explore various possibilities and they get us to think of ways to falsify them. They may ultimately prove wrong but they are something we can work with.

God? Well, god is the same as magic. Magic is an alterative to god.

I agree.....

What I was referring to is that the big bang left the field tooooo open for God Of Hindsight tricks by the theists. They love the Big Bang because it leaves the question .... what started the big bang and how did matter come from nothing.

Even though the big bang has mathematics in it ....it has LONG lost EMPIRICAL science in the cold.

Just read one of the books I pointed to....the first one is the best..... it explains the HISTORY of the development of the big bang and how time after time its predictions turned out to be wrong and then the mathematicians scrambled to their white boards to see how they can change some constant or introduce some new element etc. etc. just to WARP and CONTORT the theory to accommodate the new data....but only to have any newer data NOT fit still and thus more changes.....

To me that is not science....it is more akin to APOLOGETICS.

Just read any of the books I pointed to and you will see in much more details how that is HISTORICALLY.....I can if you want me to quote some passages.... but if you go on amazon you can read online some pages of the books.

 

[RandFan]

I agree.....

What I was referring to is that the big bang left the field tooooo open for God Of Hindsight tricks by the theists. They love the Big Bang because it leaves the question .... what started the big bang and how did matter come from nothing.

Even though the big bang has mathematics in it ....it has LONG lost EMPIRICAL science in the cold.

Just read one of the books I pointed to....the first one is the best..... it explains the HISTORY of the development of the big bang and how time after time its predictions turned out to be wrong and then the mathematicians scrambled to their white boards to see how they can change some constant or introduce some new element etc. etc. just to WARP and CONTORT the theory to accommodate the new data....but only to have any newer data NOT fit still and thus more changes.....

To me that is not science....it is more akin to APOLOGETICS.

Just read any of the books I pointed to and you will see in much more details how that is HISTORICALLY.....I can if you want me to quote some passages.... but if you go on amazon you can read online some pages of the books.

Thanks. I've read Brief Moment In Time and Elegant Universe. There is no dogma. The experts fight and scream over many different theories. Egos being what they are the prponents of any theory are going to tear down the competition and thats a great thing. But I'm not going to declare that some of the brightest and most gifted phycisists are engaged in some CT to further a descredited idea when many of these peoples are at each others throats.

Red shift, solar wind, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc, all contoversial but in the end science is self correcting. We shouldn't throw anything out so long as experts are working to find an answer.

Otherwise cool

 

[Leumas]

But I'm not going to declare that some of the brightest and most gifted phycisists are engaged in some CT to further a descredited idea when many of these peoples are at each others throats.

No CT....just egos and vested interests (e.g. years of research) tend to make people BIASED towards their cherished notions....even scientists are not immune from APOLOGETICS for their beloved theories.


In some things academia has become a church-like institution.

 

[RandFan]

No CT....just egos and vested interests (e.g. years of research) tend to make people BIASED towards their cherished notions....even scientists are not immune from APOLOGETICS for their beloved theories.

In some things academia has become a church-like institution.

Cool.

 

[DevilsAdvocate]

Even were we to go along with the theists' Kalam argument, or if we were to use the "six numbers" fine-tuning argument, this wouldn't give us a personal God who actually cared, one way or the other, about our existence. I would ask any theist, "Where was this God of your's in 2004, when an earthquake under the Indian Ocean generated a tsunami that claimed the lives of about 230,000 people? And where was this God of your's in 2010, when an earthquake in Haiti, followed by a cholera epidemic resulting from the subsequent break down of infrastructure, took the lives of 300,000 people? In the case of those dying cholera after the quake, a disproportionally high number of them were children.

These two natural disasters alone took the lives of over half a million people. Even if you can prove the existence of some kind of God, what difference does it make? This God of yours presumably could have intervened to prevent these disasters, but chose not to. Why would I want to worship such a God?

