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Touching on one point. The expansion of the universe is slowing based on the information gathered. The concept in play currently is that as the universe is spreading from the big bang, it will slow down eventually, then stop, and reverse the order and slowly start pulling back together. In billions of eons or whatever, the process restarts.
 


The bible was written by man and is therefore flawed. Much of the Bible are writings of the apostles to other people or church segments instructing them on what they thought to be the correct process. Only short time after Jesus was killed, the 'church' he built was destroyed and those he taught were killed. Therefore, the Bible is not correct.

Enter the Book of Mormon. The book explains that the Bible is flawed and the that Book of Mormom is there to help fill in blanks. In the Mormon religion, their book is considered the most accurate book (when compared to other scrolls and the Bible).

Man assembled the Bible through writings of those who were supposedly touched by God or called upon. The writings were considered great enough to assemble and put together. When amassed, it tells many stories, teaches lessons, and establishes a society.
 


Ive read the current theory is heat death, since the universe is actually expanding faster. Im more of a proponent of a multiverse theory or superstring.

How do you guys feel about heaven and hell?

I took some latin in HIgh school and I can say first hand what a pain that language is. Its very nuanced especially when tenses change depending on social status or the number of people you are talking too. This is what makes it so hard to translate and capture the original intention.

Can someone expand on these verses?

Deuteronomy 23:1
A man whose testicles have been crushed or whose penis has been cut off must not be admitted to the congregation of Yahweh.

Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

21:29 But if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in, but that he hath killed a man or a woman; the ox shall be stoned, and his owner also shall be put to death.

 
Thats the thing that gets me is I dont think God meant literally if you get you nuts chopped off you cant get into heaven. So what exactly is he trying to say?

Or that if you don't stone adulterers or work on a Sunday its a sin.

The problem I have with Bible interpretations is Some people use it as justification for oppression. For example homosexuals. It does say in the bible something to the effect "A man laying with another man as he lays with a woman is a sin." But no one follows the other obscure rules. You think if this were passed down from God himself he would have expected all of the little rules to be followed. Not just the ones that are socially convenient.
 


That was the theory some decades ago, when cosmologists didn't know how much matter there was in the universe. If it exceeded the critical point, which is where the universe has exactly enough mass-energy in it that it would asymptotically approach the 'steady state' - neither expand nor contract - then the universe would indeed stop expanding and start contracting.

However since then they have found out that the universe is far, far short of the mass & energy needed to achieve the critical point, even including so-called dark matter. So the universe would continue expanding forever, albeit slowing down due to the gravitational attraction of the mass-energy within it.

When you throw in dark energy, which some think is the so-called vacuum energy due to the uncertainty principle, where a particle and its matching anti-particle spontaneously arise in a vacuum then extinguish themselves when they merge back together, the universe is actually accelerating its expansion. Scientists have actually measure this energy using two flat plates suspended in a vacuum, then measuring the forces arising between the two as they vary the distance. Once you subtract out the mutual gravitational attraction, there is a mysterious repulsion found when the plates are extremely close together (in the micron range IIRC). Supposedly that is the distance range in which the particle-antiparticle pair exist before annihilating each other.

The data supporting this dark energy concept comes from measuring red shifts of type-II supernovae (the ones where white dwarf stars accrete mass from a companion star that eventually causes the dwarf star to exceed the Chandresekar mass limit and then explode). This is a so-called standard candle because it doesnt' matter how small the dwarf star is originally - once it gets up to a fairly exact mass limit, it explodes and thus the energy output is about the same for all such instances.

According to Hubble's law, the further away an object is from us, the greater its red-shift - where light is shifted to the red end of the spectrum due to the object receding more rapidly the further it is away. IIRC there as a lot of research going on in the mid-to-late '90s, trying to pin down the Hubble constant, which determines the amount of redshift vs. distance, but until they came up with the idea of using type-II supernovae standard candles, they had to depend on other phenomena such as Wolf-Rayet stars, which have a cyclic variation in brightness that corresponds to their mass. Once you know a star's mass you know its intrinsic brightness, and thus its distance from you by comparing intrinsic to actual brightness.

However Wolf-Rayet stars are only good out to a billion light years or so, since they become too dim to measure beyond that. So a much brighter standard candle was needed; hence the type-II supernovae where the exploding dwarf emits as much light as its entire home galaxy does for a short while. Thus it can be seen as far out as an entire galaxy can - maybe 10 billion light years or so.

Once the data from the new standard candles was obtained, cosmologists found a discrepancy between the expected Hubble constant and the measured values. Stuff that was significantly further away was actually receding much faster than what Hubble's law predicted. Thus the old "linear" expansion theory had to be modified with the exponential dark energy theory about 10 or 11 years ago, to account for the discrepancy. Since the near data pretty much matches both the linear and the exponential theories, this is why it wasn't noticed before. It's only when you get out to really huge distances that the difference grows rapidly.

