My head hurts thinking about this.

[goatboy]

Sorry if this topic has been done to death, or if its the wrong group to ask this question. But I cant get my head around this at all.
Why does it take 13 billion years for the light to reach us from distant galaxies when 13 billion years ago (if I understand the big bang) we were in the same place or at least close?

 

[Atlan0001]

Sorry if this topic has been done to death, or if its the wrong group to ask this question. But I cant get my head around this at all.
Why does it take 13 billion years for the light to reach us from distant galaxies when 13 billion years ago (if I understand the big bang) we were in the same place or at least close?

I never thought of it exactly as you have questioned it. And, of course, neither have any physicists including my three favorite reads.

You are right on the mark. The evolution of every "place" in the universe is [in-place] and nowhere else so why should it take 13-billion years for the light of our evolution [in-place] to reach us? Unless! of course, the universe is flat and the light only travels through an extending (accelerating expansion) sheer flatness connecting the 3rd-dimensional times of Flatland (one turning out to be a 3-dimensionally expansive (inclusive of time) 2-dimensional (thin spatial crust) Flatland)! Ugh!

My rendering is that SPACE (Gravity (archaic: Aether)) is not flat but spontaneous concurrent REALTIME(t=0) 'front' ('frontier') and coordinate point SPACETIME (past histories past light cone (t=+1) and future histories future light cone (t=-1)), and ["time's mirror"] collapsed cosmological constant (/\) P/BB Horizon Mirror (t=*1*), are all infinitely flatter than stacks of pancakes.

 

[Questioner]

According to theory it took a long time before space became clear for light to travel unimpeded.

So any light we see is from a good deal after the initial instant of the big bang.

Things had to have been pretty far apart when the light left any object we now see.
In the mean time space has been stretching so that trip to us has kept getting longer and longer.

The light we now see has traveled 13B LYs from where that object was then.

I think that's the basic idea.

 

[billslugg]

Yes, light started when the fireball cleared up at 380,000 years after Dabegwan*. The universe is expanding at the speed of light, stuff takes time to get here.

*Southern California slang for "The Big One"

 

[Atlan0001]

With distance, an expanding triangulation, accelerating in an expanding triangulation of a 3-pointed triangle!

NOW! At what point, macrocosmically, as well as microcosmically, does "Relativity" completely break down . . . completely shatter into many diamond-like shards of universes?! "Break down" begins less than an arm's reach (so to speak) away!

 

[Questioner]

It's weird to think about,
if we look out at something directly North 13B LYs away and directly opposite South also 13B LYs we were in the middle of them when they were much closer together.

So if we want to see the instant of the big bang we have to [can] look exactly in the center of ourselves to see it.

(Sounds like cheap philosophy.)

 

[Atlan0001]

It's weird to think about,
if we look out at something directly North 13B LYs away and directly opposite South also 13B LYs we were in the middle of them when they were much closer together.

So if we want to see the instant of the big bang we have to [can] look exactly in the center of ourselves to see it.

(Sounds like cheap philosophy.)

"The center of ourselves"? Think about the universality of the Planck Horizon (aka the Big Bang Horizon / aka one of the two horizons of the speed of light (c=(t=0) and/or c=(t=*1*)))!

 

[Questioner]

I am the big bang! Lol

 

[Atlan0001]

I am the big bang! Lol

Well, not the whole thing but a piece of it / 'of a piece with it'.

 

[Questioner]

One could conceptualize that we are journeying inside the big bang as space expands around us.

At 13B yrs old i have to admit to be beginning to feel it.

Time to polish those photons again...

 

[Atlan0001]

As far as I know! which is just as much as anyone at all knows! that Horizon is an eternally permanent fixture. And the human body, like the head of a pin, can contain within it an infinity of infinitesimals, thus infinity itself. Not counting "infinity of the mind" to begin with, how does it feel to be a walking mass of infinities, and, thanks to infinity, being immortal . . . at least in a mind stretching and renewing over infinities of horizon universes from Stone Age cave to Space Age starship . . . rather than being such an infant at just 13B years old?

 

[billslugg]

The Big Bang was 13 billion years ago but it seems like just yesterday. Time flies, I don't know where it goes.

 

[Atlan0001]

The Planck / Big Bang universe event doesn't work like a supernova event, nor does its time have anything to do with time as we know it. It is an out of time / an all time (t=*1*) eternally permanent closed up and collapsed containment-like Horizon of an infinity of horizon universes (existing both inside / outside that event -- in SPOL superposition -- horizon): Thus, a collapsed cosmological constant (/\) event. Multi-dimensional . . . an Infinite MULTIVERSE (from 0-d point singularities, 1-de strings and 2-d Flatlands, through ever-increasing builds of dimensionalities in the hyperspace folds and out of the folds of hyperspace) Universe.

