Mind Body Evolution Podcast

Alchemy, Newton, and the Cosmological Principle

Dr. Josh Stout believes Google is wrong. The universe is 13.7 billion light-years in all directions. Every point is the center, AND every point is the edge. Any direction you look is back in time.

Dr. Josh Stout, PhD

Feb 16, 2024 — 57 min read

For the world is hollow and I have touched the sky...

Why Google is Wrong About the Size of the Universe

Please scroll down for links below the transcript. This is lightly edited AI generated transcript and there may be errors.

Alchemy, Newton and the Cosmological Principle
mindbodyevolution
Dr. Josh Stout

Eric 0:08

Friday, February 16th. Season two. Episode seven. Mind Body Evolution. Hi Josh.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:12

Hi Eric. So, right, today.

Eric 0:17

Shutting the door. I usually do that before we start.

Dr. Josh Stout 0:18

Today, I would like to talk about something of further afield. Again, I talked about sugar. Last time I gave everyone I ate pure discussion on on health related matters, just biology. But I kind of have a hobby where I like to look at other fields. I and I see what look like discrepancies or things that don't necessarily fit perfectly within their sort of concept of themselves. And one of the things I've been interested in for a very long time is cosmology. And there were ideas that I actually came up with as an undergraduate I that I've only begun to understand are not what everyone thinks. And so I thought they would be willing, I would be interesting to I sort of juxtapose what I how I see the universe is working and how Google says the universe works. Okay? And we disagree. And I think I'm right. So I it'll be interesting and I think it'll be interesting to to see my my reasoning to see why I say Google is wrong. And I think Google has to be wrong for a very simple reason that the universe is the universe as we know it everywhere. I could be wrong about this.

Eric 1:50

Google says something different than that.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:54

Yeah, we'll get there.

Eric 1:55

Okay.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:55

But we're going to we're going to talk so.

Eric 1:59

That the universe is the universe everywhere you look. Yeah, It's the same everywhere that the principles are.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:04

Right.

Eric 2:05

That apply here.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:06

Apply everywhere else.

Eric 2:07

As far as you can go.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:09

So people have been thinking about this for a very long time. You had the pythagoreans, you had the neo platonist, you had people trying to reconcile Greek cosmology with Egyptian cosmology. We've talked about that. There's been a lot of talk about what the universe is, this sort of undivided whole from which many things then come. And this has been a through line in human understanding for for a very long time probably pre-dates writing the idea that there was there was nothing and then there was something because it has to kind of be like that.

Eric 2:44

Otherwise there was something all the time in or out, is that that's another possibility. But.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:49

But infinities get get hard to think about, right? And so.

Eric 2:53

So does nothing.

Dr. Josh Stout 2:54

Yeah. So there's nothing. And so all of these things are problems and they've been problems for, for, for philosophers for a long time. You know, one of my favorite philosophers was Parmenides. He was a, he was a Pre-socratic philosopher, and he said, Don't let anyone ever tell you that not being is. And I really like that is part of why they had a hard time with zeros, because zero is a, you know, a circle around nothing, which then takes that nothing and says it's right there, which is hard to talk about because how can nothing be a place.

Eric 3:29

But can you localize nothing.

Dr. Josh Stout 3:30

Yeah, exactly. But you know that's what, that's what, that's what a zero is. There's lots of interesting ideas about it. You know, the Indian concepts of zero is negative infinity, plus positive infinity equals zero. It's not a circle around or something. It's all of everything.

Eric 3:46

And.

Dr. Josh Stout 3:46

Is a zero. Nothing and nothing. Exactly. And I actually think that this represents the universe pretty well, which will be getting into eventually. The universe is a big giant zero, which is interesting to think about.

Eric 4:00

It's not a pot of milk?

Dr. Josh Stout 4:02

But this is also a hypothesis. No, it's not a pot of milk. The milky Way, though, is is is interesting. The the the the the idea of a galaxy is literally milk galactose. It means milk swirling it when you pour cream into your coffee. That's exactly what the Greeks were thinking about when they thought about a galaxy that that swirly spirally shape.

Eric 4:23

I can go for that.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:25

Yeah, exactly. So in early Greek thought you had the idea of this undivided one of which there is nothing that isn't that one. That would be what Parmenides would say. There's nothing that's not the universe because it's the universe by definition.

Eric 4:39

And you can't get outside of it. Too weird because nothing because it's.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:42

The universe, right? There is no nothing outside the universe. There is no nothing.

Eric 4:45

There's no outside.

Dr. Josh Stout 4:45

There's no outside. There's just the universe. Yeah. And so that's, that's the one of palm entities. And he talked about it being bounded by ligatures of strong necessity, ie the idea of that's.

