Thread: Time expanding with space?

According to the Big Bang space is expanding and all that we see is expanding with it correct? Also time and space are intertwined somehow (I can't as of yet grasp exactly how but I'm sure I will in the future.) which then leads me to theorize that time itself is expanding along with space.

Now if time were expanding along with space is it possible that the galaxies in the Universe coudl actually not be speeding up due to some unknown form of energy? Could it just be an optical ilusion to us as a result of the expansion of time?

If you wish to understand time/space, you will need the following items:

A pen.

A piece of paper.

Actually, a few pieces of paper.

A pair of scissors.

A box of straws.

A balloon.

Actually, a package of balloons.

The cardboard inside of a roll of paper towels.

A bottle of blowing bubbles.

With those things, I can show you time, space, and that which we call the universe...if you are interested.

You can let me know.

I didn;t say I wish to understand it. I'm reading a book right now that I'm fairly certain you all have heard of called A Brief History of Time which deals with these sorts of things. I'd rather you comment onthe topic rather than one single line in brackets.

i think it was hubble that used the balloon analogy to describe how space expands and how expanding space affects objects like galaxies. inflate a balloon and place many dots on it (use a sharpe marker) inflate it more and you will notice the distance between all the dots increase proportionately in all directions. Inflate it again and the same occurs. That is the way our universe expands.

How would the expansion of the universe affect objects traveling through space. One would assume you cannot only travel through space but rather would be thaveling through space while it is expanding.

How does that affect time. Space expands at rates faster than light. Lets say a probe is traveling 25k mps. through space. In 10 years it should travel approx. 7,888,000,000,000 miles. In 10 years, how much would space expand along its route? Combine it? How far would the probe actually travel in terms of distance to return to the probes origin? What is the affect of time on that probe?

Bumfluff, we don’t yet have a theory of time. However, there are some other things that we do know. The universe is expanding but, the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces are not expanding along with the universe. Thus, the measurement for a second is derived from the action of these forces:
“Under the International System of Units, the second is currently defined as the duration of 9 192 631 770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom.”

The second could also be derived from the speed of light or the fall of an object in positive gravity. If time ‘expanded’, this measure would change and we would have noticed it change. So your last two questions don’t apply.

Space isn’t expanding faster than the speed of light…yet. (It did during inflation.) A meter stick, the Earth, and our local group of galaxies are still held together by mutual gravity. So Alpha Centauri won’t race away from your space probe. However, if dark energy continues to grow ever stronger, then in about fifty billion years it will exceed the strong force and all atoms will fly apart. At that point, time may become irrelevant.

one more thing... my rambling thoughts...

if the universe is like an expanding balloon, it could be said to be finite in size at any particular moment in time. on the other hand, it may be said to have infinite potential to expand. i think hawking said if the universe is infinite and has no end, it is likely it had no beginning and no creation factor of any kind or type.

if the universe had no beginning, time must have existed before the BB or maybe the BBT is wrong but in any event, time always existed.

The problem with the BBT is that it doesn’t tell us what ‘banged’, or how or even why. M theory says that extra dimensional branes of energy collided at an infinite number of points creating a ‘multiverse’. For this to happen, time may be ‘multiversal’.

Originally Posted by ajg624

if the universe had no beginning, time must have existed before the BB or maybe the BBT is wrong but in any event, time always existed.

Nobody can say definitively what time is at the moment. If it is nothing more than a abstract concept, then time before the big bang did exist from our point of view (otherwise there would be no before). If it is some kind of dimension or have physical properties then it would have been created during the big bang, and therefor not have existed before.

Originally Posted by Arch2008

The universe is expanding but, the forces of gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces are not expanding along with the universe.

A meter stick, the Earth, and our local group of galaxies are still held together by mutual gravity.

So a meter stick is not expanding; only "space" in the very extraterrestrial sense is expanding? See, when I read "balloon" I imagine the dots growing larger.

The best way to conceive it, is to compare the universe to a ball of cookie dough with the galaxies being raisins in the dough. As the dough expands, the raisins get farther apart, but they don’t expand too.

much evidence exists pointing to the BBT as true and correct. ya know what, the more one thinks about it the more it seems too simple of a solution. obviously not a scientist, but when i first became interested in the BBT, i pictured this massive explosion (BANG/ZOOM) emminating from a tiny miniscule atom sized particle. impossible to understand, comprehend or even imagine.

from what i read since, the "bang" portion of the BBT may be a bit misleading. As it were the BBT is not an onomatopoeia but rather a term that describes the expansion of space and not the explosion of space. somehow i begin to think about stretch armstrong.

there is a point to this rambling on... maybe we just dont understand the physical properties of space well enough to devise a theory better than the BBT. assumming a singularity existed before the expansion makes sense to me because it would mean there is no space to expand. once the singularity divides, presto, space exists. maybe one of the properties of space that we cannot understand is that space naturally expands and this process may be looked at as some type of force (a 5th force) unrelated to the forces we now know. A force of its own. One that does not require outside energy to expand (dark energy). The idea of it all doesnt seem too strange. no space, no expansion, space, yes expansion. it seems like a natural conclusion. It's more difficult to imagine space not expanding than of it expanding freely. what could there be to possibly stop it from expanding.

as for the pre BB why cant we say the singularity was always there and then one moment or a less than a second of time moment, it divided and began to expand.

thinking outside of the box, what existed before space? the BBT assumes the singularity existed and constisted of an unimanginable amount of compressed matter down to the size of a teeny weeny particle. KaBoom!

But...

i think about space expanding... what does it expand into? nothing right. what if before space existed there was nothing. ok - we would have to call it something. again, what does space expand into. must be something right. age old debate i know.

suppose there was nothing at one time and this nothing has certain properties we cannot imagine. what if its natural process is to create something out of nothing? if this were possible, it would be impossible to understand because we do not have any of this nothing to experment with. we should know this "nothing" exists because it is what space expands into. maybe as space expancs into "nothing" it has a cause and effect on the "nothing" maybe as our universe expands it is creating something in the nothing it is expanding into.

Originally Posted by Arch2008

The best way to conceive it, is to compare the universe to a ball of cookie dough with the galaxies being raisins in the dough. As the dough expands, the raisins get farther apart, but they don’t expand too.

Expansion's selective penchant for open dough and not bits of dough between clustered raisins must be puzzling.

I buy scientific magazines every now and then as I'm sure quite a few of you do as well. Recently there has been a book advertised in almost every one of these scientific magazines called somethign like Introducing Null Physics. In the brief summary of it they include the theory that black holes actually have a limit to how massive they can get. If this si true then what happens when one of these singularities excedes that mass (I believe I heard that most of the objects swallowed by a black hole are released due to Hawking Radiation, what if the mass taken in exceded the speed the singularity could release the radiation associated with it.)? Would all of that mass within that super massive black hole be released by an explosion on terms with the Big Bang?