This is much where I come from. There is something that caused the big bang, or something that caused the singularity to exist. It is possible to label that “thing” as “God”. But that “thing” or “God” that started the big bang does not have influence in our current life. It may have set things in motion, but it does not have personal emotions on whether or not your cat dies or not. There is no link to such a “thing” or “God” having relevance to our personal desires, or even the way things work in on Earth, or Solar System, or known universe.

If this “thing” or “God” had such influence, anomalies to standard laws of physics should be all around us and observable even at the highest levels. But there is not. Therefore, there CANNOT be an influential God.

This means that the only thing that we know about God is that “God” is the “thing that began everything”. So “God” would only be important if there is another realm for the afterlife. But this cosmology supports no evidence of an afterlife. In fact, the concept of a soul or afterlife doesn’t make sense outside of human fictional desires.

So we end up with “God” which can be described as nothing more than “the thing that started everything”. The two terms are interchangeable. Therefore, there is no need to use the term “God” (which carries all kinds of connotations that are proven to not be real) when we can just use “the thing that started everything”.

Therefore, God does not exist. CANNOT exist.

That is pretty much my main (philosophical) argument for being a “hardcore” atheist who believes that God does not exist and not simply a “we have no proof whether or not God exists” type of atheist.

 

[Leumas]

You dont even accept the premise that distances are expanding

By the way...... regarding expanding distances.

Imagine our CORNER of the Hyperverse is a balloon and expanding. As far as we can discern it is expanding and our limited minds think that the balloon is THE universe.

But what contains the balloon..... where is the universe expanding into.... is there space that it expands into.... what is beyond the boundary of the balloon.....

What contains our expanding universe is the HYPERVERSE and thus the universe we are limited to discerning is only a balloon in a room in the most meaningless nook of the REAL UNIVERSE.

It all is a matter of where we limit your limited mind and thoughts..... I elect to think of INFINITY as EVERYTHING not just our corner of things.

A while back people used to believe that earth was surrounded by a dome with little prick holes in it and some lamps rotating around it.

We discovered the solar system....then the galaxy then the trillions of galaxies.... and we call that the universe.

What if our collections of galaxies is a small little part of a HYPER GALAXY just like our stellar collection is just one of many in a galaxy.

What if our Hyper Galaxy is one of trillion Hyper Galaxies.

Which are in themselves just a small collection in ....... keep going.

Years ago we could not see beyond 10⁹ light years.... we thought that was the age of the universe and it fitted into a mathematical model......now we can see 15x10⁹ light years away and are discovering that at that distance there are hundreds of FULLY FORMED galaxies.... but still think that 15x10⁹ years is the age of the universe because the newly contorted mathematical formula says so..... what hubris.

 

[CurtC]

Imagine our CORNER of the Hyperverse is a balloon and expanding. As far as we can discern it is expanding and our limited minds think that the balloon is THE universe.

What contains our expanding universe is the HYPERVERSE and thus the universe we are limited to discerning is only a balloon in a room in the most meaningless nook of the REAL UNIVERSE.

OK, but that's pretty much consistent with current Big Bang cosmology.

 

[Aepervius]

By the way...... regarding expanding distances.

Imagine our CORNER of the Hyperverse is a balloon and expanding. As far as we can discern it is expanding and our limited minds think that the balloon is THE universe.

But what contains the balloon..... where is the universe expanding into.... is there space that it expands into.... what is beyond the boundary of the balloon.....

What contains our expanding universe is the HYPERVERSE and thus the universe we are limited to discerning is only a balloon in a room in the most meaningless nook of the REAL UNIVERSE.

It all is a matter of where we limit your limited mind and thoughts..... I elect to think of INFINITY as EVERYTHING not just our corner of things.

A while back people used to believe that earth was surrounded by a dome with little prick holes in it and some lamps rotating around it.

We discovered the solar system....then the galaxy then the trillions of galaxies.... and we call that the universe.

What if our collections of galaxies is a small little part of a HYPER GALAXY just like our stellar collection is just one of many in a galaxy.

What if our Hyper Galaxy is one of trillion Hyper Galaxies.