Eric 4:59

A beautifully vague way of speaking.

Dr. Josh Stout 5:00

So it was bound by what needs to be. There can be a thing that isn't that because it's what needs to be. And they literally envisioned it as an egg wrapped around with snakes and those were the ligatures of strong necessity. I'm Cronus and anon K time and necessity were what binds the universe together. You can't escape either of these things. What is necessary is necessary.

Eric 5:25

Sounds like a tautology.

Dr. Josh Stout 5:27

Well, it is. The universe is a tautology and you can't escape it. That's the whole point. The point. That is the point. So this had been going on for some time in a sort of philosophical way, and people had had different concepts. Maybe the universe was infinite from the beginning. There was no beginning. It was just infinite. Or maybe there was a beginning and it started somewhere. And so this was a major change as Christianity starts because in Christian thought, there is a beginning to the universe and in Jewish Old Testament thought there's a beginning to the universe. This is a concept that was then sort of being reconciled with these with these Greek cosmologies, some of which were infinite in all directions. Other ones were infinite in different ways, but there would be bounded infinite different ways to think about infinity, and that there's nothing outside this infinity. And these in the Middle Ages were then being sort of trying to reconcile ideas of Greek and Egyptian thought and coming up with ways to talk about it that were bringing all all of these together. And this was the the origin of alchemy. So the first, you know, truly medieval alchemical text was something called the Emerald Tablet. And the Emerald Tablet was supposedly written in Greek by Hermes Trismegistus. So a combination of the God, Hermes and Thoth Hermes Trismegistus. So Thoth is the scribe of the Egyptian world, the ibis headed God, and he combined with, you know, Hermes carrying the carausius with the wings on his ankles and became this author who wrote a book called The Emerald Tablet. And the Emerald Tablet has become the sort of earth text of all alchemy and magical thinking and one of its primary things, the thing that, you know, really the people take away from it is is the saying as above. So below that what is in the heavens is what is on earth. And what is on Earth is what is in the heavens.

Eric 7:34

So you're saying that pardon me? You're saying that that's one of the oldest concepts.

Dr. Josh Stout 7:38

It's it's one of the concepts that has been a through line. We you know, there is, there's versions of it in in basically all texts, you know, so when you say something like God created man in his image, that would be an example of that. That would be as above so below that. Everything's the same in all directions conceptually, because the microcosm represents the macrocosm, and the macrocosm can be found in the microcosm.

Eric 8:05

This is the way things need to be.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:07

This the way things need to be that everything is fractal at all scales and all the way up and all the way down. This again.

Eric 8:15

Sorry. Can't help but think about the turtles again.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:18

Yeah, exactly. It's fractal turtles in all directions, but you can imagine fractal turtles would get smaller and smaller as they go out. You'd still have finite turtles if you had, you know, fractal turtles, each standing on a smaller turtle as they went. You could end up with a bounded batch of turtles, you know, a Mandelbrot turtles. Essentially, you would have something that had limited size but infinite turtle Mandelbrot.

Eric 8:40

Is it bounded or it is.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:42

Mandelbrot has a particular.

Eric 8:43

In on it. You can it's.

Dr. Josh Stout 8:44

It doesn't end is when you zoom in because it gets smaller and smaller but the size of the Mandelbrot set as a whole giant concept is one thing and it has a particular finite size.

Eric 8:55

You can, you can conceptualize the thing that creates something that…

Dr. Josh Stout 9:00

Right. So if you had a if you had a turtle standing on four smaller turtles and each one of those smaller turtles was standing on four smaller turtles, you could have as a as an entire set, you could have something a finite size with an infinite number of turtles because the smallest turtles would be infinitely small.

Eric 9:15

Right.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:16

It's angels dancing on the head of a pin. Yes. Yeah. These are these are all the concepts that humans have been dealing with for a long time. We make fun of them in many ways because these things I do seem a little bit bizarre when you take them to their logical extremes. Turtles all the way down, dunce goddess was this medieval philosopher who was talking about hierarchies and the and the arrangement of the world. He's one of the ones who was coming up with how many angels? Could you arrange it in a hierarchy? Yeah. And so we get the idea of a dunce cap from him, from the philosopher Duns Scotus, and we put on a medieval cone cap looking like a witch or a wizard, and we sit in the corner as, as, as Duns Scotus.

Eric 9:53

Because his ideas were.

Dr. Josh Stout 9:55

So marked by the age of reason. By the time you get to the 18th century that that he was the example of of someone who was an idiot.

Eric 10:03

I had no idea where that came from.

