THE UNIVERSE: And then there was light….

RonPrice

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 2, 2006
Messages
21
Location
George Town Tasmania
Part 1:

The Universe(1) is an American documentary television series which first appeared in the UK in 2007 and it continued to the end of 2011. I did not begin watching the series in Australia until 2012. Computer-generated imagery and computer graphics of astronomical objects, as well as interviews with experts in the fields of cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics make this series fascinating for people like me whose knowledge of these fields has always been minimal.

I have had a fascination with these subjects since the start of the space age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, since my becoming affiliated with the Bahá'í Faith back in the 1950s during my adolescence, and since having the influence of a maternal grandfather who was also interested in these fields.

Part 2:

It is difficult not to be interested in the subject being in the first generation to see the movement of man into space in the last five decades. But I have never followed-up that interest in any serious way other than: (a) to attend two or three of those planetariums that dot the landscape of the cities of the world, (b) to browse through a few books and (c) to listen and watch the occasional special on astronomy in the electronic media like the one to which I refer above.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)7TWO TV, 25-26 February 2012, 11:45 p.m. to 12:50 a.m. and The Universe(TV Series) at Wikipedia.

Now that I am retired from
the world of jobs, meetings
and what now seems like an
endless amount of socializing,
I can give myself to learning &
the cultural attainments of the
mind. I really got going with the
fields of astronomy, cosmology
and astrophysics in the year ’09:1

1 The International Year of Astronomy 2009 was a global effort initiated by the International Astronomical Union and UNESCO to help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day-and-night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery. In 2009 astronomy celebrated four centuries of its modern existence, beginning with Galileo in 1609. In December 2010 a National Geographic video-documentary was televised. It was entitled: Journey to the Edge of the Universe. I have written about this before.

Part 3:

In the first years of my retirement from FT, PT and volunteer work, 2005-2012, there has been an increasing range of stimuli that have turned me toward astronomy of which the series I mention and that National Geographic video above are but two. It will be interesting to see the development of this interest in these middle years(65-75) of my late adulthood, the years from 60 to 80 according to one model of human development in the lifespan.

The cosmic dark age, perhaps as long
as between 150 million to 800 million
years after the Big Bang. This is one of
the great mysteries in all of astronomy.1

1 John Mather who won the Nobel prize for physics in 2006 said this. He is a senior astrophysicist at the U.S. space agency's (NASA) Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and adjunct professor of physics at the University of Maryland, College Park. Go to Wikipedia for more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages

What brought this cosmic dark age to an end was the birth of the first stars and galaxies. "Suddenly light was everywhere," says Abraham Loeb of Harvard's Centre for Astrophysics. "The Universe lit up like a Christmas tree."

Ron Price
29/2/'12 to 30/1/'15.
 
This is a relevant post, Quackers, in the sub-section: science and technology. The universe is studied in a branch of science known as astronomy and/or astrophysics. You are a busy beaver here at Civilization Fanatics' Forum. I can only drop in here occasionally in this the evening of my life. As I say in my post, there is an excellent overview of the chronology of the universe at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages -Ron Price, Tasmania:cool:
 
MY SPACE RACE

...in a world of spin-offs
------------------------------------------
Part 1:

In the last thirty years of my autobiographical writing, 1984 to 2014, I have used many templates or frameworks, devices and arrangements, patterns and plans, in which to provide a perspective on my life-narrative. The template or framework below involves the space race.

The 'Space Race' was a 20th-century competition between two Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union and the United States, for supremacy in spaceflight capability. The race took place from 1955 to 1972. The technological superiority required for such supremacy was seen as necessary for national security, and it was also symbolic of ideological superiority. This 'Space Race' spawned pioneering efforts to launch artificial satellites, unmanned probes of the Moon, Venus, and Mars, and human spaceflight in low Earth orbit and to the Moon.

The competition began on August 2, 1955, when the Soviet Union responded to the US announcement four days earlier of their intent to launch artificial satellites for the International Geophysical Year, by declaring they would also launch a satellite "in the near future". The Soviet Union beat the US to this, with the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik 1. The competition peaked with the July 20, 1969 US landing of the first humans on the Moon with Apollo 11, and it concluded in a period of détente with the April 1972 agreement on a co-operative Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, resulting in the July 1975 rendezvous in Earth orbit of a US astronaut crew with a Soviet cosmonaut crew.1

Part 2:

This space race was part of the back-drop of my life from the age of 11 to 31. In the northern summer of 1955 I was about to enter grade 4 and to begin my 9 year baseball career from late childhood to late adolescence. My mother had also just begun to take me along to what were then called, and still are, "Baha'i firesides".

