First Light Issue

Philosophy Forums Science, Technology, and Math
1

I’ve been increasingly stumped every sense I read the last essay in Giorgio Agamben’s little work ‘What is a Apparatus’… though I did know of the confusion in my own mind well before it, his assumptions brought it into the forlight of consternation. I know someone on this site expressed somewhat similar views to what I am about to express, but none the less, my questions are many, and geometrical concerning this article here, and it’s assumption ‘first light’ can be captured:

bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18006933

  1. Assuming the Big Bang Hypothesis is true, we the line below being E for Earth, B for Bang Epicenter, and F for ‘fucking far’

E—B—F

the universe expanding

E----B----F
E-----B-----F
E------B------F

as such… I understand the hope is seeing light someone along the B-F spectrum, and date that.

E------B----O-F

With O being the oldest point technologically detectible. Now, I am assuming for whatever reason you can’t see though B exactly, hub of the wheel issue, or black hole, or white holes, or alien assholes or something is cock blocking it, so it’s not quite E-B-O were looking at but a a angle of E-O a few above B. I don’t know if there is some triangularion going on or not here, or some bad ass mapping and mathematics… again, the essay by Giorgio assuming the light is traveling through the universe and is just naturally red shifting without obstruction without reference to relativity or B spot phenomena everywhere else stands suspicious to me, but whatever.

So… where the hell are they expecting this first light phenomena to come from? Cause first light to me would always be BEYOND F… and it has nothing to bounce off of. This is of course assuming light can travel in a true void of space, or rather non-space. F might represent a non-phenomena of physics well beyond even quantum assumptions where light cannot spread because the preconditions for light are rooted in B’s explosion and is bound and thus relative to it, in the same way pond scum is bound by the limitations of the edge of the pond… it can’t spread beyond it’s source, but hypothetically, one could trace back via the growth and discernible deposition of the pond scum the origin of the pond scum’s original generation point.

It seems to me if we lived all on a cell of a microbe in this pond happily in out microuniverse, our scientist scientist would all have their telescopes aimed at the shore to figure out… where in the pond the scum began… which seems ironic and damn silly to me, as it clearly didn’t begin there. Trying to find ‘first scum’ would be a laughable enterprise to me. We would only see it via a tangent around the B point, and that tangent would be a tangent that diverged from it’s B to F line to reach us otherwise.

Whole thing seems rather fishy to me. But I openly admit my ignorance. These people convinced people on two continents to drop billions on this telescope, and I am not inherently opposed to it, quite open to more pictures in fact. At some point though, we gotta admit we’re dealing with some funny geometry though, and the stuff just isn’t making any sense.

(I recognize the flaw in assuming we can’t see through B, but I have reasons for this. It may well be that B isn’t detectable or even the center of the universe anymore despite being it’s origin, we may be living in a asymmetric universe)

2

My first thought was that you really should get a little more sleep before asking such questions. But then, from what I can surmise of what you probably intended to ask…

A) They are supposedly looking for objects that display (via light) the oldest that they could find.
B) Their theory is that light does reflect off of the outer void, “background radiation”.
C) In the midst of a global economic crisis, people still believe that governments spend $100,000,000 looking for the possibility of a very old spec of light billions of light years away. But then why else would you want a giant camera floating in orbit that would justify spending so much of other people’s money.

I couldn’t discern what you were trying to say concerning “looking through B”.

In addition, I feel compelled to mention that the entire BB theory is becoming ever more dubious. Each of the reasons they used to compose the idea have been explained by far more sensible theories.

3

I find myself doubting the big bang theory more and more each day.

The bounceback of background radiation? No… we have instruments that can do that already, and you can’t call that first light… as we don’t bloody fucking know what that ‘bounce back’ would do. We get Camera Obscura from a little hole in a wall, I can’t imagine what’s happening from a radiation bounceback… one thing I am fairly certain of, the image isn’t gonna maintain itself and just reverse and show up a backwards upside down version of the ancient universe. Light changes it’s characteristics just from bouncing off my pale ass… I suspect something is going on to disrupt it at the edge?

Yes, I know the dent theory of the universe, how we have 4-7 dents in the universe from background radiation. Maybe, or maybe not. Those dents could be more localized/closer phenomena as well. All we have to measure this stuff is light shift and in close objects gravitation leap frogging… and we lack good calculations for showing what’s doing what farther out. We’re just hoping this red shift thing is accurate enough to assume what’s the oldest objects are… but this is assuming far means oldest. Goes back to the questionibility of the big bang and symmetry.