Dr. Josh Stout 10:06

Yeah. And we get the word idiot from a private person. Idiotic means literally idiosyncratic. Someone who's an individual, someone who's not part of the society and is in is different from that. Wonderful. So anyway, these are these are interesting ways we've we've mocked people over the years is they're they're they're cosmologies and they're they're they're separating out from everyone because they see something different. And that would definitely make me among their crew. I feel like this a lot. So anyway, the the idea in the in the Emerald tablet of as above so below was really important for Newton he he he made his own translation of the Emerald tablet. He was an alchemist and it was how he understood the universe. So when he was trying to understand gravity, gravity had to be the same everywhere. Gravity had to work the same at all levels. So it had to be the way the solar system held together and it had to be the way that a rock was attracted to the earth. All of these things had to be in common. They had to be a direct relationship between, say, gravity and mass. There's no reason that there is one. It's almost a alchemical concept that the heavier something is, the more mass it has. And so it's exactly equal. So a marble and a bowling ball fall at the same rate. Why is that? A bowling ball is being pulled down more than the marble. Why is it not moving faster? It's not moving faster because its inertia slows it down. It exactly the same amount as it's being pulled by its mass. So the inertia made by the mass is exactly proportional to the gravity made by the mass. And so there's this beautiful sort of symmetry is that Newton was seeing as an alchemist that informed his mathematics and informed the way he was trying to conceptualize the world that all of these things had to be true and had to be these sort of unifying ideas that you can then express these in math, which was he saw as the pure alchemical language that the language was you could not lie in because the things you described had to be the way they were described. They couldn't be a different way.

Eric 12:15

And because of they were a different way, the equation would work.

Dr. Josh Stout 12:18

And so this is how he was viewing the world, but it was coming from what had been magical, thinking that everything has to be the same, that the macrocosm has to be the macrocosm. And he was then expanding this to say, if the universe truly works this way, then I can say things about the universe by looking at the microcosm I can run experiments. And so he was creating modern experimental physics as an alchemist, and so he was doing microcosm experiments to understand a a cosmology, a mythology, a a, a spiritual world that he was understanding as a way the world had to be. Because it doesn't have to be that way. Things could be different at different levels. You know, I was mentioning before we started that this was why I, I, Einstein really hated quantum mechanics. You know, he said, I don't like the idea that God plays dice with the universe. But what he really, really hated was the idea that at some scale the universe was different from what we see and that, you know, we tend to still think of it as the microcosm, as the macrocosm. You know, we want to think of atoms as little planets surrounding a sun.

Eric 13:38

We want to think of things as things that we can actually think of.

Dr. Josh Stout 13:42

Right. And, you know, clearly, atoms are not that. And the quantum world is different from the larger world that.

Eric 13:47

We conceive of that we. So how do we talk about it?

Dr. Josh Stout 13:49

So this idea breaks down at certain levels and it's not supposed to as an alchemical idea. It's supposed to be true at every level, all the way down. But there are levels where it does seem to break down. And so the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, really hated this. The one who came came up with the idea of the scientific revolution, that there is a, you know, a new idea that doesn't match the old ideas and then sort of gets moved forward. He was fighting against the earlier, the logical positivist who came up with the scientific method, the idea that, you know, you hypothesize, you test it, you come up with something, a new thing that became questioned as as, as, as a process. And so philosophers were trying to come up with new ways to think about how knowledge moves forward. And one of the things that Popper really disliked was the idea of the cosmological principle, the idea that there was a anything you saw in the universe must be just like it is here. There's there's no reason for that. That's essentially a religious statement, right?

Eric 14:54

How would you know?

Dr. Josh Stout 14:55

How would you know? Exactly. And so he really disliked this and Newton wouldn't have disagreed with him. He's like, yes, that's a religious statement. And that's what I am doing when I'm doing my math and inventing.

Eric 15:06

Physics using my religion.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:07

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Eric 15:09

A beautiful thing to be able to prove your religion.

Dr. Josh Stout 15:11

Yeah. He didn't see any problem with that at all. Yeah. Because it was his math and he was inventing too. He was inventing better and better math that could describe curves and things that, you know, didn't add up nicely in two plus two that, you know, we're, we're infinitesimal pieces of things. Right? You could only make a curve out of infinitesimally small straight lines. And he was coming up with a with a with a calculus that would allow you to do that, to deal with some of these infinities. Yeah, I you know, this is this was a the Greeks were doing with their mystical things that the pythagoreans were, you know, the early cosmologists and they were dealing with things like the square root of two and pi, which are all altered in infinitely infinite series in math that, you know, you're getting closer and closer to something that you never quite reach. But, you know, the more numbers in pi you get, the better a circle you've made. So all of these things were not just math ideas, they were also philosophical concepts of how we approach the infinite. And these were people who were, you know, thinking really, really strongly about them.