In the southern winter of 1975 I was lecturing at the Box Hill Institute of Technical and Further Education in Melbourne Australia, and I was the secretary of a small Baha'i group in Kew Victoria, and just about to enter my second marriage. In 1969 I was teaching primary school in Canada when the first men landed on the moon, and in 1972 I was teaching high school in Australia when a more cooperative relationship between the USA and the USSR began.

Those two decades were a period of vast change in my life-narrative from being a primary school student in Canada to a university graduate and, as I say above, on my way to a second marriage which, by December 1975, had two children, and in Melbourne Australia. I won't give you chapter and verse of all the major events of those two decades in either the space race or in my own life-race.

I will mention, though, that those 20 years were a period of the exploration and the defining, the emerging and the consolidating of my raison d'etre, my modus operandi, my modus vivendi, my cosmology, my personal mythology, my religious and philosophical position, a position I still hold as I go through my 70s.2-Ron Price with thanks to 1Wikipedia, and 2Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 23/12/'14.

Part 3:

The Space Race had its origins
in the missile-based arms race
that occurred following WWII,
when both the Soviet Union &
the United States captured the
advanced German technology
and personnel....In those years
I went from the age of 1 to 10:
my personal life-race was on!!

The Space Race has also left a
legacy of communications, and
weather satellites, a continuing
human space presence on that
International Space Station. It
has also sparked many spending
increases on education & research
development which led to a host of
beneficial spin-off technologies in
the years of my life: 1973 to 2014,
as my own life continued its spin....

Ron Price
23/12/'14.
 
On day 1 God created light! ...
On day 4 or 5 he created the sun and the stars.

Christianity ... Oh you!
 
On day 1 God created light! ...
On day 4 or 5 he created the sun and the stars.

Christianity ... Oh you!

Light before the sun and the stars is correct. But there is a bit of a problem with day and night before the sun.
 
If the planet was spinning, there could be day and night without any light. It is not the light that creates day and night. It is a spinning planet.

On day one, it does not say that God created light. It says let there be light. That could mean creation of light, but not necessarily. There would be no problem as light could have come from a source outside of the universe, as from God. It would be like adding power to a radio. The radio was created, but the power does not have to be created. It just has to come to the radio via a battery, or power cord. Or via a remote signal as current physics allows the transmission of power now without a direct physical connection.

"Light" is not just a source of illumination. It has a lot more properties to it than that.

Back to having a night and day. There did not even have to be time or a spinning earth until day 4 when God said there would be an actually division of day and night by a spinning world, not just the sun. If the earth was not spinning even if you had a sun, half the earth would be in constant day and the other half in constant night. That would hardly be considered a day like we know it with it's temporal properties. Time does have to have the motion factor for it to work?

It clearly states that the purpose of the sun was for the "division" of day and night, but not the "creation" of day and night. The problem is that the spinning motion is not stated in the passage, but if you toss in a sun and other planets and cause gravity to come into play, then perhaps having a spinning motion, may also happen then and not four days earlier?

On day 1 God created light! ...
On day 4 or 5 he created the sun and the stars.

Christianity ... Oh you!

Should that not be Judaism receiving the blame for Genesis?
 
This thread reads like a blog that's being hijacked into yet one more "I do so have evidence for all that impossible stuff in Genesis!" pseudoscience mess.
 
Part 3:

The Space Race had its origins
in the missile-based arms race
that occurred following WWII,
when both the Soviet Union &
the United States captured the
advanced German technology
and personnel....In those years
I went from the age of 1 to 10:
my personal life-race was on!!

I remember reading a booklet that came with a globe I had a long time ago. It discussed the space race and attributed the early advantage of Soviet rocket technology to the fact that the Americans developed the H-Bomb first. So in order to compete in the "missile-based arms race that occurred following WWII," the Soviets had to build bigger, heavier rockets to carry their bigger, heavier bombs.

I do not know if you read something similar to this before or if you find it interesting.
 
Thanks, folks, for all those responses this month. I encourage you all to read, or reread the Wikipedia account of the chronology of the Universe. It describes the history and future of the universe according to Big Bang cosmology, the prevailing scientific model of how the Universe developed over time from the Planck epoch, using the cosmological time parameter of co-moving coordinates.