I know this and I support this enough… I like the pretty pictures and speculation as much as the next guy.

I doubt this… if they do assume it, they are tarded in the brain for the camera obscura reasons stated above. The microwave background radiation doesn’t just ‘maintain’ a image of the big bang, the shit’s all scattered. We assume it’s showing us the limits of the universe. But were guessing here. It seems a safe bet, but it’s a largely unchallenged one, and such assumptions have a horrible track record in physics.

Looking through the epicenter of the big bang. If it occured, then our universe, be it symmetrical or asymmetrical, has a epicenter. If it does… I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s as difficult as looking through a star or a galaxy core. I have my doubts it’s going to stay in one spot though, it would likely act like a vortex and everything would come out all wobbly and the geometrical center wouldn’t be the aggregate mass center of the universe, much as the polar north pole isn’t the magnetic one. They likely are looking at a angle away from it. To look right through it would perhaps be the longest length in the universe in our perspective to the other side. However, we don’t know, even if the camera obscura bounceback issue is solved, if the farthest light’s length has bounced back. Those dents we’re seeing might just be local walls in our universe… much as a mosque wall with the tessellations

The whole thing seems like a scam in some ways, and I think Hawkings at times sounds like a idiot when I read his books in his assumptions (my favorite being his doubting two dimensional life could exist… did he like, not read Flatland as a child?). There are so many variables… but this is a scam I support anyway… cause I like the pictures. I don’t like the dating of the universe thing trying to trace everything though the big bang though. Think it’s rather foolish. At least the US didn’t blow all that money on the Higgs-Boson Collider in Switzerland though. I swear, aliens are going to bomb the fuck out of it because it’s messing with their wireless reception or something dramatic but in the big scheme of things insignificant and inconsequential. We blow craploads of money on stupid stuff like this, when all we needed was more rigorous philosophical discipline in pushing assumptions and lazy acceptance of ideas unto the precipice.

4

The real point in such “scams” is just as it was with going to the Moon. The profit involves the technological development that the people would not have been willing to directly pay for (especially when it involves huge cameras over head to be used for… well… whatever overhead cameras are used for by governments).

They are doing the same thing regarding the search for the mystical graviton. Hundreds of billions of dollars spent in many countries searching for something that doesn’t exist and even if it did, holds no promise for any technological progress of any kind. But what it does do, is pay for extreme technology involving ultra sensitive photon receptors of various types used in surveillance.

5

Contra-Nietzsche,

You have some misconceptions about what the Big Bang theory is.

First, there are two separate theories to consider. The first theory, and by far the most well supported by the evidence, is that the universe as we know it is expanding and its ultimate history is a hot, dense state. This is what the vast majority of cosmologists mean when they talk about the Big Bang theory. I will follow convention and call this the standard cosmological model.

The second theory is that the universe began with a specific event. There is speculation about this, but not good evidence. I will not talk about this theory in the following.

In the standard cosmological model, there is no point of origin. The expansion of the universe happens, essentially, everywhere. Galactic mass prevents expansion within galaxies and within some larger collections as well.

In the history of the standard cosmological model, the particles as we know them formed in the early hot, dense universe. The interactions in this universe prevented the formation of atomic nuclei of great size and it prevented light from going very far before it ran into something. Eventually, the universe got thin enough so that light could travel without hitting things: the light from this time is the background radiation. We cannot see anything earlier than this time (with photons) because photons from before this time no longer exist because they collided with other particles and were absorbed.

After the release of the background radiation, it took a while for the material of the universe to coalesce into stars. The light from these stars is what the James Webb telescope is looking for. Finding this light is important for confirming that the standard cosmological model is correct and for fixing the details of the model. How long it took for stars to form and ignite depends on the density of the universe and some other details about its contents.

No serious cosmologist thinks that any light bounces off some “outer void”. I doubt any serious cosmologist believes in any sort of “outer void”.

6

The Big Bang theory is different than the expanding universe theory. But both seem to be lacking in evidence.

7

Yes, the “Big Bang theory” has no scientific evidence, and therefore is a religious conjecture. I knew this decades ago…

Atheists and “agnostics” who believe in science, actually believe in a religion without even realizing it.

There is no “evidence” for the “Big Bang”. It is yet another jewchristian interpretation of Christian Creationism. The “Big Bang” is the atheistic, satanic version of the Big Bang…Creation without a “Creator”.

