Current Theory of Cosmology

[dmill1220]

I agree Dragon!
a very tricky subect indeed! and can be a very explosive one at that!
Let me explain why I said this!
We see, smell, hear, or Feel everything , our brains can only process Info with these input devices,
I do understand Relativity, and can see were youre going with this, but remember this, its an important concept!
since we are limited just by our senses alone, what else could we be missing? Our concept of time and understanding of relativity is one enriched, or made possible, by our physical senses and, observations, Mathematics, and logical deductions or verified experiments right?

Can we be so sure that we have all of the physical senses or tools necessary, to see all there is to observe? I am sure that we don't, our own science has proven that to us already! things that we have discovered by means that our senses could not show us, this leaves an interesting Paradox in what we observe around us. one such example out of many others is, dark energy!

When I finally see a grand unified theory of everything, its still possible that we may still be missing part of the picture.
I try to look at things in a different perspective simply because the eye and, our senses, can fool us, or leave something out that is actually there but we are just not built to comprehend or see it.
Please understand that I am in no way refuting what Einstein has layed down, Im just trying to express that there can be alot more possibilities due to our limited senses. no one can have all the answers if all of the input devices are not in place for proper processing.

My statement of time comes from this line of reasoning, and its only a speculative opinion. I did not intend to start a heated debate!
Dennis

[dmill1220]

There seems to be opinions from string theory advocates according to Dr. Edward Witten, About Space and Time being Illusions.
I find this to be quite a bold statement from a theoretical Science that has yet to be proven, and is not very well understood.The article can be found in Astronomy Magazine online.
Here we go again with yet another opinion on where String theory is going and its implications. here is a quote from this article,
Quote:A: Many physicists have suggested that such seemingly intuitive concepts as "space" and "time" might be illusions — that they may be approximations of something deeper. What does string theory say?

EW: It does very much look, in the context of string theory, that space and time are approximations that are good for ordinary purposes. If you have a human-size distance, like three meters, or a human-size time period, like … five seconds, time is a good notion and space is a good notion. But when you get down to very, very tiny levels — even below the subatomic level — it looks like our ordinary notions of space and time break down. We don't really understand what's behind space-time — it's probably tied up with the fact that we don't yet understand the basic ideas that string theory is based on :end Quote.

Oh boy what a big can of worms! Does anyone really believe in such a speculative theory? IS there a War on current accepted theories?
Im not sure what to believe in myself. since it is purely Hypothetical at Least, and the statement that we really dont know whats behind Space and Time is also included in this Statement .
Dennis

[Blue Fire]

Dmill1220, this reminds me of the age-old debate involving Relationist theories that Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz argued for. The following is from Brian Green's The Fabric Of The Cosmos.

... Leibniz, who was Newton's contemporary, firmly believed that space does not exist in any conventional sense. Talk of space, he claimed, is nothing more than an easy and convenient way of encoding where things are relative to one another. Without the objects in space, Leibniz declared, space itself has no independent meaning or existence. Think of the English asphabet. It provides an order for twenty-six letteres - it provides relations such as a is next to b, d is six letters before j, x is three letters after u, and so on. But without the letters, the alphabet has no meaning - it has no "supra-letter," independent existence. Instead, the alphabet comes into being with the letters whose lexicographic relations it supplies. Leibniz claimed that the same is tre for space: Space has no meaning beyond providing the natural language for discusssing the relationship between on object's location and another. According to Leibniz, if all object were removed from space -- if space were completely empty -- it would be as meaningless as an alphabet that's missing its letters.

As I understand it, this view is still currently held by some, and may even be enoying a come-back, of a sort, with the expansion of ideas like the Holographic principle wherein what you and I experience, sense, detect, measure, etc. is merely illusion and that there is some bounding entity that is producing all those effects with some kind of holographic process. The question seems to boil down to whether space and time actually exist in and of themselves - whether spacetime is a 'something' or a 'nothing'. And whether space is absolute or 'relative'. Other theories currently popular seem to be heading in the direction that space may be absolute, in a sense returning to the idea behind the aether of space that was proposed so long ago and then discarded as quite invalid by the time Einstein came along.

Admittedly, I haven't studied this kind of stuff to be any kind of expert on it, but it is interesting nonetheless to me.

[dmill1220]

An Excellent Point Blue!
I too, am fascinated with this subject.
I would like to speed things up about 200 years or so and see where we are then,
Can you point me to the fountain of youth? LOL!
I wish we could speed things up a bit, my curiosity is killing me!
But haste makes waste and good science is a slow exacting process!
I would love to compare what we discover in the future, to all of these competing theories!
Dennis

[Dragon Star]

Originally Posted by dmill1220

Can you point me to the fountain of youth? LOL!

I hear that an overdose of Cyanide has a very similar effect...

...but don't take my word for it.

[dmill1220]

Thats Nice Dragon!
Very Funny! and probably true!
LMAO!
Dennis