The instant in which the Universe is thought to have begun rapidly expanding from a singularity is known as the Big Bang. As of 2013, this expansion is estimated to have begun 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. It is convenient to divide the evolution of the Universe so far into three phases. For more go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_the_universe#Dark_Ages

The subject is complex and requires some study over your lifetime. Mythologies, like the account in Genesis are useful as literature but not as science. My position, my take, is the scientific one. I have never thought of the account in Genesis as literally true....to each their own.-Ron Price, Australia

PS. The nuclear arms race was a competition for supremacy in nuclear warfare between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies during the Cold War. For more details go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_arms_race
 
SWALLOWED BY A BLACK HOLE

Part 1:

In the southern hemisphere's summer of 2014-2015, the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way has been getting ready to feast. I was enjoying the first of the summers which I would have in my life during my 70s. I had taken an early retirement some 15 years before and I was also enjoying the intellectual feast that was prepared for me on the world-wide-web. My three children had all left the family nest, and grand-children occupied space out on the periphery of my universe. I served as the secretary and publicity-officer of the local Baha'i group, went for a walk everyday, and socialized in the main with my wife of 40 years.

A gas cloud three times the size of our planet was straying this summer within the gravitational reach of this our nearest super-massive black hole, and was about to be eaten-alive. Across the globe, telescopes were being trained on the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, some 27,000 light years from Earth. Astronomers were living in the expectation of observing this unique spectacle in the cosmos. For cosmic detectives across the Earth, it was a unique opportunity. For the first time in the history of science, they hoped to observe in action the awesome spectacle of a feeding super-massive black hole.

Part 1.1:

I had just finished my dinner which was about as far from an awesome spectacle as one could get in the evening of my life. I watched a program on SBS TV on 9/2/'15 at 7:30 p.m. entitled: Swallowed By A Black Hole. It helped to have some knowledge of both quasars and black holes to really appreciate this program. It also helped to know something about astronomy and physics, astrophysics and mathematics.

Part 2:

QUASARS

Quasars, or quasi-stellar radio sources, are the most energetic & distant members of a class of objects called active galactic nuclei (AGN). Quasars are extremely luminous and were first identified as being high red-shift sources of electromagnetic energy, including radio waves and visible light, that appeared to be similar to stars, rather than extended sources similar to galaxies. Their luminosity can be 100 times greater than that of the Milky Way. A quasar is a compact region in the center of a massive galaxy surrounding a central super-massive black hole. Its size is 10–10,000 times what is called the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole. The energy emitted by a quasar derives from mass falling onto the accretion disc around the black hole. I leave it to readers with the interest to search-out the meaning of terms here which, in all likelihood, they do not understand.

Part 2.1:

It can be shown that quasars are between 600 million, and 29 billion light-years away. Because of the great distances to the farthest quasars and the finite velocity of light, we see them and their surrounding space as they existed in the very early universe. For more on quasars and AGN, as well as explanations of the many complex terms, go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar

Part 3:

BLACK HOLES

The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was first mentioned by John Michell in a letter written to Henry Cavendish in 1783 of the Royal Society. Black holes are mathematically defined regions of space-time exhibiting such a strong gravitational pull that no particle or electromagnetic radiation can escape from it. Black holes, defined and described as regions of space from which nothing can escape, was first published by David Finkelstein in 1958, and black holes became mainstream subjects of research.

Part 3.1:

After a black hole has formed, it can continue to grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. By absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, super-massive black holes of millions of solar masses may form. There is general consensus that super-massive black holes exist in the centers of most galaxies. The core of the Milky Way contains a super-massive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses.
The theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass can deform space-time to form a black hole. For more on black holes go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole

This subject really requires some knowledge of physics, astrophysics, astronomy and mathematics. The layman and amateur like myself can only grasp the content to a limited extent.-Ron Price, Pioneering Over Five Epochs, 11/2/'15.

Part 4:

These are subjects which
the average person can't
get their head around; the
numbers are just too big
and the concepts behind
the numbers require the
study of astronomy and
physics, astrophysics, &
mathematics. The average
punter, occupied as he or
she is with the mundane
and the quotidian, with a
job and family life, with
an interest in gardening
and sport, perhaps, bush-
walking and swimming,
is just not on the money
for the complex, distant,
scientific phenomena at
the centre of our Milky
Way galaxy at a 27,000
light-year outpost, in a
state of utter remoteness.

Ron Price
11/2/'15.
 
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