Which are in themselves just a small collection in ....... keep going.

Years ago we could not see beyond 10⁹ light years.... we thought that was the age of the universe and it fitted into a mathematical model......now we can see 15x10⁹ light years away and are discovering that at that distance there are hundreds of FULLY FORMED galaxies.... but still think that 15x10⁹ years is the age of the universe because the newly contorted mathematical formula says so..... what hubris.

If we were seeing fully formed galaxy which could not have been formed by the time we observe them and the 13 or 15 billion year were wrong the mathematical model would be dsicarded or the age presumed of the universe would be revised. The fact we are not observing such contradictory galaxy, and our mathematical model reverting from the expansion and cosmic radiation background tell us the age of the universe is within the correct ballpark, contradict fully your statement.

So please show us observation of "fully formed" galaxy which would show an inflation age older than what we assume today. otherwise I am calling bull on you.

 

[tsig]

So pray tell....how does that differ from what I am advocating....

I have been a big bang opponent ever since I heard of it… my reasons were not from any detailed mathematical of physics facts….though what little I knew did contribute.
My reasons were purely LOGICAL….. it sounded to me utterly theological in its nature…. Ending and beginning with mysteries only understandable by the initiated elites and we just have to accept what they tell us even though it does not make sense for they only hold the keys to the inner circles of knowledge. And whenever new knowledge contradicted them they came out with a new explanation that requires even more FAITH to accept as an explanation.

All the big bang did was to make the universe a god and cosmology a faith and cosmologists holy priests.

By the way….the first book I mentioned expounds greatly on what I say above. It helped me feel BETTER. Because I was starting to feel very bad. I was asking myself....Why am I the only one who rejects the big bang. Are there other people like me out there? Why am I different from all those people who seem to know better? Why am I so arrogant to think that what my teachers tell me is true must be wrong? Am I just stupid? Is there something wrong with me? Am I a freak of nature? Should I end it all?

So you see the book helped me realize that there are other people out there who are A-bigbang-ists. I felt that I can come out of the closet and declare to my teachers that I am an A-Bigbang-ist.

But the newer books also have helped in bolstering even further my A-bibang-ism when I had any agnostic recurrences every now and then. They helped me to stay on the wagon.




Ah….but you ARE responding….. logic?



I have read different books from yours that say the same thing in a different way.....sorry I have not read YOUR stuff.....but since I am not a math conjuror or physics magician I cannot catch the sleight of hand and tricks and science legerdemains that these accomplished con artists can DAZZLE people with.

The best way to DEBUNK a conjuror is to have another accomplished conjuror do it.

So I read books that DEBUNK big bang advocates’ claim to INFALLIBILITY.....sorry they are not the same ones as yours....but they seem to arrive at the same conclusions as yours.

If the books I happened to have read don't interest YOU.... I am sorry.... I apologize for not being at your level.... Most cosmology today is mainly FANTASTICAL conjectures. When the scientists finally arrive at a PROVEN (as far as science can take it) THEORY and most scientists agree….then I might read once and for all to see if I can understand it…. But I fear I will be dead before this happens….

But “I welcome your comments and hope that you will present them to your heart's content”….. I will definitely try to read them …. But you have dismissed the books I mentioned without even having had any look at them …didn't you?

Too lazy to understand the physics of do the math so you reject it?

 

[tsig]

Not true…. But there is a major resistance to alternate theories due to VESTED INTEREST in the mainstream theory and egos etc.….. they tend to not fund or grant chairs for researchers who challenge the NORM….we all know about that in academia.




Now…. where did I say this? A book I pointed to says this…..I don’t say anything…. I have read the books for the normal line and the books that have alternate theories…. Did you?

All I am saying is that the Big Bang is WRONG….which the mainstream theorists are NOW saying is the case…..even black holes are now not REALLY black holes since they emit stuff and will eventually disappear.

Now…what is the CORRECT theory ….I have no idea…. I leave that to the scientists….but so far they have not got a theory …. But a while back they said Big Bang…Singularity…. Beginning …. End….

