Cosmologist Sean Carroll asks, Is anything constant?

as to this first part from the article:

Excerpt: Nicolaus Copernicus is famous for having suggested that the Earth moves around the sun, rather than the other way around. That’s a big deal, as it displaces the Earth from its presumed position at the center of the universe. But it’s easy for us to forget something equally amazing: the idea that the Earth can actually move at all. If anything seems like a solid foundation, it’s the Earth itself. But in our post-Copernican world, we know better. Albert Einstein, with his general theory of relativity, took this conceptual revolution one step forward. Not only is the Earth not a fixed fulcrum around which the rest of the universe revolves, space and time themselves are not fixed and unchanging.

Actually Einstein would argue that the 'conceptual revolution' took one step backwards. In the Einsteinian worldview the one central assumption is 'the notion that all physical laws should appear the same (that is, take the same basic form) to all inertial observers.'

Introduction to special relativity Excerpt: Einstein's approach was based on thought experiments, calculations, and the principle of relativity, which is the notion that all physical laws should appear the same (that is, take the same basic form) to all inertial observers.,,, Each observer has a distinct "frame of reference" in which velocities are measured,,,, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_special_relativity Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity (privileged frame of reference for the observer) - video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev9zrt__lec

And this 'notion that all physical laws should appear the same (that is, take the same basic form) to all inertial observers', far from fortifying the Copernican principle, makes the earth or the sun, or any other point of observation in the universe, just as central as any other point of observation in the universe may be considered central in the universe. Einstein weighs in here

“Can we formulate physical laws so that they are valid for all CS [coordinate systems], not only those moving uniformly, but also those moving quite arbitrarily, relative to each other? […] The struggle, so violent in the early days of science, between the views of Ptolemy and Copernicus would then be quite meaningless. Either CS could be used with equal justification. The two sentences: “the sun is at rest and the earth moves” or “the sun moves and the earth is at rest” would simply mean two different conventions concerning two different CS.” Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics, p.212 (p.248 in original 1938 ed.);

Fred Hoyle, discoverer of stellar nucleosynthesis, weighs in here:

“The relation of the two pictures [geocentrism and geokineticism] is reduced to a mere coordinate transformation and it is the main tenet of the Einstein theory that any two ways of looking at the world which are related to each other by a coordinate transformation are entirely equivalent from a physical point of view…. Today we cannot say that the Copernican theory is ‘right’ and the Ptolemaic theory ‘wrong’ in any meaningful physical sense.” Hoyle, Fred. Nicolaus Copernicus. London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1973.

George Ellis, who, along with Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking, helped extend General Relativity to show that not only energy and matter had a definite beginning in the Big Bang but that space and time also had a definite beginning in the Big Bang, weighs in here:

“People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations… For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations… You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds… What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that.” – George Ellis – W. Wayt Gibbs, “Profile: George F. R. Ellis,” Scientific American, October 1995, Vol. 273, No.4, p. 55

In addition, Max Born wrote:

“…Thus we may return to Ptolemy’s point of view of a ‘motionless earth’… One has to show that the transformed metric can be regarded as produced according to Einstein’s field equations, by distant rotating masses. This has been done by Thirring. He calculated a field due to a rotating, hollow, thick-walled sphere and proved that inside the cavity it behaved as though there were centrifugal and other inertial forces usually attributed to absolute space. Thus from Einstein’s point of view, Ptolemy and Copernicus are equally right.” Born, Max. “Einstein’s Theory of Relativity”,Dover Publications,1962, pgs 344 & 345:

The following article states that General relativity forces us to search for an entirely new conception of place.

How Einstein Revealed the Universe’s Strange “Nonlocality” – George Musser | Oct 20, 2015 Excerpt: Under most circumstances, we can ignore this nonlocality. You can designate some available chunk of matter as a reference point and use it to anchor a coordinate grid. You can, to the chagrin of Santa Barbarans, take Los Angeles as the center of the universe and define every other place with respect to it. In this framework, you can go about your business in blissful ignorance of space’s fundamental inability to demarcate locations.,, In short, Einstein’s theory is nonlocal in a more subtle and insidious way than Newton’s theory of gravity was. Newtonian gravity acted at a distance, but at least it operated within a framework of absolute space. Einsteinian gravity has no such element of wizardry; its effects ripple through the universe at the speed of light. Yet it demolishes the framework, violating locality in what was, for Einstein, its most basic sense: the stipulation that all things have a location. General relativity confounds our intuitive picture of space as a kind of container in which material objects reside and forces us to search for an entirely new conception of place. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-einstein-revealed-the-universe-s-strange-nonlocality/