It is causation without cause. It’s pretty stupid, if you want my opinion.

8

When scientists talk in public and they use the words “Big Bang”, 99% of the time, they are talking about a specific model (or set of models) for the expanding universe.

One has to be pretty obtuse, really, really obtuse, to deny the evidence for an expanding universe. Or, like many of the mentally ill people on the internet, one can simply be totally ignorant of the nature of the science and comment on it anyway.

9

No Astrophysicist could counter even MY arguments against the idea of either the BB or an expanding universe. I am not making a claim one way or another on the subject, except that real Science has not shown substantial evidence either way.

10

I find it hard to believe that an astrophysicist has found anything you say worth replying to. Given that you display extreme ignorance of the nature of the field, you seem to be in the “not even wrong” category of commenter. Seriously, when you say that, ‘Their theory is that light does reflect off of the outer void, “background radiation”,’ you are talking about some kind of personal fantasy about the science.

11

The BIG BANG! you men and your sexual connotations, huh :slight_smile:

So where would the raw materials for it have come from? and what was containing them if there was no universe to speak of before the Big Bang (tee hee hee) occurred?

Us existing is a weird phenomena in itself, let alone a whole universe beyond that, and for what reason… we are but parosites.

12

Who but the mind of Magsj would have associated the Big Bang with a sexual event? :open_mouth:
It makes one wonder what kind of parties she’s been hosting. :confused:
{{…and how to get an invitation.}} :shifty:

13

The raw material is always there and is probably infinite, its probably energy [though I think its other things too] and wasn’t contained if infinite. Forms of energy simply emerge from it, maybe there is a time when they appear at once and we get a big bang, I assume so, prior to that there was another universe which probably formed into a collection of black holes, which ultimately lead to one super-duper massive black hole, all the energy is thus collected into one place then bang! …its cyclic and it’s a continuum.

Sorry it’s a bit more tantric than one would think ~ there is no ‘single’ big bang, just one prolonged orgasm. :wink:

14

Close enough.

And not any one location or single event at one time. Think “raindrops hitting the surface of the ocean” and “our known universe” is merely one splash.

15

I struggle with the possibility of multiverse, thinking metaphorically, if God/reality had to ‘conceive’ itself and its centre in comparison to the infinite, there would be a singular result.
Its one universe for me.

16

There was no beginning, thus no “centre”.

17

If BB then when that forms there would be a centre even if it is not ‘the’ centre.

Centre or no, reality still have to conceive itself as the sets of relationships e.g. between universe and infinity, and as per dimension curvature, inner and outer etc.

Someone ones told me that, everywhere is the centre, I havent quite figured that out yet, apart from imagining that if I were at point a, then the universe would be size x, if I were at any other point it would still be x.

18

Only to that particular “universe” within the infinite number of them.

“conceive itself”?? :confusion-scratchheadyellow:
The universe, being infinite, can have no center. There can be no center to an infinite line, yet every point is in the middle.

19

Impossible, but that’s another thread. {& I got an infinite lump of iron here to prove it :stuck_out_tongue: }

As one thing would need to relate to another.
If reality was a cabinet, its contents would need to fit in there.
How does one contrast a singularity or a universe to infinity? Why wouldn’t the energy dissipate into the infinite void?

20

Nope, light from this time wouldn’t be background radiation. This is what I noted in the chart… the Big Bang location- the supposed epicenter- would of blocked all that light. Believe it or not you’re actually following the logic of the schematics I presented and don’t realize it. This is one of the reasons why I said we’re looking for a tangent AROUND the big bang’s epicenter, and that it wouldn’t qualify as first light, as it’s bouncing off something else, causing a weird triangulation, and a misshappen view of the universe if the BB Theory is correct.

Which is likely already happening… we’re already discussing ‘dents’ in the universe, having found a few from that said background radiation.

At this point, I think the first light issue is fundamentally void and silly. It’s either bouncing off the edge in some theories (which isn’t my theory… no one gave me a radio telescope play around with and theorize, I got this from studies and theories such as this: news.nationalgeographic.com/news … microwave/ )

I won’t militantly pressure you one way or another though… cause you’re just one of many, and at this point, one idea is as good as another. As I said, I like the pretty pictures we get… so whatever the excuse to send up telescopes, be it for the big bang, or to make James happy by having Hubble spy on him when he’s i the shower. Whatever floats your boat.