Now they have changed their minds and are now searching for how to CONTORT the big bang to make it so that there is none of that stuff…..GOOD…. I am not objecting at all….whatever theory they want to have that eventually supports an infinite universe (time and space) one way or another is good with me….. whether it is a modified big bang or some other theory I do not mind at all.

The only thing I can support LOGICALLY is an infinite universe in time and space…… Traditional Big bang violated LOGIC…. Contorted big bang theories are now BEGRUDGINGLY supporting the infinite universe in some way or another….FINE….GREAT.



The second book I pointed to is (I think) 2010….. and since there are no books…. That means that the research is still not at a LAYMAN level (mine).



Write a book….



Now…again…where did I say that? You again ASS U ME things…..




AGAIN….I think we are NOT disagreeing…. If you say there is NO BIG BANG….. then you are AFFIRMING the title of the first book (Big Bang Never Happened).

I also do not disagree with whatever details you used to arrive at that conclusion….. I am not even saying I agree with the references I pointed out….. all I did was point them out as references for the LAYMAN…. that is people who are not MATH MAGICIANS. But if your math magicians disagree with the math magicians of the books I read but STILL come to the SAME CONCLUSION then all is well.

What you are saying is that there is NO BIG BANG….but your methods for coming to that conclusion are more valid than the ones in the books I read…..OK…. I accept your word for it…..I may even read some stuff that I can understand if you give links to them….THE MORE THE BETTER.

BUT ….BUT…. we are NOT in disagreement…. We both agree that there is NO BIG BANG….. the universe is INFINITE in time and space….. you may define the universe as multiverses or as oscillatory or whatever ….but I define the universe as a HYPERVERSE…. i.e. I expand my definition of the universe to ENCOMPASS all multiverses or all pre-time verses etc.

My universe is INFINITE IN TIME AND SPACE….. and if there are localized “big” bangs or universes creating other universes or multidimentsional realms or whatever ….. my DEFINITION is such that it ENCOMPASSES ALL OF THAT……i.e. the universe (hyperverse) is infinite.

I think you will find that most cosmologist are now in agreement when their theories or definitions are finally aligned with the infinite universe.

Well...I'm... glad that ....you are.....right...and everyone....else..is wrong....

 

[tsig]

By the way...... regarding expanding distances.

Imagine our CORNER of the Hyperverse is a balloon and expanding. As far as we can discern it is expanding and our limited minds think that the balloon is THE universe.

But what contains the balloon..... where is the universe expanding into.... is there space that it expands into.... what is beyond the boundary of the balloon.....

What contains our expanding universe is the HYPERVERSE and thus the universe we are limited to discerning is only a balloon in a room in the most meaningless nook of the REAL UNIVERSE.

It all is a matter of where we limit your limited mind and thoughts..... I elect to think of INFINITY as EVERYTHING not just our corner of things.

A while back people used to believe that earth was surrounded by a dome with little prick holes in it and some lamps rotating around it.

We discovered the solar system....then the galaxy then the trillions of galaxies.... and we call that the universe.

What if our collections of galaxies is a small little part of a HYPER GALAXY just like our stellar collection is just one of many in a galaxy.

What if our Hyper Galaxy is one of trillion Hyper Galaxies.

Which are in themselves just a small collection in ....... keep going.

Years ago we could not see beyond 10⁹ light years.... we thought that was the age of the universe and it fitted into a mathematical model......now we can see 15x10⁹ light years away and are discovering that at that distance there are hundreds of FULLY FORMED galaxies.... but still think that 15x10⁹ years is the age of the universe because the newly contorted mathematical formula says so..... what hubris.

Indeed.

 

[punshhh]

By the way...... regarding expanding distances.

Imagine our CORNER of the Hyperverse is a balloon and expanding. As far as we can discern it is expanding and our limited minds think that the balloon is THE universe.

