The universe is expanding.

so I was watching "Into The Universe With Stephen Hawking" last night and they said something in a 'matter of fact' way that surprised me. They claimed that just seconds after the big bang the universe expanded to the size of our solar system. That means it it would have been expanding FASTER than the speed of light!? They never explained how they came to this confident conclusion.

Now I'm wondering what if the speed of light actually depends on the size of the universe? Is the speed of light itself slowing down with the expansion of the universe and was it many times faster than it is now when the universe was very small and dense. That's the only way I can see how the universe expanded from a speck to 60 trillion km in 100 seconds, a distance that now takes 6 light hours. This also goes against what we know of light speed being faster in a vacuum.

Another thing they keep saying we know the universe is ~13 billion years old but do they only say that because we can only see out as far as 13 billion light years? Why assume it's only as old as we can see? I don't know.

 

My memory is a bit blurry but I think the "wall" Hubble cant see past isn't the beginning of the universe but from a time when light couldn't propagate for one reason or another (heat or something).

The number 13 billion also comes from the rate at which other galaxies are moving away from us. Provided everything started from singularity, how far away a galaxy is from us now is also relevant. Its also been suggested that the universe is more than 15 billion years, which would be the case if its speeding up at a significant rate.

 

For what it's worth:

Time/space can be properly expressed as "number of events in a given area".
When the universe was more "compressed" it was possible for more events to occur within a given section of the Time/Space continium.

So, yes, C is a relative limit. The second is a fluid measure.
And, yes, "the speed of light actually depends on the size of the universe...".

And when the Universe gets "big" enough, Time will have slowed down so much as to exist as a single Quantum and Forever ends.

Bye, Bye, Infinity

 

No it isn't. It is 299,792,458 m/s. Or, if you prefer, 299,792.458 km/s (note the decimal point).

 

Not to change the subject (and yes, I love science & technology) but every time I see this thread I’m reminded of that line from Airplane “and Leon is getting larger”


Hotwater

 

How in the hell do you figure that kilometers equals miles?????????

it's 186,282 0r 186,274 or maybe some more recently excepted ---

WAIT!

You're not an American?

m/s means "miles" per second to us Yankees.

But you mean "meters"-- right?

I bow to metric, but "meters" is pretensious as opposed to "kilometers".

And I doubt you have the chops to be pretentious.

CLARIFY! I always do.

 

Geck.. so we just say 300k a sec.. america is an arrogant bastard. Powerfull as it is. The most powerfull political entity since rome. If The whole world goes metric US has to eventually
Hey i grew up with detroit steel and miles. 350 block /4 barrel, extractors and 10" rubber.. But base 10 is better. And i get sick and tired [as python says] of 9/16th spanners.
Millimeters are much sexier.

Its called evolution

Ps i agree the mps crowd are full of crap , they think they sound smarter if they say mps and add some 000's
but thats just me.
Relativity.. i like the 1 minute with hot girl seems like 5 seconds. I can do a lot in 5 seconds. well one nice kiss anyway.

 

:smilielol5: Yeah, right!

Okay, I see now that what you were trying to say, but didn't clarify, was that the given number was metric, not American.

Unfortunately, you said it in a way that suggested that your quibble was between metres per second and kilometres per second. Taken in that context, the quibble was incorrect, since the number was in fact metres, not kilometres.

The original post that you were commenting on was correct in saying that c = 299 million metres per second.

Clear?

 

For all you know, this could be the case. The only reason that you believe differently is the fact that you can see some stars shining down, and because science has told you otherwise.

Unless you've looked at something out there through a telescope, for all you know, the Earth could be all that's around..