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Re: universe expanding, not from any particular spot



Dear Lisa-
Because you are almost about to have a birthday, I have made up
an aphorism, just for you:
The art of physics is making dumb questions meaningful.

There are people who are trying to make sense out of what
happened before the big bang. One of them is named Veneziano.
A good place to find references to physics papers is
http://www.slac.stanford.edu/spires/hep/cmdsearch.html.
You should read the instructions on how to do a search.
Happy birthday,
Jack




On Sun, 13 Aug 2000, Lisa Gardner wrote:

I guess I might as well admit what I was trying to say.

I was looking at the Big bang possibility as a side issue to being
spewed out of the larger source. That would have everything moving
outward from the point of explosion while also being propelled from
the original event.

Your ants would still perceive themselves living on the balloon
surface and moving away from each other as the balloon is expanding,
but the balloon is also drifting along on a breeze. Although these
ants are very smart and agree with me on my theory. :>) Joke

Good night
Lisa Gardner (age 9 11/12 yrs)


What if our 'universe' is just a little blob of 'stuff' thrown off
from
a MUCH larger source, and indeed maybe the blob does explode? Consider
the situation of our sun when it has certain types of flares and some
these eruptions curve back into the sun. What if, even though we
perceive our universe as expanding from a 'spot', we are in the
process of moving way from this continuingly spewing source, but in
the end we will eventually curve back and return to it.
<<<<<<<<,



At 08:10 PM 8/13/00 -0400, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
In the spirit of Newtonian mechanics trajectories of ants
(residing on the expanding balloon) are straight lines
intersecting at one point. That was the 'spot' to which
Lisa was probably referring.

I don't think so. On a spherical balloon, an obvious
symmetry argument
says that no such special point can exist.



Suppose you are one of the ants. You will observe that all
the other ants
are expanding in straight lines directly away -- but if you
announce (based
on this observation) that you are the center of the
universe, all the other
ants will laugh at you.