Image of "Pillars of Creation" from Webb telescope.
https://webbtelescope.org/contents/medi ... ?news=true
otseng wrote: ↑Fri Oct 28, 2022 10:00 am
Later, I'll post arguments why I believe the space-time fabric cannot be expanding.
Summary of arguments why space-time fabric is not expanding:
1. The space-time fabric is a
model. It is not something that actually exists.
otseng wrote: ↑Sat Oct 29, 2022 4:13 pm
But, though we can model and understand space-time as a "fabric", it does not mean there is actually a "fabric". It is only a mathematical model.
When Einstein concocted his general theory of relativity, one of the great advances was to recognize that space and time were combined into a single entity: spacetime. Another was that the presence of matter and energy curved the very fabric of this spacetime, and that curved spacetime, in turn, dictated how matter moved.
As ubiquitous as pictures of bent sheets or coordinate systems are, they aren't exactly reflective of the reality we inhabit.
But under no circumstances should you conceive of space as though it's a material, physical thing; it isn't. This is only a mathematical structure that we can write down equations to describe: the equations of Einstein's General Relativity. The fact that matter and radiation respond to that curvature in the exact ways that the equations predict validates this theory, but it doesn't mean that space is actually a fabric.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswith ... 41bf5f97fc
"The space time fabric is a mathematical abstraction which doesn't exist as such."
https://socratic.org/questions/what-is- ... made-up-of
2. It introduces more unknowns than it solves.
otseng wrote: ↑Sun Oct 30, 2022 7:46 am
One is if our 3-D space fabric is expanding, it must be "expanding" into something. There must be a higher order dimension for it to expand into. There must be 3 higher order dimensions for each of our 3-dimensional space to expand into. So, there must exist at least 6 dimensions total. Of course, these additional dimensions would be extranatural.
What would cause the expansion of our space-time fabric into other dimensions?
Not only is the universe expanding, it is accelerating in expansion. What would cause that?
3. We do not see any artifacts of the space-time fabric expansion.
I believe this is the strongest evidence against the expansion of the space-time fabric.
Unless each point in the universe was expanding at exactly the same rate, then we would see refraction effects when observing distance objects. This is similar to seeing distant objects over a hot desert or a hot highway.
Because light bends when it goes through different temperatures, we do not have a clear image of distant objects. Likewise, if light bends because of space-time fabric distortions, we would not be able to see a clear image of distant objects. But, as the Hubble and Webb telescopes reveal, we do see clear images of the remotest objects.
The only way the expansion of space-time fabric could allow for clear images is that the expansion was perfectly uniform down to the last location of each subatomic particle in the universe and expanding at exactly the same rate with zero deviation. This would be impossible. It would mean information would have to move instantaneously to all points of the universe simultaneously. This information is not only moving faster than light, it would be moving at infinite speed.
