Why does space appear black?

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Why does space appear black?

Unread post by BlueCrab » Fri Jun 13, 2008 8:41 pm

Why does space appear black?

As I understand it do to the Doppler effect, waves redshift to the point that they appear black; essentially?

The EU argues, as I understand it, that Doppler red shift is in fact not inherently a measure of distance; correct? So how does this mesh with the redshifting of waves/particles into blackness? Does it have anything to do with it at all?

In the EU theory why is space black? (or should I say appear black)

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junglelord
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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by junglelord » Fri Jun 13, 2008 9:43 pm

Photon density is too low and there is nothing to reflect off of.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
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Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
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nick c
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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by nick c » Sat Jun 14, 2008 7:04 am

hello BlueCrab,
Why does space appear black?
As opposed to being filled with the glow of endless stars and galaxies?
Are you refering to [url2=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox]Olbers Paradox[/url2]?
If the universe is assumed to contain an infinite number of uniformly distributed luminous stars, then:

1. The collective brightness received from a set of stars at a given distance is independent of that distance;
2. Every line of sight should terminate eventually on the surface of a star;
3. Every point in the sky should be as bright as the surface of a star.
A fashionable explanation for why the sky appears black is that the universe is finite and expanding...therefore the light is redshifted. So often, Olber's Paradox is explained by, and therefore used as a piece of evidence in support of the Big Bang Theory.
Thus, the mainstream explanation of Olbers' paradox requires a universe that is both finitely old and expanding.
But there is an alternate and simpler solution, Don Scott has written on this subject, explaining it as simply a result of the limitations of the human eye, which cannot perceive light beyond a certain magnitude.
It may also help to remember that the human eye is different from
photographic film or a CCD chip. It does not integrate over time. The
longer we expose a photographic plate to starlight the brighter the image
becomes. (There is a limit even to this process in film due to what is
called reciprocity failure.) But, humans can stare at the night sky all
night long and not see anything they didn't see after the first few minutes.
Things don't get brighter for us the longer we look at them. So
theoretically the longer we expose our CCD camera chip, the brighter the
image (deeper into space we can see). This is not true for the human eye.
We can see the 8400 or so stars that we can see, and all the zillions of
others might as well not be there AT ALL as far as our humble naked human
eyes are concerned.

Olber's Paradox is not a paradox at all if you look at it correctly. It is
yet another example of theoretical mathematics applied incorrectly to a real
world phenomenon. Or a mathematician might say, "They got the upper limit
on the integral wrong."

Don Scott
http://www.kronia.com/thoth/ThVIII02.txt
Nick

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by junglelord » Sat Jun 14, 2008 8:49 am

Thats what I said, photon density is too low.
;)
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by kevin » Sat Jun 14, 2008 12:10 pm

What if the light we see by and recognise needs two opposing field conditions to meet and thus create the light?
Thus the field of the sun needs to meet another field to create light around and within the field boundries of each field producing object.
The light would then alter dependant on the field shape and intensity.
Heat would be created by the local space jittering where the fields interact most.
Thus any craft sent out into space would create light in relation to the small field it creates and thus interacts with when in alignment with predominately the sun.
There will be possibly dozens of other radiations emitting from the sun, but perhaps we assign completly the wrong ones to what we call light?
Kevin

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by nick c » Sat Jun 14, 2008 1:08 pm

Hello JL:
Junglelord wrote:
Thats what I said, photon density is too low.
;)
Yes sir, you are correct :)
But I had to work Olber's Paradox and Scott's practical explanation in there, as I thought that the original post was going in the direction of Olber's Paradox having its' solution in the BB (expanding universe/red shift) and indeed, I have heard amateur astronomers cite the BB as the solution to Olber's, ie...the reason the sky is dark is because of expansion of the universe and the red shift.
Nick

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by klypp » Sun Jun 15, 2008 4:21 am

BlueCrab wrote:Why does space appear black?
Black?
Image
Doesn't look black to me. A bit bluish, maybe? Or greenish? ;)
But not black!

