/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9370189
That's after the big bang.

There's no rigorous scientific theory about what happened before the big bang, as all math breaks down at the singularity - and yer kinda boned at the planck level, before you even get that far.

There's also no observational way to test such ideas, due to this big nasty field of plasma radiating from our past - though there has been some work regarding measuring gravity waves from behind the CMB - not that it'd tell you a whole lot, but it could rule out various cosmological theories.

>>9370142
Cuz the accepted theories can be observationally tested, and are often used daily, while the alternative theories are either even more broken, or can never be observationally tested.

Not that there isn't constantly a plethora of theories in progress - gotta be a million quantum gravity theories competing with each other right now, and various other GUT's, that don't currently mesh with observation, but may yet one day with continued tweaking and new observations. So it isn't as if alternative theories are being ignored - there's a constant battle of unnatural selection among them - it's just the one's the creationists tend to like are shit.

It's not like the accepted theories have been set in stone for millennia or anything - even the standard model's been turned on its head at least four times in the last hundred years. The Hubble Telescope changed pretty much everything less than two decades ago, with that whole accelerating expansion thing.

My understanding of many things regarded physics, universal structure, and even solar structure is very limited. I have a few questions that I hope you may be able to answer for me.

From what I know, scientists have confirmed that the universe is expanding. However, from a relativistic perspective, is there any way to know whether or not the universe is expanding in one particular direction versus another? Or is the universe simply expanding outwards in all directions?

Assuming the universe is not expanding in a given direction and space is expanding outwards, would that not make any person's current location in the space the "center" of the universe, relative to that person? Considering that individual could travel, infinitely, in any direction, is there any way to disprove that logic?

Using this hypothesis, and knowledge that the solar system is a heliocentric model, all of the other planets revolve around the sun. Yet, from our reference location in space, that model would then rotate around us from a relative perspective? Is there any way to definitely prove that we are in fact moving through space, rather than space and objects move around our location relative to us?