Thanks MBig,
The part that's really hard to wrap your head around (At least for me) is that there is no central starting point (where the BB began) according to most cosmologists. Even Sagan had a hard time buying this notion that the observable, or physical universe, is actually the surface (for illustration) of a large bubble and we're all on top, if you will. As the bubble expands the matter on the surface moves away from each other. Rather than accept this, we really can't fathom that we're all on the same plain because we already know that some matter (things) is moving towards other matter. Andromeda colliding with the MW, as an example; so it can't be the surface of the bubble unless the surface of the bubble is merely a metaphore. (A metaphore for what?) In reality, the bubbles'
surface MUST have depth, but wait a minute, even if it had depth things would still move away from each other, they would never interact, so now what?
This is my dilemma. No one knows the size of the universe, and if we don't know it's size we can't know its age.
Age of the universe - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article pretty much says the same thing, although scientists generally agree that the universe as far as we can tell is 13.77 Billion years old.
My problem is in the dirty details, and assuming strong priors. For example, one conundrumm is that cosmologists generally say there is no central point in the universe, that every point is the central point, yet the Lambda-CDM concordance model suggests that everything in the observable universe was at one time all packed together in one place. Even if we postulate that the universe is not infinite, that it did have a beginning, and even if we assume that it is larger than what we can observe, the Lambda model requires that it was all, at one time, in one place. See the problem? If it was all in one place then I know of no other physcial reality that allows something to be all in one place, but also in no place at the same time. Thus, the universe MUST have had a central point, a place where it began, and since space and time are the same thing, we know that time had a beginning somewhere in space. Additionally, this new discovery of the 4 bly structure throws the homogenious hypothetical up for further discussion in my opinion. If true, then the universe is not homogenous, it is - ANYTHING BUT, which also lends serious questions to the inflation theory.
My point is that, no matter how you look at it, according to almsot all accepted science to date, this large quasar cluster should not be there, in fact it should even exist at all.
Tim-