Like this guy says: Put on your glasses!!! :geek:

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by rangerover777 » Sun Jun 15, 2008 9:28 am

It seems that the answer is pretty simple : Since light does not hit any object while
traveling in space, so there is no reflection. If earth was a part of a relativity dense
nebula we might see much more light in the night sky (reflected from the dust clouds
around).
Or if you would sit in your house during the day, with open windows and all the objects
(trees, walls, roofs, plants, grass, dust in the atmosphere, etc.) around you would
absorbed 100% of the sun light - it will look like night time….

Now, there is a difference here between a light source and reflected light.
In the Olber’s Paradox it refer to a light source, and like Don Smith said it’s a matter
of exposure and time of accumulation. So there is no paradox in Olber’s theory.

The visible light also carries a particle of matter with it (the so called “photon”) and
if you compare it with the Atom, there is some similarity if you consider light to a
beam of particles. Maybe this is why it deflected so well when it encounter an object
that made of atoms.

I’m not sure if there is such a thing as a “Photonic Lenses” or Filters, that you can look
around you during the daytime and see how plants (for instance) absorbing more light
then a bare soil around them, and if such a “spectro-view” can be translated to numbers.

Since the old question - “if the visible light is a beam of matter” (we already know it
carries energy as well), could start to make some sense. And how this light from the stars
become matter, may shade light on how a constant transformation of matter occurs in the
universe (including the deflection question).

Something to think about.

Cheers

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by nick c » Sun Jun 15, 2008 10:08 am

hello klypp,
Black?

Doesn't look black to me. A bit bluish, maybe? Or greenish?
But not black!
Like this guy says: Put on your glasses!!! :geek:
That is an interesting twist on the "Absorption" explanation for Olbers Paradox. The twist being that the (visible) light is being absorbed and then reemited in a wavelength not visible to the human eye. Note the refutation of the "Absorption" explanation below, assumes that the reemission will be perceived by the human eye.
Absorption
An alternative explanation which is sometimes suggested by non-scientists is that the universe is not transparent, and the light from distant stars is blocked by intermediate dark stars or absorbed by dust or gas, so that there is a bound on the distance from which light can reach the observer.

However, this reasoning alone would not resolve the paradox given the following argument: According to the second law of thermodynamics there can be no material hotter than its surroundings that does not give off radiation and at the same time be uniformly distributed through space. Energy must be conserved, per the first law of thermodynamics. Therefore, the intermediate matter would heat up and soon reradiate the energy (possibly at different wavelengths). This would again result in intense uniform radiation as bright as the collective of stars themselves, which is not observed.


color highlight added

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox
I still lean toward Scott's explanation (or JL's not enough photon's...hmmm but then after reading some of the other threads, I wonder if there is even such a thing as a photon :shock: )
We can see the 8400 or so stars that we can see, and all the zillions of
others might as well not be there AT ALL
as far as our humble naked human
eyes are concerned.

Olber's Paradox is not a paradox at all if you look at it correctly. It is
yet another example of theoretical mathematics applied incorrectly to a real
world phenomenon. Or a mathematician might say, "They got the upper limit
on the integral wrong."

color highlight added
So that (3K radiation) argument is somewhat irrelevant, since if Scott's reasoning is correct, we would not see a bright sky even if there were no intermediate objects such as dark stars, dust, and gas to absorb the light. Anyway, it allows one another argument against the proposition that Olber's is best explained by the Big Bang.

Nick

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by junglelord » Sun Jun 15, 2008 6:33 pm

Photons are very real. Crititcal Photon density and critical threshold levels of activation for Rods (photoreceptors of the eye for black and white) are the reasons why space is black combined with the most important fact that there is nothing to reflect off of. These three reasons are why space is black.
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by klypp » Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:18 am

Hello nick,
just some comments on Olbers paradox and the Wikipedia article:

Olbers' paradox is about more than just a bit brighter sky. As the Wikiguy says, "the intermediate matter would heat up and soon reradiate the energy". De Chesaux estimated that this would lead to a sky 150.000 times more intense than sunlight! Olbers came to a similar result. And this definately wouldn't give us all just a nice tan. The earth would simply evaporate within hours!!!