But what contains the balloon..... where is the universe expanding into.... is there space that it expands into.... what is beyond the boundary of the balloon.....

What contains our expanding universe is the HYPERVERSE and thus the universe we are limited to discerning is only a balloon in a room in the most meaningless nook of the REAL UNIVERSE.

It all is a matter of where we limit your limited mind and thoughts..... I elect to think of INFINITY as EVERYTHING not just our corner of things.

A while back people used to believe that earth was surrounded by a dome with little prick holes in it and some lamps rotating around it.

We discovered the solar system....then the galaxy then the trillions of galaxies.... and we call that the universe.

What if our collections of galaxies is a small little part of a HYPER GALAXY just like our stellar collection is just one of many in a galaxy.

What if our Hyper Galaxy is one of trillion Hyper Galaxies.

Which are in themselves just a small collection in ....... keep going.

Years ago we could not see beyond 10⁹ light years.... we thought that was the age of the universe and it fitted into a mathematical model......now we can see 15x10⁹ light years away and are discovering that at that distance there are hundreds of FULLY FORMED galaxies.... but still think that 15x10⁹ years is the age of the universe because the newly contorted mathematical formula says so..... what hubris.

Yes nice idea, I see no way round the infinite universe myself. I quite like the idea that the infinite spacetime is simultaniously infinite in extent and also present in one point and one moment of time. Ie timespace is a projection of that one point.

 

[Leumas]

If we were seeing fully formed galaxy which could not have been formed by the time we observe them and the 13 or 15 billion year were wrong the mathematical model would be dsicarded or the age presumed of the universe would be revised. The fact we are not observing such contradictory galaxy, and our mathematical model reverting from the expansion and cosmic radiation background tell us the age of the universe is within the correct ballpark, contradict fully your statement.

So please show us observation of "fully formed" galaxy which would show an inflation age older than what we assume today. otherwise I am calling bull on you.

Regarding the old galaxies… Here is the research site for the Deep Space observations

http://www.gemini.edu/index.php?q=node/18​

These sites give the information in a bit more layman terms

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...y-are-galaxies-in-the-early-universe-old.html
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblo...rly-universe-appear-old-a-galaxy-classic.html​

In fact the age of the universe as predicted by the Big Bang has been revised several times in the past by re-tweaking the math.

Misconceptions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe#Misconceptions

Many secondary sources have reported a wide variety of incorrect figures for the size of the visible universe. Some of these figures are listed below, with brief descriptions of possible reasons for misconceptions about them.

• 13.7 billion light-years. The age of the universe is estimated to be 13.7 billion years. While it is commonly understood that nothing can accelerate to velocities equal to or greater than that of light, it is a common misconception that the radius of the observable universe must therefore amount to only
• 13.7 billion light-years. This reasoning makes sense only if the universe is the flat spacetime of special relativity; in the real universe, spacetime is highly curved on cosmological scales[citation needed], which means that 3-space (which is roughly flat) is expanding, as evidenced by Hubble's law. Distances obtained as the speed of light multiplied by a cosmological time interval have no direct physical significance.[20]
• 15.8 billion light-years. This is obtained in the same way as the 13.7 billion light year figure, but starting from an incorrect age of the universe which was reported in the popular press in mid-2006.[21][22][23] For an analysis of this claim and the paper that prompted it, see.[24]
• 27.4 billion light-years. This is a diameter obtained from the (incorrect) radius of 13.7 billion light-years.
• 78 billion light-years. This is a lower bound for the diameter of the whole universe (not just the observable part), if we postulate that the universe is finite in size due to its having a nontrivial topology (as discussed in this article), with this lower bound based on the estimated current distance between points that we can see on opposite sides of the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). If the whole universe is smaller than this sphere, then light has had time to circumnavigate it since the big bang, producing multiple images of distant points in the CMBR, which would show up as patterns of repeating circles.[25] Cornish et al. looked for such an effect at scales of up to 24 gigaparsecs (78 billion light years) and failed to find it, and suggested that if they could extend their search to all possible orientations, they would then "be able to exclude the possibility that we live in a universe smaller than 24 Gpc in diameter". The authors also estimated that with "lower noise and higher resolution CMB maps (from WMAP's extended mission and from Planck), we will be able to search for smaller circles and extend the limit to ~28 Gpc."[13] This estimate of the maximum diameter of the CMBR sphere that will be visible in planned experiments corresponds to a radius of 14 gigaparsecs, or around 46 billion light years, about the same as the figure for the radius of the observable universe given in the opening section.
• 156 billion light-years. This figure was obtained by doubling 78 billion light-years on the assumption that it is a radius.[26] Since 78 billion light-years is already a diameter (the original paper by Cornish et al. says 'By extending the search to all possible orientations, we will be able to exclude the possibility that we live in a universe smaller than 24 Gpc in diameter', and 24 Gpc is 78 billion light years),[13] the doubled figure is incorrect. This figure was very widely reported.[26][27][28] A press release from Montana State University – Bozeman, where Cornish works as an astrophysicist, noted the error when discussing a story that had appeared in Discover magazine, saying "Discover mistakenly reported that the universe was 156 billion light-years wide, thinking that 78 billion was the radius of the universe instead of its diameter."[29]
• 180 billion light-years. This estimate accompanied the age estimate of 15.8 billion years in some sources;[30] it was obtained by adding 15% to the figure of 156 billion light years.

