Has Geocentrism become less popular?

[AV1611VET]

The people who claim to take it literally are also the folks who say "but what that really means is..." the most. I'll start a thread on that in GT if you'd like.

Absolutely!

 

[Mark Quayle]

While of course we are literally the observers, so that redshift is relative to us (naturally the only possible kind of 'redshift' is that relative to a point of observation), the standard conception is that anywhere else -- any location in the Universe -- would also see the same degree of redshift of distant galaxies (the same proportionality: the degree of redshift relative to distance) alike to what we see from our point of observation. Does that clear up the question? (if you'd like to hear how astronomers figured out the relation between degree of redshift and distance, that's an interesting topic, and it begins with just pure trigonometry for nearby objects like nearby stars and then progresses from that to next using a ladder of standard objects that have known brightness so that their apparent brightness indicates their distance)

I got off on a tangent (about the speed of light) in an earlier response to this. What I had intended to get at, is what has always seemed strange to me:

When I hear, "Big Bang", or whatever other description they have for it, the expansion is said to be from a single point in space, (yet, they talk about there wasn't really space at that point, nor time 'before' that, etc.) but whatever, when I hear other things they say, I hear them talk as if it happened 'over there a ways', and intuitively, I think, "There is material also going that direction, and at angles compared to us, up-down-left-right". When I drop a stone in the dust, I can see where the stone hit, even if I don't see the stone itself, by the directions the dust goes. When I see an explosion, I see where the center of the damage is by the ejecta flying off. Admittedly, I don't comprehend the fancy talk, about how there were no dimensions or whatever they say there. I have pretty well given up trying to understand.

My question is: Why can't we tell where it happened, and how close we are to that spot, and what direction objects are traveling relative to that spot, by observation? (I can easily understand why something ejected at above half the speed of light going the opposite direction from what we are going at above half the speed of light is, relative to us, departing at more than the speed of light, and thus, invisible to us. I can speculate, too, that in the small amount of time we have been able to observe and measure arc, and compare one body with another, there may not have been enough motion at the huge distances we observe, to see something moving at, say, right angles to ourselves, sufficiently for numbers to be accumulated to show 'where they came from'.)

 

[Ophiolite]

My question is: Why can't we tell where it happened, and how close we are to that spot, and what direction objects are traveling relative to that spot, by observation?

It happened where you are standing right now and over here where I am sitting and at the top of Olympus Mons on Mars and on the planets revolving around Alpha Centauri and in the middle (and the edge) of the Andromeda galaxy. I could could go on for megaparsecs, but you get the drift.

 

[Halbhh]

I got off on a tangent (about the speed of light) in an earlier response to this. What I had intended to get at, is what has always seemed strange to me:

When I hear, "Big Bang", or whatever other description they have for it, the expansion is said to be from a single point in space, (yet, they talk about there wasn't really space at that point, nor time 'before' that, etc.) but whatever, when I hear other things they say, I hear them talk as if it happened 'over there a ways', and intuitively, I think, "There is material also going that direction, and at angles compared to us, up-down-left-right". When I drop a stone in the dust, I can see where the stone hit, even if I don't see the stone itself, by the directions the dust goes. When I see an explosion, I see where the center of the damage is by the ejecta flying off. Admittedly, I don't comprehend the fancy talk, about how there were no dimensions or whatever they say there. I have pretty well given up trying to understand.

My question is: Why can't we tell where it happened, and how close we are to that spot, and what direction objects are traveling relative to that spot, by observation? (I can easily understand why something ejected at above half the speed of light going the opposite direction from what we are going at above half the speed of light is, relative to us, departing at more than the speed of light, and thus, invisible to us. I can speculate, too, that in the small amount of time we have been able to observe and measure arc, and compare one body with another, there may not have been enough motion at the huge distances we observe, to see something moving at, say, right angles to ourselves, sufficiently for numbers to be accumulated to show 'where they came from'.)

I think a well written article will be better than just our wordings, so here are a couple:

With more details:

Where did the Big Bang happen?

Close your eyes and imagine the Big Bang. That first moment, where all the energy, matter and light came into existence. It's an explosion right? Fire, debris, sinks, marmots and anvils flying past the camera in an ever expanding cloud of hot gas.

phys.org

or very short:

Where was the Big Bang located?

