Peter Duncanson wrote:
On Mon, 28 May 2012 19:37:23 +0100, Java Jive
wrote:

Very interesting. Thanks for the following.

I've interpolated a question further down.

As it happens, I met Prof Hoyle, I think it would have been in the
60s. He came to tea and/or dinner at our house. Although, from this
brief meeting and even now that we know he was wrong, I wouldn't
presume to speak for him, paraphrase him, or put words in his mouth -
people should read his own work if they want to understand his
reasoning - as I was then, as now, interested in Astronomy, he and I
talked for a while about the two opposing theories, for which, at that
time, there was considered insufficient evidence to confirm or reject
either.

AIUI, one of Hoyle's criticisms of the Big Bang Theory was a
philosophical one, based on its incompleteness. In my own words, I
would describe the problem thus:

A Big Bang universe must in some sense be finite, because it begins
with all the matter at a single point before it was flung out by the
explosion, and although it was flung out immensely fast, and even
allowing for the alteration of time under General Relativity, it must
have been with a finite velocity, and a finite amount of time has
elapsed since,

Is it not now considered that rather then matter being flung out
explosively it is space that has expanded taking fragmented matter with
it?


make little difference really.

and therefore it can only have expanded by a finite
amount. So what happens at the 'edge' of it and beyond? The theory
can tell us nothing about that, and for many opponents of it, I
believe including Hoyle, this was profoundly dissatisfying and a major
objection to it.

To me then and since, one possible answer has always seemed 'obvious',
that our universe is just one among possibly infinitely many others,
and, although I dare say that many others possibly before and
certainly since have come up with this idea, as far as I was concerned
then, it was an original idea of my own, and therefore I mentioned it.
He seemed genuinely surprised at this turn in the conversation, as if
that possibility had never occurred to him, and then clammed up
rather, as if unwilling to discuss the subject further. Perhaps he
thought I was just a young smart-arse trying to catch him out, and/or
that it was beneath his dignity to discuss something with someone who
didn't have sufficient in depth knowledge of the facts of the subject,
or perhaps he had no interest in debating what was mostly a
philosophical point - it is difficult to see how one could test for
other universes beyond the limits of our own - but in truth I really
don't know why.

At any rate, we do know now that the Steady State Theory was wrong.


Well we know that the best fit story we can tell about the (physical)
universe starts with a bang.

As far as we can conjectu whether space and time came into being then
or not is a moot question.






--
To people who know nothing, anything is possible.
To people who know too much, it is a sad fact
that they know how little is really possible -
and how hard it is to achieve it.