Quote:
Originally Posted by Morepower
Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see the Big Bang Theory debunked in the near future. It seems scientists are clutching at straws. They say at an early point during the Big Bang it had to expand faster than the speed of light (expansion ?), just like that ! Even though for many years it was said nothing could exceed the speed of light, especially considering the amount of energy required to move matter near to the speed of light, let alone faster. And yet we still say nothing can go faster than light. And now again they say we have reached the limits of what we can see due to the fact that everything after a certain point is travelling faster than light. Not to mention when things don't seem to fit the model of the Big Bang they just keep adding Dimensions, first ~9, then 11, and now 20+ ? Then there is the before the Big Bang where there is a particle (?) that is infinitely smaller than an Atom and is infinitely dense and infinitely hot. I realise that it is just a "Theory", and I was an avid believer in it untill just recently. Now, for me at least, there are just too many holes and infinately's in it. BTW i'm not trying to start any arguments, however i am wondering if anyone else is questioning the Theory ? Apologies to the OP if I have thread jacked.
Respectfully
Craig
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Actually, SR doesn't say that nothing can travel faster than light. That is a great mistake that has been perpetrated by both laypeople and many scientists for many years. What Einstein said was this....
no particle or object, other than light itself, can travel at the speed of light. The important bit to remember is that it is
at the speed of light, that is the crucial piece of the statement. Due to the way objects (particles, planets, spaceships etc) behave and interact with the spacetime field which they occupy, they cannot be accelerated to the actual speed of light. This is because the energy required to do so is absurdly large, as close to infinity as you will get. It's only photons, which have their intrinsic properties of no rest mass or size, which can be made to move at light speed (they are, after all, particles of light!!!). All particles of light, regardless of their wavelengths, frequencies etc, move at the speed of light, in a vacuum. Unless, of course, they are slowed by some other agency...like glass, gas, water, gravity etc.
It may come as a surprise to many here (except those that have studied relativity at uni), that there are instances in which the equations for SR can only be applied to objects that always move at velocities
faster than light!!!. These outcomes to the equations are valid answers, however, some of the characteristics of those answer would seem strange to us, such as "imaginary mass". But because things such as "imaginary mass" sound wacky, it doesn't mean it can't exist. There are stranger things in physics that are bandied about in labs and on blackboards that are being talked about every day.
As for spacetime itself tavelling fater than light, that is perfectly acceptable under SR (or GR for that matter). The speed of light limitation only applies to objects moving within and through spacetime itself. There's no speed limitation to spacetime's movements anywhere. It could expand at whatever velocity inflation imparted to it, and given what we observe, most likely did. What you have to remember is that spacetime itself is what was expanding. Not anything else or into a pre-existing space. Even given that it may have expanded out of a much larger multidimensional space, it still expanded into it's present state outside of that spacetime. Those other spacetime dimensions now appear to be miniscule to us, because of that shift in perspective caused by the expansion. It's hard to conceptualise for many, but that's what happened. In effect, the expansion due to inflation has cut us off from the other dimensions, except at the quantum level, where spacetime is most likely fluctuating randomly and chaotically....what they term the "spacetime froth".
Those increasing numbers of spacetime dimensions you mentioned....it depends on which equations of state for spacetime you use, the degrees of supersymmetry that are allowed for those equations, which determine how many spacetime dimensions there are. Some systems need upto 26 dimensions, most of them usually need 11, and it appears that given what we know of the numbers of fundamental particles and the interactions between them that this universe is composed of 11 dimensions overall.
Hope that helps with explaining things for you
