RE: The Universe: Now, ✨Ten Times Bigger!✨
Interesting post!
I think you might be misunderstanding the usage of the term universe in the papers you are talking about. When we are making estimations about the number of galaxies, the number of particles (a fascinating and mind-boggling calculation) or anything about the size of our universe, we are not talking about the whole universe that exists. In that cases we are referring to the observable universe. We actually don't know if the whole universe that expands beyond the edge of what we can observe is finite or infinite. An extrapolation of what we see in the observable universe seems to suggest that it is indeed infinite, so the number of worlds in habitable zones must then be an infinite number too.
What seems to limits how much of the universe we can observe is the fact that the universe is not ageless. It seems to have started to exists at some point, so there is a limit to the age of the light that can reach us. Since light travels at a constant speed, this limits the furthest regions of the universe that we can see since light that started from places that are too far hasn't had the time to reach us yet. So in that sense, not only is space-time expanding, but so is the observable universe as with every second that passes from the beginning of the universe, more and more light will have had enough time to reach us so we can observe it.
So the observable universe is not really talking about the whole universe that exists, but the arguably arbitrary portion of the universe that is possible for us to see and somehow measure.
Hello, Dave. I do quite well understand that the estimates are the "observable universe." I realize that our knowledge is quite limited, and in fact that what we "know" about our universe is often largely speculative and based on the hypotheses we develop based on what we can observe.
Many of those hypotheses are driven by philosophical presupposition. I've written about this before, and mentioned one of the theoreticians whose presuppositions are similar to mine, Dr. Russel Humphries. Have you read any of his thoughts about the evidence for a shell-like arrangement of galaxies based on red-shift data?
Thanks for your comments.
Sure. I guess I didn't word the preface to my comment very well as I thought the "might" in there would be enough to convey that I'm not sure about how you used the term and my guess was noting more than a hunch. It was probably better to ask or to not mention it, instead of sharing that hunch at all as it adds no value to the discussion. I'm quite unhappy now when I reread my comment since it does sound condescending, so I'd like to apologize for that. I'm not really sure what I was really thinking there, seems I was on a bit of a bad roll yesterday :/
The reason I mentioned the observable universe is that the property you were referring to in your post doesn't really have bearing on an infinite universe. Even if the universe has 10 times the density compared to what we previously though, it would still be infinite. I guess, I would have been much better off just sharing this though without the rest of the ramblings...
I don't think that's the case. Can you point me to such presuppositions? I can see Dr. Humphries making presuppositions (like the Earth is 6000 years old) and trying to make the data fit that explanation. I have to say there is quite a lot of evidence that he is indeed patently wrong as his theories are widely inconsistent with all kinds of data that we have. The piles of evidence that the Earth's age is in the billions of years are really overwhelming and I would find it quite surprising if you wanted to argue young Earth creationism.
Real scientists do not presuppose, they come up with a hypothesis and test it (try to falsify it with empirical data). The idea for the Big Bang was not an idea somebody had which they tried to justify with data. It's an idea that came about after somebody came up with an astounding result that was independently verified, continues to be reliable and repeatable and that actually turned our ideas about the universe on their head. You have to ask yourself why red-shift quantization hasn't done the same so far. My explanation is that it hasn't managed to actually present any significant results.
I'd like to point you to the most recent study about that with the largest sample size I've found [link]. Keeping in mind the mind-boggling number of galaxies we can observe (the Hubble telescope found thousands of those in its first hour of operation looking at a single patch of dark sky), this study decided on a sample of 250. The last sentence of their abstract is "The formal confidence levels associated with these results are extremely high." Keeping in mind the sample size and the actual amount of data we have access to, this claim is patently ridiculous. The other study I found was looking at 78 galaxies...
Keep in mind that crunching the numbers for a much larger sample size would not be a difficult task with modern computing power. If those "scientist" really cared about real inquiry into truth, they would have already crunched the data for at least a decent sample sizes and if they were correct in their hypothesis, they would have already collected their Nobel Prizes after justifying their claims properly. So far all of this looks like simple cherry-picking.