Alternatively, you might be thinking of the 'brane theory, which is a result of string theory explaining why the gravitational force is so weak (many orders of magnitude compared to the strong & weak nuclear forces and electromagnetic force). Because gravitons are the only force carriers that spread out through the extra dimensions of the universe (either 10 or 11 or 22 IIRC, according to quantum gravity), it is quite diluted in our 3 distance dimensions. So our 4 spacetime dimensions are like a thin membrane spread out over the other dimensions, and only gravity leaking out and permeating these extra dimensions. Thus even with dark energy causing spacetime within our universe to accelerate its expansion, gravity leaking via the other dimensions will eventually cause our membrane - or 'brane - to collide with another one releasing all that leaked gravitational potential energy and causing another big bang.
 


Be aware that the Old and New testaments are different. Also, do not read line by line, but in the context of the whole message.
Read the line before: "Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." and it will provide additional context into what that statement means.

Now, remember, Jesus supposedly came to earth because the Church was wrong in its teachings. He was there to set things correct and fix them. So, taking the old stuff and having it be manipulated resulted in Jesus, God's Son and/or a prophet (since he could speak with God) to correct the Church on earth. That's why Jesus came to earth in a religious context. He came to fix the Church.

Jewish people for example don't see Jesus as the Son of God, but as someone who was teaching the correct way of the Jewish religion. He didn't do anything special, he was only doing what the real Church was supposed to do. Remember, Jews didn't kill Jesus. Roman Catholics killed Jesus.
 
Fazers:

All good and all.. but again I defer that our technology and science is not accurate enough to truly understand this. It was only 3-4 years ago that I was learning of the penrose theory from the person who discovered it herself.
From my limited knowledge based on what she explained, they were able to determine that all stars were moving away from a central point. I recall covering the red shifts to determine the makeup of the planet and all that stuff. Even then, on a closer scale to our milky way and whatnot, planets are moving away from us, not towards us, giving credit to the concept of a central location where things started.

We will never know in our lifetime. But it was interesting to read on your information yet I do find that a bit harder to readily accept as a possibility. It seems something more out of Star Trek with the Universe is Moving, not the planets, etc. Extra dimensions... ehh.

Heck, we still can't figure out gravity, let alone something a billion light years away. But this is how discovery is made through observations, discussions, and the thought process. Much like how different branches and forms of government or religion start.
 
Jesus was a Jew...In fact, he was a Rabbi!

There was severe corruption in the land that the religious leaders took the Law and twisted each and every one of them to manipulate, control, and steal from individuals.

Read up on Jesus in the Temple. Also, there is a chapter in the New Testament, ( one of the the First Four,) that Jesus says He is not to remove the Law, but to fulfill it...or something like that. Give me time to find it.
 
A lot of people get confused by trying to imagine the expansion of the unverse. Often a cosmologist will trot out the "dots on a balloon" idea where you paint dots on a balloon and then watch them move away from each other as you inflate the balloon. But this doesn't really help with the concept of gravity wanting to move those dots closer together, etc.

So another analogy is to think of two boats on a pond. Without any disturbance such as wind or currents, they will just sit there motionless with respect to each other. Now throw in gravity, which is like an infinitely stretchable rubber band, connecting the two, except this is a special rubber band that gets twice as strong as it shrinks to half its length (i.e., the inverse square law attraction). So the boats will slowly start moving towards each other and accelerate the closer they get.

Now imagine an opening on the bottom of the pond where water wells up to the surface, tending to push the boats apart. Now imagine more such openings located every foot along the bottom. The further away the boats are, the greater the volume of water trying to push them apart. This is the analogy to the expansion of space (spacetime) that carries the boats within it. Even though the boats are fighting the current via the gravity rubber band, it is a losing battle because the increasing amount of water pushing them more rapidly apart as the distance between them grows. The more they are separated, the more openings dumping more water into the current pushing them apart.

Finally, to account for dark energy, imagine some nasty little gnome living in a cavern below the pond, turning up the water pressure on each opening and thus increasing the water flow from each one as time goes by. Hence the acceleration is accelerating..

Dunno about you guys, but this idea floats my boat more than dots on a balloon 😀..
 
Right, but the expansion of space is a theory we're grasping onto without really anything readily known to cause it.

As for these 'wells' in space time, what/where are they and/or where is this coming from? I would imagine that at some point enough mass could eventually combine to cause gravity to win over this concept of space expansion.

