OT: astronomical distances quantized? Was Re: [XCSSA] Legos and Dark Matter

[xcssa@xcssa.org]

>
> In Feyman's Physics lectures, he mentions that the equations for
> galaxy-shaped things haven't been worked out yet, if I had a math and
> astronomy bent that'd be an interesting project.


Thanks for all your thoughts!  Whoever you are.

Those lectures were given around the year 1960.  Since then perhaps the 
math has been worked out, and compared with the astronomical redshifts 
(that was Vera Rubin's part), and the result is the modern theory of 
"Dark Matter" to explain why the rotation doesn't correspond to the 
calculated gravity from the visible matter.

Or perhaps he meant the General Relativity math hasn't been worked out. 
 That's quite possible.  IIRC, the current calculations are based on 
Newtonian Mechanics which is believed to be a pretty good approximation 
for most galaxies.

If you want to figure out the GR math, good luck!

>
>
> In one of Sagan's books, he said that, bizarrely, it appears as though
> the distance to visible galaxies is _quantized_, that they occur at
> regular intervals.  It's odd that it's a quantization but it's
> appearing at the astronomical level, instead of sub-atomic.  I wonder
> if this is still believed to be true, and what the explanations for it
> are.

Never heard of this before, not that that means much.

>
>
>> astronomer Halton Arp, who have alternative interpretations of nearly
>> everything you've heard, including the red shift itself and the
>> cosmological background radiation.)
>
>
> Is that "tired light"? 


No, it's the concept that redshifts can also be caused by other things, 
such as peculiar electromagnetic effects.  Big Bang naysayers Arp, 
Burbidge, and the late great astronomer Fred Hoyle all argued that the 
visible redshifts don't actually show an incredibly extensive expanding 
universe, but instead a more compact visible universe (perhaps there's 
more out there, we just can't see it) with lots of strange 
electromagnetic effects.  And these things that are now understood as 
galaxies were previous understood as stars-in-formation (where the term 
"nebula" came from.)  Some of the big bang naysayers go back to the old 
"nebula" interpretation of many objects.

Hubble himself never felt the expanding universe concept was proven.  He 
used the term "anomolous redshifts" instead of "expanding universe." 
 The term "big bang" was actually a derisive term meant to ridicule the 
expanding universe idea.  But it caught on among supporters anyway.

Now, of course, there are much more data apparently confirming the big 
bang model, such as the cosmic background radiation (CMB) and it's 
distribution.  But the big bang naysayers have alternative 
interpretations of everything.  Some even suggest that CMB is just a 
local effect around our solar system.

The current model can't be exactly called "big bang" anymore anyway. 
 It's really "big bang with dark matter and unexplained acceleration." 
 And even the current theorists of that model can't explain everything 
perfectly.  They have trouble particularly with nearby galaxies.  They 
will even admit that.

And until we have a better explanation for "Dark Matter" and "Dark 
Energy", which constitute 96% of the universe according to current 
calculations, it can't be said that we actually understand much.

>>
>
> I'm not sure I really believe in it, but the simulation argument puts
> things in a unique light:
> http://www.simulation-argument.com/
>
> It seems to me that EPR pairs (quantum particle pairs produced
> symmetrically), whose states are complements but a superposition of
> both values until one is "read", at which point the other's wave
> function collapses and it has a specific value.  That sounds a lot
> like "lazy eval", where an expression isn't evaluated until its result
> is needed, and a number of similar issues in processor design (branch
> prediction, register renaming), if you're better with hardware
> metaphors. 

Thanks for the pointers.  Very interesting ideas.  Possibly a better 
expert than I am could find holes in them.  But see above, the experts 
can't explain 96% of the universe, so what kind of experts are they anyway?

Anyway, if the simulation theorists can posit a testable hypothesis, and 
then do the test, then they could win.

The problem often alleged to such theories based on similar ideas 
(complexity, chaos, etc.) is this: they can't make predictions. 
 Ultimately everything becomes so subject to infinitesimal differences 
in starting conditions (e.g., the butterfly effect) that such theories 
can't make testable predictions.  So, the critics say, what good are 
they?  Science is not supposed to be simply a feel-good exercise, making 
us feel good because we can "explain" everything in terms we can 
understand.  That kind of "science" goes way back and never did much 
good.  Instead, modern science is supposed to invent new theories which 
explain the old facts, and predict new ones, better than the old theories.

Given a sufficiently complex theory with enough unknown variables, 
anything can be explained after-the-observation.  What's generally 
considered the test of a good theory is that it predicts the outcome 
BEFORE the observation, so it can't be said we just rigged the variables 
to make it work with known data.

Charles