An atheist tried to say, in spite of what Einstein and these other giants of science said, that it was still improper for me to think the earth had any special significance in the universe. But as hard as it may be for him, and others, to believe that the earth could have any special significance in this vast universe, there is actually very strong evidence coming in from cosmology that indicates that the earth is not as forlorn as they, as atheists, might have hoped it to be. First off, In what I consider an absolutely fascinating discovery, Einstein’s General Relativity has shown that 4-dimensional (4D) space-time, along with all energy and matter, was created in the ‘Big Bang’ and, via the finely tuned 1 in 10^120 cosmological constant. continues to ‘expand equally in all places’:

"There is no centre of the universe! According to the standard theories of cosmology, the universe started with a "Big Bang" about 14 thousand million years ago and has been expanding ever since. Yet there is no centre to the expansion; it is the same everywhere. The Big Bang should not be visualized as an ordinary explosion. The universe is not expanding out from a centre into space; rather, the whole universe is expanding and it is doing so equally at all places, as far as we can tell." Philip Gibbs

Thus from a 3-dimensional (3D) perspective, any particular 3D spot in the universe is to be considered just as ‘center of the universe’ as any other particular spot in the universe is to be considered ‘center of the universe’. This centrality found for any 3D place in the universe is because the universe is a 4D expanding hypersphere, analogous in 3D to the surface of an expanding balloon. All points on the surface are moving away from each other, and every point is central, no matter where you live in the universe. And as such, it may now be possible for the Earth to be, once again, considered ‘central in the universe’. That every 3-Dimensional place within the universe may be considered central in the universe may seem very counterintuitive to most people, but that is exactly what has now been shown. I find the best way to get this ‘centrality of the Earth in the universe” point across is to visualize it first hand. Thus I reference the following video to clearly get this ‘centrality in the universe’ point across:

The Known Universe by AMNH – video - (please note the 'centrality' of the Earth in the universe at the 3:36 minute mark in the video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U

Here is a still shot of the image at the 3:36 minute mark of the preceding video

Picture of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) http://new-universe.org/zenphoto/albums/Chapter4/Illustrations/Abrams47.jpg

Moreover, there are strange 'anomalies' in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation that line up with the earth:

Why is the solar system cosmically aligned? BY Dragan Huterer - 2007 The solar system seems to line up with the largest cosmic features. Is this mere coincidence or a signpost to deeper insights? Caption under figure on page 43: ODD ALIGNMENTS hide within the multipoles of the cosmic microwave background. In this combination of the quadrupole and octopole, a plane bisects the sphere between the largest warm and cool lobes. The ecliptic — the plane of Earth’s orbit projected onto the celestial sphere — is aligned parallel to the plane between the lobes. http://www-personal.umich.edu/~huterer/PRESS/CMB_Huterer.pdf Here is the actual graph of the alignment from the Huterer 2007 paper (worth a thousand words): http://i44.servimg.com/u/f44/16/14/18/96/axis_o10.jpg

bornagain

November 28, 2015

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Dr Sheldon states:

We've dissected Sean "the cosmologist" Carroll before ...

I'm not sure why the quotes are necessary. Carroll literally is a cosmologist, after all.

... who is willing to sacrifice cosmology to the altar of Darwin, promoting “evolution” of “multiverses”. In this article he is equivocating on the word “change” to suggest that if Einstein showed that spacetime was changeable, then evolution must be true.

I looked at every instance of forms of the word "evolve" in the article, and every time Carroll uses them, he means "to develop" or "to change". The article doesn't say anything about Darwin or biological evolution. I know physicists (and particularly cosmologists) regularly use the term "evolve" in the same way as Carroll is, so I'm not sure why Dr Sheldon is making such a big deal out of this.daveS

November 28, 2015

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This is silly. What changes in our universe are INSTANCES of constant Classes of things. So, for example, the Instance of rings around Saturn apparently appeared 100 million years ago or something. And astronomers have calculated that within another 60 million years or so those rings will disappear for a number of well understood reasons. (The thicker rings will spiral down into Saturn, etc.) But as long as Saturn's rings exist, they're simply instances of a known class. When European explorers first reported that the Locals had shown the explorers what we know call Niagara Falls, a European artist painted a picture of the Falls without ever seeing them. And since ALL of the large waterfalls in Europe occur in the mountains, the artist painted something like Angel Falls in South America. But as more Europeans saw and described Niagara, the Falls was accepted as simply an instance of a different type of waterfall that otherwise complied with the known characteristics of the Class called Waterfalls.mahuna

November 28, 2015

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I think it is the ordering based on nothing (nihilo / zero) which provides a framework for the universe, while the existence of the entire universe and everything in it can be changed per decision, within the framework that the totality equals zero. Creatio ex nihilo, and, ex nihilo nihil fit. At the start of the universe there is the most freedom to choose. Then after the first decision is made, possibilities around what has already been chosen are more likely, providing for stability around the framework.mohammadnursyamsu

November 28, 2015

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