If the universe has finite amount of mass in space, and all mass can be contained into a section of space.. the empty space outside of the contained mass.. is that expansion, space, existing, or what?

Imagine a water drop hitting the ground in an open area. It splashes out so far. That's the mass. The floor all around it is the space that no mass has entered. Is that still space? Or is that the expansion you refer to? Or are you referring to an entirely new concept that more space is being created within the contained space of mass?
 
Ummm, if one were here on our planet, and all the other stars had gone out, we would never know, simply because the light from those long brunt out stars would still be heading for earth long after the stars death
 


I'm not disputing the big bang theory - the idea that the universe sort of erupted from a central location some 14 billion years ago. However if you read Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" you'll note that the uncertainty principle also applies to the Big Bang, which is why we cannot penetrate further than about the time the universe was a basketball in size, or 10^-43 seconds old, take yer pick 😀. Spacetime is too granular to go beyond that.

However I was also pointing out that scientists have known for a couple decades or so that there is far too little matter in the universe to cause it to recollapse in a "Big Crunch". By observing the motion of stars in a galaxy - their position & velocities - they can infer how much mass there is in that galaxy. Which is also how they came to figure out there was a ton of unseen matter out there. If you take a standard spiral galaxy, the stars should have velocities that drop the further from the center they are, exactly like how the planets in our solar system move more slowly the further out they are according to Newton's law. However observation shows that the stars all move at nearly the same velocity no matter their distance from the center. The only way to explain this would be if the mass of that galaxy was distributed throughout it instead of being concentrated at the center. It's as if the stars are like glowing spots on a large dark wheel of matter slowly rotating, instead of being in orbits around the center of the mass.

Even accounting for this dark matter, the universe suffers from a mass deficit similar to our national debt - ain't no way it's gonna contract back down to zero 😛.

We will never know in our lifetime. But it was interesting to read on your information yet I do find that a bit harder to readily accept as a possibility. It seems something more out of Star Trek with the Universe is Moving, not the planets, etc. Extra dimensions... ehh.
Click to expand...

Read my post on the water welling up from the pond bottom analogy - I find it preferable to the balloon blowing up one. As for the extra dimensions, string theory ties my 'brane up in knots as well 😛. But interesting none the less. IIRC some cosmologist once said string theory was a mathematical exercise in search of a theory 😀.. They only invented it as a way to reconcile Einstein's general theory of relativity (the macro-scale) to quantum theory (nano-scale), in the so-called Grand Unification Theory attempt.

Heck, we still can't figure out gravity, let alone something a billion light years away. But this is how discovery is made through observations, discussions, and the thought process. Much like how different branches and forms of government or religion start.
Click to expand...

Well these theories try to reconcile reproducible observations with the underlying causes. If they manage to make predictions that we can actually check (which pretty much eliminates string theory; hence the comment above), then so much the better. The inflationary theory was proposed by Alan Guth back in the '80s (?) to explain why the cosmic background radiation seems to be almost completely uniform no matter what direction we look. However if it were completely uniform, then matter would have been uniformly dispersed throughout the universe and no galaxies could have formed. So inflation basically takes quantum uncertainties many times smaller that an atom, in that primordial Big Bang basketball, and blows it up on a cosmic scale to the size of galactic clusters spanning billions of light years.

It's really a question on trying to fit all the pieces of evidence together in a cosmic crime scene, and thus reconstruct what happened. So it's CSI - Universe, I guess 😀.
 
So what's your saying with "CSI - Universe," is that if we go back through all the theories, it'll be the 3rd theory that is true? I mean, the first two just throw you off... but the 3rd person is generally the ticket. Or the third does an end around and leads back to the first.

Basically, we figured it out. We just don't know we did it yet. 😀
 


It would be spacetime momentum. Basically its the leftover force of the Big Bang explosion that spewed matter, energy and time and space into the undefined void surrrounding it. The inflationary epoch was just a glitch where some cosmic glitch temporarily sped up the movie by a huge factor. After it ended the expansion continued at its ordinary pace.

People tend to think of the universe as expanding into something - what, they're not sure of. However cosmologists argue there is nothing, no space, no time, no matter and no energy - outside our universe. So once the universe started expanding, there was nothing outside it to impede or slow it down.

As for these 'wells' in space time, what/where are they and/or where is this coming from? I would imagine that at some point enough mass could eventually combine to cause gravity to win over this concept of space expansion.
Click to expand...

Think of a bubble of air suddenly released in outer space. Internal pressure will drive the molecules apart. It will continue to expand forever as it does not have enough mass within it to cause it to collapse again. Remember that gravity varies as the inverse square of the distance between the masses. If the initial velocity is high enough, gravity will drop more rapidly than it can slow down the masses. IOW, the mass has achieved escape velocity.