The commonest misconception about the Big Bang is that it happened at some particular spot in preexisting empty space.

skyandtelescope.org

 

[Mark Quayle]

It happened where you are standing right now and over here where I am sitting and at the top of Olympus Mons on Mars and on the planets revolving around Alpha Centauri and in the middle (and the edge) of the Andromeda galaxy. I could could go on for megaparsecs, but you get the drift.

"drift" —am I detecting a pun there?

 

[Mark Quayle]

I think a well written article will be better than just our wordings, so here are a couple:

With more details:

Where did the Big Bang happen?

Close your eyes and imagine the Big Bang. That first moment, where all the energy, matter and light came into existence. It's an explosion right? Fire, debris, sinks, marmots and anvils flying past the camera in an ever expanding cloud of hot gas.

phys.org

or very short:

Where was the Big Bang located?

The commonest misconception about the Big Bang is that it happened at some particular spot in preexisting empty space.

skyandtelescope.org

Read them, and thanks, but nope. Still doesn't make sense to me. Too many objections.

What kind of "space" is it, that is stretching? Does it have outer limits? Or is that circular to imagine? I don't get it.

 

[Shemjaza]

Read them, and thanks, but nope. Still doesn't make sense to me. Too many objections.

What kind of "space" is it, that is stretching? Does it have outer limits? Or is that circular to imagine? I don't get it.

As an analogy think of a 2 dimensional space on the surface of a balloon.

Two things on the surface very slowly moving away from each other will get a lot further than they moved due to the balloon inflating.

Now imagine trying to define where the balloon started inflating from using coordinates on the surface... it's impossible.

It's consistent with what we know about space for the universe to be finite but unbounded, but the 3d space of the universe is expanding in a higher dimension.

We have evidence for this kind of phenomenon when we examine that mass literally distorts the structure of space.

 

[Mark Quayle]

As an analogy think of a 2 dimensional space on the surface of a balloon.

Two things on the surface very slowly moving away from each other will get a lot further than they moved due to the balloon inflating.

Now imagine trying to define where the balloon started inflating from using coordinates on the surface... it's impossible.

It's consistent with what we know about space for the universe to be finite but unbounded, but the 3d space of the universe is expanding in a higher dimension.

We have evidence for this kind of phenomenon when we examine that mass literally distorts the structure of space.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Yes, the link used that analogy of the balloon expanding. But it doesn't work for me. It is not impossible to tell where the center-point in the expansion in the balloon is, by looking at the surface. The center point isn't on the surface.

You, and others, and the links, liken our understanding of the universe to someone who only sees the surface of the balloon, and cannot conceive of the 3d shape of the balloon. I get that. What I don't get is WHY believe that there are more physical dimensions to the physical size and shape of the universe than the 3d that we are familiar with. I am unable to just take everyone's word for it. It doesn't make sense to me.

 

[Shemjaza]

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Yes, the link used that analogy of the balloon expanding. But it doesn't work for me. It is not impossible to tell where the center-point in the expansion in the balloon is, by looking at the surface. The center point isn't on the surface.

You, and others, and the links, liken our understanding of the universe to someone who only sees the surface of the balloon, and cannot conceive of the 3d shape of the balloon. I get that. What I don't get is WHY believe that there are more physical dimensions to the physical size and shape of the universe than the 3d that we are familiar with. I am unable to just take everyone's word for it. It doesn't make sense to me.

General relativity predicts the curvature of space time through higher dimensions as a consequence of gravity and extreme relative velocity.

But as I said we can actually detect this happening when we need to account for relativistic effects from satellites and planets in our Solar system and we can directly visualise the effect when we analyse the distortion around black holes and galactic clusters.

 

[Ophiolite]

"drift" —am I detecting a pun there?

Absolutely! I often do that, especially when I am in an expansive mood.

 

[Halbhh]

Thanks for taking the time to answer. Yes, the link used that analogy of the balloon expanding. But it doesn't work for me. It is not impossible to tell where the center-point in the expansion in the balloon is, by looking at the surface. The center point isn't on the surface.

You, and others, and the links, liken our understanding of the universe to someone who only sees the surface of the balloon, and cannot conceive of the 3d shape of the balloon. I get that. What I don't get is WHY believe that there are more physical dimensions to the physical size and shape of the universe than the 3d that we are familiar with. I am unable to just take everyone's word for it. It doesn't make sense to me.