This is why I prefer Marmet. I think Scott has the correct answer to another problem, not the Olbers' paradox.

It is easy to show that Olbers is wrong. And using the laws of thermodynamics works very well!
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that if a star is heating up it's surroundings, it has to cool down equally much itself! Conservation of energy.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that an infinite univers as a whole cannot heat up or cool down! It can only heat up if heat is added from the outside. An infinite universe has no outside!

It's always amusing to see how these Wikipedia "experts" wriggles when they're out to "prove" their weird theories. Note how this guy mixes "unifomingly distributed" into his interpretation of the second law. But this has nothing to do with it. The second law says that heat must go from hot to cold. It doesn't matter how hot and cold are distributed within the system! I don't know why he obscures things by putting this in. My guess would be that it has to do with the isotropy of the universe. How to prove that isotropy contradicts an infinite universe and favours Big Bang? Well, I'm not going to lend a helping hand. Marmet is right, a Big Bang-universe should be anisotropic!
Also note how he talks about heating of matter in connection with the first law, and conveniently "forgets" to mention that the emitting star cools down.

And of course this: "alternative explanation which is sometimes suggested by non-scientists".
The "non-scientist" in this case, Paul Marmet, was a professor of physics for more than twenty years and also President of the Canadian Association of Physicists, just to start with...

So, the universe is infinite and has a "temperature" of about 3K. We might all evaporate soon, but not as a result of the heat from distant stars!

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by redeye » Mon Jun 16, 2008 7:53 am

The first law of thermodynamics tells us that if a star is heating up it's surroundings, it has to cool down equally much itself! Conservation of energy.
Would this still hold true for a star that was receiving energy from an outside source?

Cheers!
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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by klypp » Mon Jun 16, 2008 9:01 am

redeye wrote:Would this still hold true for a star that was receiving energy from an outside source?
You mean like an electric sun? Yes, it would! As long as the universe obeys the laws of thermodynamics.

I have to put in a disclaimer here. My intention was first and foremost to show that the Big Banger's arguments are false. They can not use the laws of thermodynamics the way they do!

Whether or not the universe obeys these laws everywhere is, however, another question. I'm not so sure about their fundamental nature. At least, I can't say the modern "entropy" version is cordially applauded by the roses in my garden... :(

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by junglelord » Mon Jun 16, 2008 12:21 pm

Thats due to Information! Rose's carry information. Any theory that does not include information, is not complete...therefore the rule of entropy is not complete.
Ask anybody what the physical world is made of, and you are likely to be told "matter and energy."
Yet if we have learned anything from engineering, biology and physics, information is just as crucial an ingredient.
The robot at the automobile factory is supplied with metal and plastic but can make nothing useful without copious instructions telling it which part to weld to what and so on. A ribosome in a cell in your body is supplied with amino acid building blocks and is powered by energy released by the conversion of ATP to ADP, but it can synthesize no proteins without the information brought to it from the DNA in the cell's nucleus. Likewise, a century of developments in physics has taught us that information is a crucial player in physical systems and processes. Indeed, a current trend, initiated by John A. Wheeler of Princeton University, is to regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.

A Tale of Two Entropies

Formal information theory originated in seminal 1948 papers by American applied mathematician Claude E. Shannon, who introduced today's most widely used measure of information content: entropy. Entropy had long been a central concept of thermodynamics, the branch of physics dealing with heat. Thermodynamic entropy is popularly described as the disorder in a physical system. In 1877 Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann characterized it more precisely in terms of the number of distinct microscopic states that the particles composing a chunk of matter could be in while still looking like the same macroscopic chunk of matter. For example, for the air in the room around you, one would count all the ways that the individual gas molecules could be distributed in the room and all the ways they could be moving.

When Shannon cast about for a way to quantify the information contained in, say, a message, he was led by logic to a formula with the same form as Boltzmann's. The Shannon entropy of a message is the number of binary digits, or bits, needed to encode it. Shannon's entropy does not enlighten us about the value of information, which is highly dependent on context. Yet as an objective measure of quantity of information, it has been enormously useful in science and technology. For instance, the design of every modern communications device--from cellular phones to modems to compact-disc players--relies on Shannon entropy.

Thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy are conceptually equivalent: the number of arrangements that are counted by Boltzmann entropy reflects the amount of Shannon information one would need to implement any particular arrangement. The two entropies have two salient differences, though. First, the thermodynamic entropy used by a chemist or a refrigeration engineer is expressed in units of energy divided by temperature, whereas the Shannon entropy used by a communications engineer is in bits, essentially dimensionless. That difference is merely a matter of convention.

Even when reduced to common units, however, typical values of the two entropies differ vastly in magnitude. A silicon microchip carrying a gigabyte of data, for instance, has a Shannon entropy of about 1010 bits (one byte is eight bits), tremendously smaller than the chip's thermodynamic entropy, which is about 1023 bits at room temperature. This discrepancy occurs because the entropies are computed for different degrees of freedom. A degree of freedom is any quantity that can vary, such as a coordinate specifying a particle's location or one component of its velocity. The Shannon entropy of the chip cares only about the overall state of each tiny transistor etched in the silicon crystal--the transistor is on or off; it is a 0 or a 1--a single binary degree of freedom. Thermodynamic entropy, in contrast, depends on the states of all the billions of atoms (and their roaming electrons) that make up each transistor. As miniaturization brings closer the day when each atom will store one bit of information for us, the useful Shannon entropy of the state-of-the-art microchip will edge closer in magnitude to its material's thermodynamic entropy. When the two entropies are calculated for the same degrees of freedom, they are equal.

What are the ultimate degrees of freedom? Atoms, after all, are made of electrons and nuclei, nuclei are agglomerations of protons and neutrons, and those in turn are composed of quarks. Many physicists today consider electrons and quarks to be excitations of superstrings, which they hypothesize to be the most fundamental entities. But the vicissitudes of a century of revelations in physics warn us not to be dogmatic. There could be more levels of structure in our universe than are dreamt of in today's physics.

One cannot calculate the ultimate information capacity of a chunk of matter or, equivalently, its true thermodynamic entropy, without knowing the nature of the ultimate constituents of matter or of the deepest level of structure, which I shall refer to as level X. (This ambiguity causes no problems in analyzing practical thermodynamics, such as that of car engines, for example, because the quarks within the atoms can be ignored--they do not change their states under the relatively benign conditions in the engine.) Given the dizzying progress in miniaturization, one can playfully contemplate a day when quarks will serve to store information, one bit apiece perhaps. How much information would then fit into our one-centimeter cube? And how much if we harness superstrings or even deeper, yet undreamt of levels? Surprisingly, developments in gravitation physics in the past three decades have supplied some clear answers to what seem to be elusive questions.

This surprising result--that information capacity depends on surface area--has a natural explanation if the holographic principle (proposed in 1993 by Nobelist Gerard 't Hooft of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and elaborated by Susskind) is true. In the everyday world, a hologram is a special kind of photograph that generates a full three-dimensional image when it is illuminated in the right manner. All the information describing the 3-D scene is encoded into the pattern of light and dark areas on the two-dimensional piece of film, ready to be regenerated. The holographic principle contends that an analogue of this visual magic applies to the full physical description of any system occupying a 3-D region: it proposes that another physical theory defined only on the 2-D boundary of the region completely describes the 3-D physics. If a 3-D system can be fully described by a physical theory operating solely on its 2-D boundary, one would expect the information content of the system not to exceed that of the description on the boundary.

A Universe Painted on Its Boundary

Can we apply the holographic principle to the universe at large? The real universe is a 4-D system: it has volume and extends in time. If the physics of our universe is holographic, there would be an alternative set of physical laws, operating on a 3-D boundary of spacetime somewhere, that would be equivalent to our known 4-D physics. We do not yet know of any such 3-D theory that works in that way. Indeed, what surface should we use as the boundary of the universe? One step toward realizing these ideas is to study models that are simpler than our real universe.

