“…infinitely finite?”
In May 2016 Stephen Hawking hosted a PBS-TV series called Genius. He opens the series by asking the question, “Where did the universe come from?” and continues, “The answer, as most people can tell you, is the big bang. Everything in existence, expanding exponentially in every direction, from an infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense point, creating a cosmos filled with energy and matter. But what does that really mean and where did it all begin?”
We once challenged the concepts. The first working title of that posting was “Can A Quiet Expansion Challenge the Big Bang?” which was deemed too confrontational. The more important question was, “How did it all begin and what does it mean?” That change was made on Friday morning, June 17, 2016. This is what we said:
Big bang theory: The world-renown Cambridge University physicist, Stephen Hawking, was the leading spokesperson for the big bang. He became a rock star among scientists because he was so successful as its primary advocate. Within his May 2016 PBS-TV series, Genius, he asks, “Where did the universe come from? The answer, as most people can tell you, is the big bang. Everything in existence, expanding exponentially in every direction, from an infinitely small, infinitely hot, infinitely dense point, creating a cosmos filled with energy and matter. But what does that really mean and where did it all begin?”
His confidence also exudes from his 1988, best-selling book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes, and even from his foundational writing in 1973 (co-authored with Cambridge colleague, George F. R. Ellis) their highly-technical book, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time. By the way, George Ellis in a personal communication told Bruce Camber that he didn’t think that Hawking was thinking about the Planck Temperature when he arrived at “infinitely-hot.”
Are space-and-time unbounded or bounded? If bounded, is our universe a container universe? Are the Planck base units and all the dimensionless constants part of the definitions of the boundaries between the finite and the infinite?
Within the current bbt analysis gravitational waves arise from within their inflationary period. The bbt thought leaders ascribe a much faster-than-light expansion just after the big bang. And, that begs the question: What are the preconditions of superluminal events and motion? There haven’t been any answers since 1902 when Jacobus Kapteyn made his initial observations, since the 1983 “superluminal workshop” at Jodrell Bank Observatory, and since the subsequent studies of microquasars their accretion disks and such phenomenon as magnetorotational instability. It is all a very special language, logic and reality; the observational results are well-defined; yet, the most-penetrating conclusions are pending.
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Originally: https://81018.com/2016/06/01/quiet/#Cf1