Timeline for Is there physical evidence to distinguish between the expansion of space and an anthropocentric universe?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
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| S Dec 20, 2022 at 8:06 | history | suggested | CommunityBot | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
no spaces before question marks: https://ell.stackexchange.com/a/4870
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| Dec 19, 2022 at 18:02 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Dec 20, 2022 at 8:06 | |||||
| Mar 4, 2022 at 14:26 | comment | added | ProfRob | No, you don't have to provide a theory - you have to provide a hypothesis. The anthropocentric idea is falsifiable. | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 19:46 | comment | added | StephenG - Help Ukraine | @Brionius You normally have to provide an actual theory, not just a vague idea, in order to test it. You cannot falsify a vague idea. FLRW provides a proper theory to test against observation. That's the point - you want people to disprove something they cannot in any way check the detailed predicted behavior of. | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 18:47 | comment | added | Brionius | This is interesting, but doesn't really answer the question - is there a physical observation you can make that distinguishes between Hubble flow and static space-time with radial motion away from Earth? I agree that the latter arrangement is a bit of a "just so" story, but that's orthogonal to whether or not it's falsifiable. It's ok if the answer is "no", I'm not planning to discard the FLRW metric in favor of geocentrism ;) | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:31 | comment | added | StephenG - Help Ukraine | @BlueRaja-DannyPflughoeft GR does not force us to construct a non-anthropocentric model, but it is extremely difficult to make an anthropocentric model with GR that matches what we actually observe (I don't know of one, but I'm no expert in GR cosmology). The problem with the arbitrary center in the antro.. model is that it's, you know, arbitrary. The issue of why we would be really close to the center (so a difference is "irrelevant") just brings us back to an arbitrary model with no rules defined. No underpinning physics for the model is the problem. FLRW does have underpinning physics. | |
| Mar 1, 2022 at 1:02 | comment | added | BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft | Does GR necessarily negate the possibility of an Antropocentric universe? If yes, then put that in your answer. If no, then there's your "underpinning physical model". Also, the comments about "where do your define the center" are completely off-topic - a few AU are irrelevant over billions of light-years... | |
| Feb 28, 2022 at 14:57 | comment | added | StephenG - Help Ukraine | @WaterMolecule The vagueness of the anthropocentric concept means that you can arbitrarily adapt it to match any additional observation. That's what differentiates it from a proper scientific theory. There is no underpinning physical model (like GR) to govern what is reasonable or how to construct the theory. That's not science, it's dogma. | |
| Feb 28, 2022 at 14:46 | comment | added | WaterMolecule | The anthropocentric theory makes some concrete predictions that are at least hypothetically testable. You could, in principle, travel to another galaxy and the expansion wouldn't look spherically symmetric. Whether you can practically test this is another matter, but it's at least in principle possible, which is more than you can say of some things called theories. There might be some practical way to test it that we haven't thought of yet (using gravitational lensing?). Saying that it doesn't make any predictions and isn't a scientific theory is an exaggeration, I'd say. | |
| Feb 28, 2022 at 12:37 | comment | added | adam.baker | I take the OP to be asking what set of observations are rendered coherennt (mathematically interrelated or predictable from one other) by the FLRW, which one would not expect to be coherently related if it merely happened that we were in the middle, etc. | |
| Feb 28, 2022 at 1:37 | history | answered | StephenG - Help Ukraine | CC BY-SA 4.0 |