- #1
feloniuspunk
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I know it's the popularly accepted theory of how everything began, and for the moment, let's assume it's true. What I'm trying to understand is the red shift in terms of the farther away an object you observe is, the farther back in time you are seeing it. The further away objects are the greater is the red shift. Thus, if we someday achieve the ability to see all the way back to "the beginning", what would we see?
My thinking pushes me towards the idea that if the most distant objects are racing away from us the fastest, then aren't we really "seeing" them in the state they were in right after the big bang? It makes sense. Right after the big bang things were all expanding away from each other at very rapid rates. However, galaxies didn't form until sometime after the big bang, after all the plasma coalesced and formed matter which in turn formed solar bodies, galaxies, etc.
So, if when we see objects about 15 billion light years away, the average estimate of the age of our universe, does that imply that the only way they could have gotten that far away from us is if they were traveling at or near the speed of light for the past 15 billion years? That doesn't make sense.
It's almost as if the universe is too big for the matter in it to have expanded so great a distance over such a short period of time. I'm not so sure the red shift means what we think it does. It's almost too convenient of an explanation to compare it to the doppler effect for light. I think that for objects to have gotten so far away in the amount of time we think it took, then those objects would initially have had to be traveling at speeds greater than the speed of light, at least for some finitie period of time.
Time is the puzzler here. What if things were traveling greater than the speed of light for some period right after the big bang? Relativity urges us to think that time slows down as we approach the speed of light, where it even stops entirely right at the speed of light. But at speeds greater than the speed of light, could that imply then that time may in fact go in reverse? In other words, objects will arrive at locations before they actually got there. A seeming paradox.
Any help or discussion about this to help clarify my thinking would be greatly appreciated.
My thinking pushes me towards the idea that if the most distant objects are racing away from us the fastest, then aren't we really "seeing" them in the state they were in right after the big bang? It makes sense. Right after the big bang things were all expanding away from each other at very rapid rates. However, galaxies didn't form until sometime after the big bang, after all the plasma coalesced and formed matter which in turn formed solar bodies, galaxies, etc.
So, if when we see objects about 15 billion light years away, the average estimate of the age of our universe, does that imply that the only way they could have gotten that far away from us is if they were traveling at or near the speed of light for the past 15 billion years? That doesn't make sense.
It's almost as if the universe is too big for the matter in it to have expanded so great a distance over such a short period of time. I'm not so sure the red shift means what we think it does. It's almost too convenient of an explanation to compare it to the doppler effect for light. I think that for objects to have gotten so far away in the amount of time we think it took, then those objects would initially have had to be traveling at speeds greater than the speed of light, at least for some finitie period of time.
Time is the puzzler here. What if things were traveling greater than the speed of light for some period right after the big bang? Relativity urges us to think that time slows down as we approach the speed of light, where it even stops entirely right at the speed of light. But at speeds greater than the speed of light, could that imply then that time may in fact go in reverse? In other words, objects will arrive at locations before they actually got there. A seeming paradox.
Any help or discussion about this to help clarify my thinking would be greatly appreciated.