 

[Greenlight]

if the space part of space/time were expanding then it took those distant planets 13 billion years to get to where they are relative to us, then it will take 13 billion more years for their light to get back to us so that we see it where where we do.

But if the time part of space/time is what is changing instead, then those planets were already where we see them and they didnt have to use any time to expand anywhere.

 

[Atlan0001]

if the space part of space/time were expanding then it took those distant planets 13 billion years to get to where they are relative to us, then it will take 13 billion more years for their light to get back to us so that we see it where where we do.

But if the time part of space/time is what is changing instead, then those planets were already where we see them and they didnt have to use any time to expand anywhere.

If things were 1-statically 1-dimensional you would be right on but they are not. Beyond us, beyond "Relativity" to us, it is not only an infinity of horizon universes inside and outside of a superposition (time mirror) Mirror Horizon (Horizon Mirror (t=*1*), it is a multi-dimensional MULTIVERSE Universe. To begin with, an infinite separational plurality and complexity of "motion" throughout all the layers and levels of increasingly distant positions and velocities in and of the multiverse universe forbids you to be right. Relativity breaks down; complexity collapses . . . there is "event horizon" (there are event horizons).

Second is the self-similar fractal zooms structure (inclusive of a fundamental "set and reset") of the multiverse universe. Hyperspace / subspace "zoom" SPACE (gravity / antigravity force made . . . or vice-versa (archaic: Aether / Ether)). Fundamental "set and reset" . . . macrocosmic / microcosmic strong binding (nuclear) force forming basic "definition."

To be cont'd, maybe....

 

[goatboy]

Thank you all. My head still hurts! I think the explanations are beyond my mental capacity.

 

[Questioner]

Remember you are at a place that was at the center of the big bang 13B yrs ago. Everywhere is.
The big bang was right here as well as out there.

Good luck on the headache.

 

[Gibsense]

Goatboy you surely are wrong. Your mental capacity is no problem I'll bet.
What may be a problem is experience.
I have a much simpler view of reality but it does require a bit of imagination. The above discussion assumes a flat (presumably infinite universe) like a flat piece of paper. Some might redefine this to define flat as any shape that can accommodate parallel lines unbounded etc. Perhaps you should ignore this in favour of a different shape (I.M.O.) e.g.

Place a dot on a bit of paper: This is the Big Bang.
Using protractors to draw a circle putting the sharp end on the Big Bang and using the pencil end to produce a circle. You have a circle with a dot in the centre, obviously.

The distance from the dot to the circle represents 13.8 billion years. Our Universe is the Circle. Not inside the circle (that's where it was in the past). Not outside the circle that's where it will grow.

Clearly, a circumference line (the circle) is not 3d space but for simplicity, it represents it validly. So you can see there is no way of getting back to the Big Bang as you are contained in the circle.

So the question arises "Why do we say we look back to stars only a short time since the Big Bang ?" Well, the circle represents 3d space so light travels along it. It takes time to do this.
The circle is getting bigger - the space is stretching (the universe is expanding) and so is the wavelength of the light. The wavelength gets longer and longer (redder and redder) turning from light to microwaves to radio waves and so on. There is then a point where we cannot see anything. The James Webb telescope can handle the redder wavelengths to a degree. It sees more detail and so also further back in time.
So far so good. However, some of the light (from now what are far-off stars), has been heading our way since when the circle was small and space has been stretched.
So light wavelengths have been getting redder by the stretching of space - as we said - but the light has had to reach us in a long spiral as the universe expanded.

NOW, hold onto your hat, lol . If we were alive in the early universe - a little circle - then it would have taken only a short time to reach us spiralling out. Yes? Also the Stars would appear less red (less light stretching). However we are not near so a lot more time is needed for light to reach us. Not only that but (my guess is...) the darkest red will not necessarily coincide with a view near the Big Bang. It may well be (IMO) that the farthest star/galaxies we can see are no where near from the Big Bang and we are seeing galaxies much older than we think.

Anyway if you trawled through this verbage I hope it helped.

A point to bear in mind though is that many think the universe is flat. This makes our current observations difficult to explain

 

[Atlan0001]

The Big Bang was 13 billion years ago but it seems like just yesterday. Time flies, I don't know where it goes.

Bill, I'm about to knock you out of your rocking chair! The universe accelerates in expansion faster than the speed of light! What we observe is a Big Bang 13 billion years from now! We, right here, right now, are quantum entangled , "Klein bottle-like" (bent, curving round in on themselves light cones-like) with, in, and at "a universe beginning point of 'Origin' (right here, right now)!" Turn that illustration of universe expansion around 180 degrees in time reversal and put us at the point of universe compaction (our little COMPACTED POINT of the universe), the future coming to us in the past in an observation of a light that gets from there to here far faster than the speed of light!

I need this observation elsewhere as well here to do some beefing up! 'Expanded' upon it there (pardon the pun)!