A class of concrete examples of the holographic principle at work involves so-called anti-de Sitter spacetimes. The original de Sitter spacetime is a model universe first obtained by Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter in 1917 as a solution of Einstein's equations, including the repulsive force known as the cosmological constant. De Sitter's spacetime is empty, expands at an accelerating rate and is very highly symmetrical. In 1997 astronomers studying distant supernova explosions concluded that our universe now expands in an accelerated fashion and will probably become increasingly like a de Sitter spacetime in the future. Now, if the repulsion in Einstein's equations is changed to attraction, de Sitter's solution turns into the anti-de Sitter spacetime, which has equally as much symmetry. More important for the holographic concept, it possesses a boundary, which is located "at infinity" and is a lot like our everyday spacetime.

Using anti-de Sitter spacetime, theorists have devised a concrete example of the holographic principle at work: a universe described by superstring theory functioning in an anti-de Sitter spacetime is completely equivalent to a quantum field theory operating on the boundary of that spacetime [see box above]. Thus, the full majesty of superstring theory in an anti-de Sitter universe is painted on the boundary of the universe. Juan Maldacena, then at Harvard University, first conjectured such a relation in 1997 for the 5-D anti-de Sitter case, and it was later confirmed for many situations by Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., and Steven S. Gubser, Igor R. Klebanov and Alexander M. Polyakov of Princeton University. Examples of this holographic correspondence are now known for spacetimes with a variety of dimensions.

This result means that two ostensibly very different theories--not even acting in spaces of the same dimension--are equivalent. Creatures living in one of these universes would be incapable of determining if they inhabited a 5-D universe described by string theory or a 4-D one described by a quantum field theory of point particles. (Of course, the structures of their brains might give them an overwhelming "commonsense" prejudice in favor of one description or another, in just the way that our brains construct an innate perception that our universe has three spatial dimensions; see the illustration on the opposite page.)

The holographic equivalence can allow a difficult calculation in the 4-D boundary spacetime, such as the behavior of quarks and gluons, to be traded for another, easier calculation in the highly symmetric, 5-D anti-de Sitter spacetime.

http://sufizmveinsan.com/fizik/holographic.html
I came to a conclusion when I was doing thesis work on Biophysics, that conclusion is that E=I and that we live in a 5-D Holographic Universe....I stand by those claims. APM agrees with that theory. David Bohm agrees with that theory. Michael Talbot agrees with that theory. Karl Pribram agrees with that theory.
The Holographic Universe
Michael Talbot (1953-1992), was the author of a number of books highlighting parallels between ancient mysticism and quantum mechanics, and espousing a theoretical model of reality that suggests the physical universe is akin to a giant hologram. In The Holographic Universe, Talbot made many references to the work of David Bohm and Karl Pribram, and it is quite apparent that the combined work of Bohm and Karl Pribram is largely the cornerstone upon which Talbot built his ideas.


The Holographic Universe
In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect's experiment is related to the EPR Experiment, a consicousness experiment which had been devised by Albert Einstein, and his colleagues, Poldlsky and Rosen, in order to disprove Quantum Mechanics on the basis of the Pauli Exclusion Principle contradicting Special Relativity.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

http://www.crystalinks.com/holographic.html
If you only knew the magnificence of the 3, 6 and 9, then you would have a key to the universe.
— Nikola Tesla
Casting Out the Nines from PHI into Indigs reveals the Cosmic Harmonic Code.
— Junglelord.
Knowledge is Structured in Consciouness. Structure and Function Cannot Be Seperated.
— Junglelord

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Re: Why does space appear black?

Unread post by Solar » Mon Jun 16, 2008 3:28 pm

I'm just a bit curious here.

There is an interesting chart of the Electromagnetic Spectrum here. As is familiar, the spectrum of visible light falls within a pretty narrow area of what is know so far of this spectrum.

It seems to me that any frequencies to either side of the spectrum of visible light would naturally appear 'black'. Simply because they don't fall within the required range of visible light.
"Our laws of force tend to be applied in the Newtonian sense in that for every action there is an equal reaction, and yet, in the real world, where many-body gravitational effects or electrodynamic actions prevail, we do not have every action paired with an equal reaction." — Harold Aspden

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