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Mystery surrounds universe's rate of expansion


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  • The title was changed to Mystery surrounds universe's rate of expansion

I have been pondering about the acceleration of universal expansion for a long time. And I don't buy dark energy. It just doesn't make sense.

My best guess is that something new is pushing the old stuff. This new stuff could be made from quantum fluctuation.
I suspect that the new stuff is unique and large in size, but it could also be smaller occurrences in multiple places.

Edited by sci-nerd
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I think that the assumption that the speed of light has been constant since the time of the early universe might be wrong, and that they might be getting erroneous results for the rate of expansion in the distant universe because of that.

Edited by fred_mc
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1 hour ago, UM-Bot said:

Scientists have discovered discrepancies in our understanding of how fast the universe is expanding.

First choice is try to make sense of it that is consistent with everything we already know.  Second choice is back up to where we got it wrong and try again.

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If more distant expansion is slower than nearby expansion, since the farther away we observe we're looking back in time, doesn't this mean that in the past the expansion was slower than it is now? 

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58 minutes ago, StarMountainKid said:

If more distant expansion is slower than nearby expansion, since the farther away we observe we're looking back in time, doesn't this mean that in the past the expansion was slower than it is now? 

Yeah, that's the conundrum. Why's it speeding up?

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Dark matter is measurable and therefore provable, but dark energy is more difficult to measure and more difficult to prove, but it is most likely real because of the observed effects. I believe that dark matter and dark energy is the hidden world where our spirits go. Because it actually makes sense. How else do you explain a MASSIVE universe full of stuff located right in your face, but out of touch, invisible. I was a skeptic, but then I saw a spirit that was standing right in front of me dissapear before my eyes and now I am a firm believer. Don't criticize it, just open your mind to the POSSIBILTY of it. Because, what else could it be?

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13 minutes ago, Hazzardpro said:

Dark matter is measurable and therefore provable

No it isn't. We can see the effect of what we assume is dark matter, but it has never been directly detected.

Dark matter and energy are "ghosts" in the sense that we see the effects, but we can't detect or measure them.

Edited by sci-nerd
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16 minutes ago, sci-nerd said:

Yeah, that's the conundrum. Why's it speeding up?

As space expands, there is more space to expand. 

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3 minutes ago, StarMountainKid said:

As space expands, there is more space to expand. 

Our universe currently has two sets of rules:

The big: Relativity
The small: Quantum mechanics

Your proposal fits none of them, the way I see it. Or you need to elaborate further.

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12 minutes ago, sci-nerd said:

Our universe currently has two sets of rules:

The big: Relativity
The small: Quantum mechanics

Your proposal fits none of them, the way I see it. Or you need to elaborate further.

If dark energy causes space itself to expand, there becomes more space to expand. Nobody knows. 

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I just had an epiphany.

What if it's not dark energy but bright energy?

What if light itself accelerates the universe? Photons!

Think about it! A photon leaves an atom at 300.000 km/h. That's alot of power!

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2 hours ago, Hazzardpro said:

Dark matter is measurable and therefore provable, but dark energy is more difficult to measure and more difficult to prove, but it is most likely real because of the observed effects. I believe that dark matter and dark energy is the hidden world where our spirits go. Because it actually makes sense. How else do you explain a MASSIVE universe full of stuff located right in your face, but out of touch, invisible. I was a skeptic, but then I saw a spirit that was standing right in front of me dissapear before my eyes and now I am a firm believer. Don't criticize it, just open your mind to the POSSIBILTY of it. Because, what else could it be?

The universe expands as consciousness expands and you cannot see consciousness. We can say that there is more consciousness now than there was in the early universe and thus explain what we observe. In the quantum state, an act of observation makes something certain (real), hence demonstrating that matter (the universe) is affected by a human mind.  Is it such a stretch to believe this happens on the largest scales? More souls=more evolution=more curiosity=more expansion.

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7 hours ago, Hazzardpro said:

Dark matter is measurable and therefore provable, but dark energy is more difficult to measure and more difficult to prove, but it is most likely real because of the observed effects. I believe that dark matter and dark energy is the hidden world where our spirits go. Because it actually makes sense. How else do you explain a MASSIVE universe full of stuff located right in your face, but out of touch, invisible. I was a skeptic, but then I saw a spirit that was standing right in front of me dissapear before my eyes and now I am a firm believer. Don't criticize it, just open your mind to the POSSIBILTY of it. Because, what else could it be?

 

6 hours ago, sci-nerd said:

I just had an epiphany.

What if it's not dark energy but bright energy?

What if light itself accelerates the universe? Photons!

Think about it! A photon leaves an atom at 300.000 km/h. That's alot of power!

