A really big question

[BeyondKnowledge]

Nobody is sure, Astyanax, but there is no "outside" for light to escape into.

I you are asking how fast the most distant observable regions are moving away down to cosmic expansion.

I think it is estimated to be around 3 times the speed of light...

I question the expansion simply because the distant objects being measured are billions of years in the past. It took that long for the light to get here so the measurements are really out of date.

[BeyondKnowledge]

Oh, I see. Is that why so many Christian philosophers – Thomas Aquinas, John Scotus, St Anselm, Calvin, the list goes on – have presented proofs of God’s existence?

Frankly, I don’t believe you have any idea what other people think. You are sui generis.
 

And yet you keep making dogmatic statements as if you were the Pope. Do you remember my first words to you on this thread? Go back and read them.
 

Yes, to try to identify the reasoning behind these absurd dogmatic statements you keep on making. God exists, God is this, God is that, Astyanax is this, Astyanax is that, Astyanax’s idea of rock ’n’ roll is this, blah blah blah.

Ever since the beginning of our conversation I have been trying, so far without success, to find an excuse for your behaviour apart from ‘clueless young egotist shooting his mouth off.’ Care to help me with my quest?
 

Then say so, instead of pontificating your ‘thoughts’ as if they were eternal truths. Not one person, apart from you, is making metaphysical statements on this thread without explaining how they arrived at them.
 

Oh, really. Well, we’re just having fun here. And when I need your help seeing for myself, O Wise One, I’ll ask you. I’m sure I speak for others on the thread as well when I say this.

I get you now. You are one of those that take things like religion too seriously. You feel threatened by ideas you don't agree with.  At least you try to reason and not just lash out.

Please don't bring up the pope, that is another evil entirely unto itself.

[chr0naut]

Correct, and it works both ways. You can make a black hole out of a mass of 1mg.
 

Incorrect. There is no specific mass at which objects turn into singularities. 
 

Yes, the Schwarzchild radius, at which escape velocity reaches the speed of light.
 

Are you sure, Andy? Is it possible for light to escape the Universe?

How fast is the boundary of the Universe expanding? 
 

*     *     *

By moving backwards in time. Consider the nature of spacetime. Either it is a continuum along which physical objects move or change timewise or it is a ‘block universe’ in which past, present and future (as we perceive them) are incorporated within the configuration space of all possible formations of itself. In the first case, there is no going back and the God into which the universe has evolved does not exist in any configuration of the Universe itself. God is time-limited and irrelevant, helpless to alter His own past, because it is already vanished beyond recall. In this model the Universe is uncreated and there is no God except at its terminus.

Yes, operation within the universe, by whatever rules of the universe, binds everything to a fixed trajectory forward or backwards in time (and space), but God is not bound by the ruleset.

A God external to the universe can both create, and operate within, a 'block universe', because they would not being bound by its ruleset. God can be in superposition with a 'block universe'.

The second case is more interesting. In this one, time as we know it is just an illusion of perspective. We are temporal beings who have no control over our movements through the configuration space, but God, being all-powerful, could move at will; or to put it another way, God could inhabit only the configurations in which He is evolving towards omniscience and omnipotence. So in this case, yes, He would be able to, so to speak, evolve himself. At least, that is what it would look like from our timebound perspective.
 
See above.

For us, yes of course. But ‘with God all things are possible’; surely this should include the painstaking inversion of His route through configuration space, with every physical variable retracing its original path?

Surely God could unbreak a cup, or unscramble an egg?

God could make the cup and the egg anew, from scratch, or could erase the breakage from existence, or simply unbreak things by putting the pieces back together. I rather like the Japanese art of Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold to make something even more beautiful and valuable out of something mundane that was broken, and I imagine that would also be a very Godlike way of doing things - to make beauty from brokenness - with nothing wasted!

Er, no. You have forgotten the Lorentz equations.

The Lorentz transformation refers to the mathematics of calculating relative values between different reference frames. From any single reference frame, of any observer, however, "c" is always 299,792,458 m/s. So, one second equates to a set distance; 299,792,458 meters.

Stated otherwise, "wibbly-wobbly, spacey-wacey and timey-wimy"!
 

Yes, the caveat is essential. I find the first quoted sentence a little presumptuous; not offensively so, but clearly based on the limits of human understanding.

One can only try to the limit of their ability.

The observation that God can’t be miraculous to Himself is a platitude; He couldn’t be God without complete self-understanding. But doesn’t this observation also support the hypothesis that God is in fact the Universe, as BeyondKnowledge asserts?

Theologically, mathematically and scientifically, the observed matter universe is assumed to be finite. The redshift, the cosmic microwave background, stellar nucleosynthesis and the abundance of light elements, the absence of a massively bright hot sky, and many other things argue for a start to the universe we observe. A progression through time from some sort of initial point.