History (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_the_universe#History)

The first reasonably accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the Universe, a numerical value now known as the Hubble constant, was made in 1958 by astronomer Allan Sandage.[18] His measured value for the Hubble constant yielded the first good estimate of the age of the Universe, coming very close to the value range generally accepted today.

However Sandage, like Einstein, did not believe his own results at the time of discovery. His value for the age of the Universe was too short to reconcile with the 25 billion year age estimated at that time for the oldest known stars. Sandage and other astronomers repeated these measurements numerous times, attempting to reduce the Hubble constant and thus increase the resulting age for the Universe. Sandage even proposed new theories of cosmogony to explain this discrepancy. This issue was finally resolved by improvements in the theoretical models used for estimating the ages of stars. Presently, using these new models for stellar evolution, the estimated age of the oldest known star is about 13.2 billion years.[19]​

 

[Leumas]

Yes nice idea, I see no way round the infinite universe myself. I quite like the idea that the infinite spacetime is simultaniously infinite in extent and also present in one point and one moment of time. Ie timespace is a projection of that one point.

Yes .....

 

[Leumas]

OK, but that's pretty much consistent with current Big Bang cosmology.

Yes....it is .... but there is the bigger picture.

Imagine if a species that is always born on a full moon and live only for one night to breed and then die.

Imagine if they were to develop a cosmological theory.

To them the moon is ALWAYS full.... one of their species foretold that the moon has cycles. They objected saying that the observations they made do not allow for that hypothesis.


Imagine a species that came into existence on the full moon and to them the passage of 28 days is like an eternity. Generations after generations are born and die in hours.

They have been observing the moon waning and their society decided that the moon is showing signs of going extinct.

One of their species did come out with the idea that perhaps there are moon cycles...but he was quickly laughed away into hiding.


The inflating balloon we are living on IS NOT THE universe.... it is a PART OF the universe.....or Hyperverse if you like.

All our observations and knowledge is but an INSTANT in the life of the INFINITE hyperverse.

Our universe is but a minute chunk of space and time of the infinite universe.

Our observations and knowledge are limited in ALL DIMENSIONS (time and space and others).

Whatever conclusions we draw from them may give us the wrong ideas.

We need to broaden our horizons....even though that might not be possible in actual SPACE and TIME we can nevertheless still do it using our MINDS.

 

[I Am The Scum]

We need to broaden our horizons....even though that might not be possible in actual SPACE and TIME we can nevertheless still do it using our MINDS.

Right on, duuuuuude

 

[punshhh]

Right on, duuuuuude

Yes its time to wake up and take the blinkers off!