 

5 hours ago, thelion318 said:

The universe expands as consciousness expands and you cannot see consciousness. We can say that there is more consciousness now than there was in the early universe and thus explain what we observe. In the quantum state, an act of observation makes something certain (real), hence demonstrating that matter (the universe) is affected by a human mind.  Is it such a stretch to believe this happens on the largest scales? More souls=more evolution=more curiosity=more expansion.

I really like all of these ideas. The first is something ive said before.  The part about light expanding visible space makes a lot of sense. 

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I still think that Dark Matter and Dark Energy is the astrophysics version of Archaeology's Ritual Object. ie: it means they don't know what it is, so they make up a vague label/placeholder for it.

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9 hours ago, Hazzardpro said:

Because, what else could it be?

Just because you personally cant think of what else it could be doesn't mean your idea is the only thing that it could possibly be.

It just means you have an astonishingly limited imagination. ;)

Edited by Torchwood
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7 hours ago, thelion318 said:

 Is it such a stretch to believe this happens on the largest scales? More souls=more evolution=more curiosity=more expansion.

Yes it is. A few billion tiny little brains that are barely able to comprehend the visible universe have no impact on the movement of the stars....how would we even measure curiosity anyway, and if it exerts a force powerful enough to push the damn stars apart how come its not leveling buildings and mountains on Earth?  My 3 rabbits are incredibly curious about everything they encounter and yet I've never come home from work to find the forces exerted by their curiosity have destroyed the continent. 

Also the expansion of the universe predates the rise of consciousness by about 10 billion years...

 

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With our Universe having a calculated age of 13.7 Billion years ago, why not a hundred trillion years ago?

Or, say, yesterday?

Or, in the future?

Why at THAT time as opposed to so many other's?

Reality is seriously mysterious.

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It's an acceptance without even the remotest causation logic.

Sleep well...

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9 hours ago, sci-nerd said:

Yeah, that's the conundrum. Why's it speeding up?

But earlier measurements have also shown that the rate of expansion is speeding up. Therefore, I don't quite understand how this new measurement is a surprise, isn't it consistent with what has measured before?

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It appears to me that the only reasonable explanation as to this unusual cosmological discrepancy is that time is an illusion and that everything has happened all-at-once in multi-dimensions... and are intimately connected in ways that we do not understand.

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9 hours ago, Hazzardpro said:

Dark matter is measurable and therefore provable, but dark energy is more difficult to measure and more difficult to prove, but it is most likely real because of the observed effects. I believe that dark matter and dark energy is the hidden world where our spirits go. Because it actually makes sense. How else do you explain a MASSIVE universe full of stuff located right in your face, but out of touch, invisible. I was a skeptic, but then I saw a spirit that was standing right in front of me dissapear before my eyes and now I am a firm believer. Don't criticize it, just open your mind to the POSSIBILTY of it. Because, what else could it be?

I've also been thinking that dark matter might be the spirit world. Dark energy, however, is something I suspect might be a mis-conception that goes away as we gain more knowledge. I've read about other explanation models where there is no need for dark energy although I don't remember the details right now (my own thought is that the speed of light might have slowed down since the early universe and that we are therefore measuring incorrectly). I believe dark matter to be something real though. 

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I remember reading a an encyclopedia printed in the 1920's that said Aether acted as a medium for light and radio waves in the vaccum of space. I'm now wondering if the stuff is there after all, its so fine its undetectable using modern equipment, and due the immense distance from these far away places it creates enough friction to slow it down, resulting in a lower wavelength and a red shift, which in itself is buried in the redshift from an object moving away from us. Same stuff would condense to energy in the form of heat should enough of the of space become compressed, compressed further energy becomes matter and droplets of matter condense out of space itself in the form of atomic particles I believe. A similar if not identical process occurred in what's called the big bang. I feel the question about that is not what caused the explosion, but why the volume space itself occupies became larger.

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12 minutes ago, cyclopes500 said:

I remember reading a an encyclopedia printed in the 1920's that said Aether acted as a medium for light and radio waves in the vaccum of space. I'm now wondering if the stuff is there after all, its so fine its undetectable using modern equipment, and due the immense distance from these far away places it creates enough friction to slow it down, resulting in a lower wavelength and a red shift, which in itself is buried in the redshift from an object moving away from us. Same stuff would condense to energy in the form of heat should enough of the of space become compressed, compressed further energy becomes matter and droplets of matter condense out of space itself in the form of atomic particles I believe. A similar if not identical process occurred in what's called the big bang. I feel the question about that is not what caused the explosion, but why the volume space itself occupies became larger.

Could be ! But then.. you'd have to re-write Special Relativity ? 

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