If God was the prime mover behind all spacetimes, in all multiverses, God could not be emergent and by necessity must be atemporal, because time itself has no separate meaning without all the other stuff, which appears finite.

If God achieved total temporal control at any stage, or at any stage existed outside of time, then God would not 'arise'. God would simply be, forever in the past, forever in the future. Completely atemporal.

Regardless of what we might conceive of as some sort of incremental origin story, an atemporal God does not have to arise, because the same is already at the end of time and at the beginning of time. A temporal 'arising' with a preexistent instance becomes a schism to itself, an always increasing population who keep replicating into atemporality - infinitely (because from an atemporal perspective, the universe is always reaching its terminus, as it is always beginning) - Pop, another God, pop and another, pop and another, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop...

I must read Spinoza closely one of these days. Maybe he’s more convincing on the subject than Liebniz.

Are the philosophers necessarily the go-to experts?

Everyone is only sensing their part of the elephant.

[Randyvine]

They tried to pin a couple on it, but they failed. Long live rock ’n’ roll!
 

*     *    *

I think this is probably what Randy meant:
[Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJQf-gcG-g4]

Lovc David Bowie RIP my Brother. An extreme talent you were.

I'm astonished at what you fine members have done with this question.
It all reads stunningly.

[BeyondKnowledge]

Lovc David Bowie RIP my Brother. An extreme talent you were.

I'm astonished at what you fine members have done with this question.
It all reads stunningly.

So it is like Suicide is Painless from M*A*S*H. It is actually an anti suicide song. I will have to add it to my collection.

[Astyanax]

Nobody is sure, Astyanax, but there is no "outside" for light to escape into.

If you're asking how fast the most distant observable regions are moving away down to cosmic expansion.

I think it is estimated to be around 3 times the speed of light...

Yes, indeed. Now consider this paradox.

The cosmic boundary is, as you say, expanding faster than light. But the cosmic boundary is in fact light – what else could it be? In the (imaginary) frame of reference of an object at the cosmic boundary, the wavefront of expansion would still be travelling at the speed of light, because nothing in the universe can go any faster.

But no such frame of reference can be postulated. Every spot in the cosmos is actually its centre. This is the reason why some physicists (Stephen Hawking was one) like to say the Universe is finite but boundaryless. If the cosmos is boundaryless, there is nothing to stop anything extending beyond it. But that extension merely expands the Universe, so the answer to ‘what’s outside the Universe’ effectively becomes ‘the Universe’.

The calculated spatial expansion of the Universe is, as you say, surperluminal, but to a photon, ‘escaping the Universe’ and ‘expanding the Universe’ are one and the same thing. This is the point I want to make.
 

*     *     *

I rather like the Japanese art of Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold to make something even more beautiful and valuable out of something mundane that was broken, and I imagine that would also be a very Godlike way of doing things - to make beauty from brokenness - with nothing wasted!

This is a very Christian metaphor, but of course you know that. Only the Peoples of the Book regard the world and humanity as broken and in need of repair. The cosmos might be riddled with misery, death and disease in other traditions, but it’s still exactly as it was meant to be. To quote the Tangerine Antichrist, ‘it is what it is.’
 

From any single reference frame, of any observer, however, "c" is always 299,792,458 m/s. So, one second equates to a set distance; 299,792,458 meters.

Ah, but how long exactly is that metre, again? Depends on how fast it’s going, doesn’t it?
 

Are the philosophers necessarily the go-to experts?

Oh yes. Surely you don’t think we should ask physicists about ontology?

And it’s no bloody use asking a theologian about anything...

[BeyondKnowledge]

Is the universe expanding? 

Facts: 

The objects in the visable universe are observed to go faster away from us the farther away they are.

The objects being observed and measured are being measured as they were a long time ago. This is because of the speed of light over the distance. 

Questions:

As the objects move faster away in the past and slower the nearer they are, does this not indicate a slowing of the expansion? As the cumulative effect of gravity over time is slowing everything. 

Does this slowing possibly indicate a cyclical universe? 

Or possiblely this is evidence of the residual motion from the big bang and everything observed is just beginning to achieve more stable motions with each other? The initial expansion becomeing more orbital in nature rather than continuing to expand.

Could they have over thought the whole expansion of the universe by missimg the fact we are not measuring the universe as it is now but very long in the past?

Has anyone ran a simulation of the universe as it would be if light were instantaneous based on objects in the farthest reaches of observations? Where is everything and how is it all moving right now?


Sorry, I can't provide aspirin as I think some are going to get headaches from thinking through this.