Spacetime itself does not have mass, so its size is irrelevant. Perhaps the well analogy was flawed since water does have mass. I only brought it up to show how the expansion rate is greater the further apart the objects are, which is the gist of Hubble's law.

If you want to go back to the expanding balloon concept, then two dots on the surface that are relatively close together, won't show as much separation velocity as two dots that are spaced a wide distance apart. In the latter case, there is just more of the expanding balloon between the two of them, hence they separate at a faster speed than the closer dots. If the first two dots are one inch apart, and you blow the balloon up to twice its original size, the two dots are then two inches apart. However two dots that are two inches apart are now 4 inches apart - IOW they moved twice the distance relative to each other as the first two dots in the same amount of time. Therefore their relative velocity must necessarily have been twice the relative velocity of the first two dots.

This is why I don't like the balloon analogy - drives me dotty 😀..

If the universe has finite amount of mass in space, and all mass can be contained into a section of space.. the empty space outside of the contained mass.. is that expansion, space, existing, or what?
Click to expand...

Spacetime is defined by mass - without mass you would not have spacetime. While the actual mass & energy within the universe has spread out to a distance necessarily less or equal to the age of the universe (approx. 14 billion years) multiplied by the speed of light (no mass can travel at, or exceed, the speed of light, and light itself always travels at the speed of light), spacetime is not so limited, due to inflation. While I mentioned spacetime as expanding by a factor of 1 followed by a thousand zeroes previously, there are other estimates as low as 10^78. Which means that the known mass in the universe would occupy a very tiny portion of spacetime. I read somewhere that there are approximately 10^85 atoms in the universe, so think of the known universe as being about 10^7 atoms - about as much space as a mote of dust - compared to the cosmos extending some 14 billion light years. And that is the lowest estimate of the size of spacetime.

Imagine a water drop hitting the ground in an open area. It splashes out so far. That's the mass. The floor all around it is the space that no mass has entered. Is that still space? Or is that the expansion you refer to? Or are you referring to an entirely new concept that more space is being created within the contained space of mass?
Click to expand...

See, you're still thinking that the universe has to expand into something. Cosmologists argue there is no "floor" for the water drop to splash onto. It is certainly not "space" since space itself requires matter to be inside it. Without matter (or energy - according to Einstein's E = MC^2 the two are interchangeable), there is no "space".

I know - a hard concept to wrap one's mind around. Speaking of which, I'm off to wrap mine around a cold brewski 😀 Cheers!
 


OK, one last post before it's Miller time (not that I'd drink that stuff 😛). Science is generally refining existing theories to fit new data, as our instruments and observations improve. Of course the observations improve thanks to better theories as well - sort of a hand-to-hand assist I guess.

About the only theory that I know of that has pretty much withstood a hundred years of increasingly refined observations would be the special and general theories of relativity, by the incomparable Albert Einstein. This is why he is considered the quintessential theorist. While other theories such as the Newtonian laws of motion or theory of gravity stood up for several hundred years, back then observations were quite primitive (i.el, sitting under an apple tree waiting for a observational event to occur 😀) and improvements progressed at a snail's pace compared today. So my guess is that on an equal scale, Einstein's theories have stood up maybe 10 times longer than Newton's, and they are still confirmed today. About the only thing that could be on the horizon would be the GUT theory to harmonize quantum physics with relativity, and so far progress has been pretty slow. But any GUT would have to accomodate the predictions made by Einstein's theories exactly, since that is what the latest observations continue to prove.

So it's pretty rare that scientists toss out a theory completely and start over. The last such time I can think of was when the Copernicaen heliocentric theory replaced the Ptolemaic theory that the Earth was the center of the universe. Refined astronomical observations required Ptolemaic theory to add celestial spheres upon spheres to accomodate the retrograde behavior of the outer planets as they supposedly orbited the stationary Earth. Copernicus correctly theorized that the Earth and planets orbited the Sun, and so the outer planets appeared to stop and then move backwards for a bit in the night sky as the Earth caught up then passed them in relative orbital position around the sun.

Unless some new observations re-support an older or modified theory, there would be no reason to go back to them. Science is all about constructing a theory, making predictions from the theory, observing what actually happens, then modifying the theory to accomodate the predictions. So hopefully it is a process that gradually zeroes in on the truth, assuming there is one. Some theorists now theorize there is no possible accomodation between quantum mechanics and relativity. Basically they are saying there are two equally correct theories of the universe - one for the exceedingly small and the other for the enormously large. If that is true, most unsatisfactory since we all would like a nice, tidy fundamental truth about everything 😀.
 
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