Sorry, I was sorta busy, and was looking for an easy already written web page to make it more clear without me having to try . So, in a nutshell (and I'm not suggesting this is going to be clear, but it might be...), in either case of a 'closed Universe' where if you have time enough and you emit a laser beam in any direction from any location, then it would eventually 'curve' back around (traveling along a straight line) to arrive at the same location where it came from (as I once thought way back in the late 70s/early 80s was as likely as not...but then space began later to seem more likely 'flat' (but even that isn't yet set in stone...)) or in the case of a 'flat Universe' (no curvature built into the Universe as a whole), where the laser beam would just continue out infinitely into the distance, never coming back near it's starting point -- in either of these 2 situations of the curvature of the Universe -- there's no edge. In the case of the flat Universe, the photons could (if not hitting anything) continue forever outward towards infinity (that's not any edge anywhere), and in the case of the closed Universe, they would curve in time back around to where they came from, and space would have no 'edge' anywhere in that case either. There are perhaps better ways to explain, and you've already heard a couple of above about stretching space, and the analogy to the surface of an expanding balloon as like the expansion of space that is currently happening, which also helps show how there's no boundary/edge to that space (the balloon surface 2 D analog to actual space in our Universe is edgeless).

But there is a seeming edge (to an observer; caused by the finite speed of light), and perhaps that will help (even if it doesn't answer all the questions), so here's a nice web page about that. (it might help to know that currently the predominate viewpoint is that space is flat, and therefore can be infinite in extent in any direction)

Does the Universe have an edge?

What is outside the Universe? Does such a question even make sense?

www.skyatnightmagazine.com

There's probably a better web page to offer more explanation in another wording, and I don't mind looking more, and may later, but this one was ok, and better than 4 others I glanced at for this topic.
Actually, I enjoy doing that kind of thing. Here's another article Is there anything beyond the universe?
....I can see a few more articles of interest already. Instead of tacking them onto this post, I'll make a new one in a while.

 

[Halbhh]

Asking where is the center of the Universe (or where did the big bang start, etc.) is very much like asking where the edge of the Universe is, in that if it has an edge, there will be a center also....
Here's an article talking about what I tried to explain above, but in another wording and with helpful editing I bet.

Where is the edge of the universe?​

We may never know.
By Eric Betz | Published: Tuesday, November 10, 2020
RELATED TOPICS: ASTROPHYSICS

Jay Smith
When Galileo Galilei pointed his first telescope to the heavens in 1610, he discovered “congeries of innumerable stars” hidden in the band of light called the Milky Way. Our cosmos grew exponentially that day. Roughly three centuries later, the cosmic bounds exploded once again when astronomers built telescopes big enough to show the Milky Way is just one of many “island universes.” Soon they learned the universe was expanding, too, with galaxies retreating from each other at ever-accelerating speeds.

Since then, ever-larger telescopes have shown the observable universe spans an incomprehensible 92 billion light-years across and contains perhaps 2 trillion galaxies. And yet, astronomers are still left wondering how much more universe is out there, beyond what they observe.

“The universe has always been slightly larger than what we can see,” says Virginia Trimble of the University of California, Irvine, an astronomer and expert in the field’s history.


Building bigger telescopes won’t help extend the cosmos anymore. “Telescopes only observe the observable. You can’t see back in time further than the age of the universe,” explains Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist John Mather of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who’s also chief scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope. “So we are totally limited. We’ve already seen as far as you could possibly imagine.” At the edge, we see the leftover glow from the Big Bang — the so-called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB). But this isn’t some magical edge of the universe. Our cosmos keeps going. We just may never know how far.

In recent decades, cosmologists have tried to solve this mystery by first determining the universe’s shape, like the ancient Greek mathematician Eratosthenes calculating Earth’s size using simple trigonometry. In theory, our universe can have one of three possible shapes, each one dependent on the curvature of space itself: saddle shaped (negative curvature), spherical (positive curvature) or flat (no curvature).
(continues....)

Where is the edge of the universe?

