About the Expansion of the Universe

Alexei Leonov, first spacewalk. The Russian program had alot of firsts :

- first artificial satellite ( Sputnik )
- first living being in orbit ( Leica/Laika the dog, may she rest in peace )
- first man in orbit ( Mr Gargarin )
- first spacewalk

plus Lunakod/Lunokhod, neat remote vehicles which explored the Moon's surface for some months, soil testing and photos, though somewhat overshadowed by Apollo.

I couldn't tell you the name of anyone on the space station, or even how many are up there. Much less what they're up to.

As for time's arrow, I prefer the thermodynamic one - the universe just get messier. There's a weirdo comment just below that article :

which apart from spelling and like errors is utter tripe. Reminds me of a program that was written a while ago for writing philosophy papers - a formulaic approach combining words from a specialised dictionary - some of which were published ( thus making a point about philosophy literature standards ).

Cheers, Mike.

Oh, wow!! I just did :

Enabling Access Points and Lambda Calculus with Parure
Yuri Gargarin, Alexei Leonov and Mike Hewson

And it's fully referenced. ROFL!!

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) Here's a reference :

I've clearly forgotten some of my earlier work. Those other guys were hacks. I was always carrying them ....

Here's a totally silly graph from it :

ie. bandwidth measured as temperature, some sort of entropic thing maybe, with Big Bang order of magnitude!! Plus complexity as a molecular sized length, nanotech switching hardware perhaps. Evidently low correlation anyway. By the way, parure means 'a set of matching jewellery'. Priceless. :-)

Well there was alot of German talent about post war. But there was plenty otherwise. Poor Sergei Korolyov had a rugged time ( denounced for 'slowing research' ) with a Stalin purge. But when freed did a terrific job with their program.

Cheers, Mike.

( edit ) That 'aether wave theory' website also has a blog. Basically it's just two guys who have been wailing on each other for the past couple of months!! Unless one/both of them is a sock puppet ... :-)

No need to be sorry! It's a strange business actually. After the USSR fell apart we are now finding out that there was plenty of 'right stuff' about. Alexei Leonov and David Scott have done a great book called 'Two Sides of the Moon'. It's a sort of dual autobiography, but gives a good feel for the cold war setting/background that each astro/cosmo-naut was in. They met in space with the Apollo-Soyuz mission. It's history now, but I can only wonder what could have been done with co-operative rather than competitive programs. The Russians had some very tragic failures only much later openly divulged, like one launch pad debacle that incinerated about 70 people.

As regards the original topic : an often unstated assumption is the constancy of measured values, or more generally the operation of physical laws. Like c, G and h. As humans have been around to do this only 'recently' compared to the age of the universe, then we have a rather narrow time series to base our knowledge. Strictly speaking estimates of the age of the universe ( or even that such a concept is legitimate ) are thinly based. Of course that's our best data for sure, but it pays not to forget that we are extrapolating - predicting beyond the range of the data set that produced our understanding. As I've indicated before, that's the soap we could well be slipping on in the dark energy/matter business.

Cheers, Mike.