Artful Dodger: Can we assume this 12 year old cosmological genius is smarter than a fifth grader? :oP I am almost certain that I am not. HAHAHAHAHAHA? bigthink link is interesting, but I need to go back and listen again. I sort of understood what he was saying about gravity. I think, maybe, I sort of understood it. If I wasn't now sober all the time, I might have gotten it the first time. Just kidding, but he was rather vague about whatever his point was. It seemed he agreed with what I just said about gravity, but then again, it was so vague I couldn't say for sure what he was alluding to. With my luck, he is registered at this site and I should expect to soon hear from him a critique of my ideas.

There is good reason our math breaks down when reverse enginering the universes expansion, when we reach a point shortly after the big bang expansion started. Math is customarily used to explain what we already know about something behaving in a consistant manner, This is how math has always been used, although we can use it now to speculate about things we may start out only imaginating. But the problem before us when looking at expanssion from some nondescript point is that the laws of our universe were in the process of being formed, before there were any laws to explain anything. There was nothing yet formed or fully formed for math to explain. String theory is popular because of its promise of possibly resolving this problem, but it is math in need of theories to explain what the math describes rather than math to describe what is already known. Also, in my opinioin the idea of anything being infinite is 'infinitely problematic' because there is no mathematical difference between the number _Zero_ and an imaginary value represented by the words _infinitely small. It's impossible to resolve this with any form of math we choose to use. I'm not saying there will never someday be a way to represent everything we believe happened through math, all the way back to the very beginning, but the idea of any chain of cause and effect that can be traced back to what amounts to a non existance cause is anathema to anyone trained in natural sciences. Just as there being a god or intelligent designer is anathema to anyone who is convinced there is no such being.

I must talk fast, before computer gets the hickups again. To the best of my understanding, space and time and even gravity are not things in the same way matter and energy are things. Space and time are both relationship of mass to other mass, space is the nothing between areas of mass and time is the relative changing positions of units of mass to one another, both are defined by mass but are of themselves not comprised of mass. Gravity, as I understand it, is the effect side in a chain of cause and effect of motion taking place within any unit of mass and its resulting effect on other mass. Put space and time together, put ;it in the oven at 350 degrees for 20 minutes, and you have baked a cake called "gravity". Space is the flour, and time is the yeast. In other words, time is the active ingredient. If you remove all space between mass you have neither space nor time. But if it was possible to stop only time, you would still have space. The infinitly small and dense singularity could just as easily be called infinitly large, because with nothing else to compare it to, the size of that point is irrelevant. Technically,, it have no size, since nothing yet exists to compare it to, at least not until chunks of matter are realised shortly after expansion occurs. Anyway, none of this is my area of expertise, but it is fascinating to think about. I am; retired, or unemployed (I haven't decided which yet) so have much more time to get lost in thought (lost in space?) over this.

Artful Dodger: interesting comments on old earth and cosmology. Can you or anyone else tell my how everythink in our universe was small enough to fit into a basketball, then a beachball, and on up to all of the mass we now have in the universe? How could all present mass, potential or realised, exist in a tiny bubble the size of our moon for example? I was an old earther until I did a study of time, what it actually is and how it is subject to basic premise of relativity. There is no real way to judge the relative motion of mass shortly after the big bang event compared to motion of mass today without knowing precisely how fast things were moving then. We see how time is moving now, but using todays measuring stick for the entire span from big bang on up until now is like judging the distance a car has traveled in an hour based on its present speed. By the way, if anyone has been wondering why I have been slow to respond to my games, it's because both my home computer and my laptop are not working properly. Today is the first time in over a month I've been able to get anything done on the home computer. Am at the mercy of my computer, can only use it when it lets me. I know this the politics board, but I would like to see more of science and philosophy being discussed somewhere on this site. Is general chat reserved for anything not listed under any particular heading?