We may never know.

astronomy.com

 

[Jude1:3Contendforthefaith]

Check out this thread :

Geocentric Early Church Writer Quotes

The Devil uses wicked people to try and convince and deceive The Church into believing that we are nothing but evolved monkeys flying through space on a giant spinning rock around the sun. The Lord Literally left Us The Bible and a bunch of writings from The Early Church to show us that we are...

www.christianforums.com

 

[Gene2memE]

The Geocentrists and Flat Earthers migrated en-mass to that which shall not be named (starting with Q) during 2018 to 2019.

Plus, some social media platforms have gradually tweaked their algorithms to stop amplifying geocentrism, flat earth, anti-vax, race-realism and other psuedo-science content.

Geocentrists were always a minority compared to the Flat Earthers. But hey, at least they're not Hollow Earthers, right?

 

[Mark Quayle]

The Geocentrists and Flat Earthers migrated en-mass to that which shall not be named (starting with Q) during 2018 to 2019.

Plus, some social media platforms have gradually tweaked their algorithms to stop amplifying geocentrism, flat earth, anti-vax, race-realism and other psuedo-science content.

Geocentrists were always a minority compared to the Flat Earthers. But hey, at least they're not Hollow Earthers, right?

It isn't exactly logical to group anti-vaxers with the rest of these you mention. Most of us who don't trust Government —particularly when government becomes adamant about what doesn't quite make sense— are not Hollow Earthers, Flat Earthers, Geocentrists, racists nor pseudo-scientists. I don't hang with Q, though I do enjoy my anonymity. Gov, or someone else, may already know who I am, but I like to pretend they don't. (I really don't think they suppose me a threat worth paying attention to.)

 

[Halbhh]

Check out this thread :

Geocentric Early Church Writer Quotes

The Devil uses wicked people to try and convince and deceive The Church into believing that we are nothing but evolved monkeys flying through space on a giant spinning rock around the sun. The Lord Literally left Us The Bible and a bunch of writings from The Early Church to show us that we are...

www.christianforums.com

God is even more amazing and able than we easily imagine, creating a vast cosmos just to give us an even more "good" home, so that we can look up in the night sky and wonder and awe at the work of God.

See? The world as it is, a magnificent globe, and the universe ('the heavens' above us) are so amazing and awe inspiring. But God can do that -- He is able! That's His design, His plan, His creation, up there!

 

[Gene2memE]

It isn't exactly logical to group anti-vaxers with the rest of these you mention.

Actually, it is. A substantial overlap has been demonstrated between the anti-vax crowd and those who are inclined to embrace other psuedo-science conspiracy theories. The Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle, but the circles have a high degree of interpenetration.

Not only that, there is a two way street between the belief sets: those who have anti-vax beliefs are then more likely over time to embrace as range of other conspiracy or fringe beliefs, and those who embrace other conspiracy or fringe beliefs are more likely to go on and become anti-vax. Colloquially, this is known as 'Crank Magnetism'.

This isn't about trusting 'The Government' or not (unless you think that recorded medical science since before 1800 has been manipulated). It's about not amplifying psuedo-science content, of which anti-vax is just one portion.

 

[Mark Quayle]

Actually, it is. A substantial overlap has been demonstrated between the anti-vax crowd and those who are inclined to embrace other psuedo-science conspiracy theories. The Venn diagram isn't a perfect circle, but the circles have a high degree of interpenetration.

Not only that, there is a two way street between the belief sets: those who have anti-vax beliefs are then more likely over time to embrace as range of other conspiracy or fringe beliefs, and those who embrace other conspiracy or fringe beliefs are more likely to go on and become anti-vax. Colloquially, this is known as 'Crank Magnetism'.

This isn't about trusting 'The Government' or not (unless you think that recorded medical science since before 1800 has been manipulated). It's about not amplifying psuedo-science content, of which anti-vax is just one portion.

Let me put it another way. It may be logical to consider [most] pseudo science conspiracy theorists to be anti-vaxxers, but it would be a mistake to consider [most] anti-vaxxers to be pseudo science conspiracy theorists.

 

[Gene2memE]

Let me put it another way. It may be logical to consider [most] pseudo science conspiracy theorists to be anti-vaxxers, but it would be a mistake to consider [most] anti-vaxxers to be pseudo science conspiracy theorists.

Anti-vaxx is a pseudo science conspiracy theory, ergo....

 

[Jude1:3Contendforthefaith]

lol they had "the vax" ready in like 2 months after Covid appeared.

Vaccines are supposed to take 10 years in clinical trials.