When Galileo was observing the Galilean moons and supporting the work of Copernicus, who had predicted that there were, you know, orbits and that the Earth was going around the sun and not vice versa. Galileo then supported that with observations and was…

Eric 16:35

This was the moons of Jupiter?

Dr. Josh Stout 16:36

Moons of Jupiter. He saw the Galilean moons, saw them going around and said, you know, here we have something orbiting around something. So other things might be orbiting the moon, might be orbiting around us, and we might be orbiting around the sun.

Eric 16:48

And so he was the first to see that and be able to prove that these things were actually orbiting another planet.

Dr. Josh Stout 16:54

Right. And so he was.

Eric 16:55

Instead of orbiting the Sun.

Dr. Josh Stout 16:56

So he was using the cosmological principle. If he saw this as another piece, then all the pieces could be working like this. And, you know, he was before Newton, So they didn't understand gravity completely, but they knew that, you know, there was an attraction to the earth. Things were in some mystical way attracted to each other. They didn't know exactly how it was working, but they could empirically predict it using their math to describe what they were seeing and relate the predictions to what they were seeing and come up with science. But it was still based on this idea of the universe must be the same everywhere and that we can see small things and then expand it to a larger concept of the universe.

Eric 17:37

Which is the cosmological principle.

Dr. Josh Stout 17:38

Is the cosmological principle. So this is something that really is fundamental to the way science works, even if it sometimes breaks down. And so this is why everyone wants to have the grand unifying theory that brings quantum mechanics into, you know, the Newtonian world, because then you would have something that scaled all the way up and all the way down and it would be really appealing. And it's something we really, really want. We haven't gotten there yet, but the cosmological principle says it must be true and eventually we will get there. It might not be true.

Eric 18:09

It might not be true.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:10

It might not be true. And that's what Popper's warning us about, that it might not be true. And he really hate it.

Eric 18:15

It might be chaos ahead.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:17

It might be all chaos all the way down. Yeah, exactly. But most good science has been made by people who thought along these lines. A lot of philosophers have said it's really no different from a religious point of view.

Eric 18:30

Well, I mean, I completely agree. But the opposite is possibly insanity.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:35

Insanity? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

Eric 18:37

I can't conceive of any of it.

Dr. Josh Stout 18:38

So so it's a very appealing sort of branch of very theoretical religion. So, you know, when Bertrand Russell was thinking about the cosmological principle, he specifically mentioned the Orphic egg. The egg with the snakes wrapped around it and said that this is the origin of all philosophy and that any philosopher or or scientist with any touch of religion, this is what they were talking about, that this is the origin of basically all of Western philosophy and science up until this time. And this is what Bertrand Russell was working on, the cosmological principle. He was trying to, on a pure mathematics sense, be able to derive all math from nothing. And Gödel is the one who showed that he was wrong. So there is also a problem with this that you can't What Gödel showed is that you can't have a…

Eric 20:15

Who showed?

Dr. Josh Stout 20:15

Gödel Okay, G, O with an umlaut over it. Gödel showed that there are no systems that can be purely self explained without reference to outside the system. So you know, you can have Euclidean geometry of based on parallel lines not moving, not, not, not meeting, but you can't prove it within Euclidean geometry. So you can have large scientific or philosophical or mathematical concepts that work and are empirically useful, that are not provable within themselves. And so that's what Gödel showed. And so that's a real problem with this idea of the Orphic egg, everything being contained. There must be something outside, even even or even a mathematical system.

Eric 21:01

So saying that that even the concept that math has to be it's either right or wrong isn't exactly correct. Well, that it can be fuzzy is.

Dr. Josh Stout 21:12

It's just that you can't prove it within within a given system, you must have recourse to a postulate outside the system. So you have to say something like parallel lines never meet. Just trust me. You know, trust me on this, you know? So there eventually is some sort of foundational faith, even if that faith is not God, it's outside the system. And so this is what everything runs into. This is why why people like Bertrand Russell say, well, you know, this is this is religion. The idea of a cosmological principle added at its at its foundation has something that is just a matter of belief that it's all turtles all the way down has to be a matter of belief because you can't you can't prove that you.

Eric 22:01

Can't get all the way down.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:02

You can't get all the way down. Exactly. Yeah. And but it's a really useful belief. You know, you can you can come up with figuring out how the universe works by looking at pieces of the universe.

Eric 22:12

And this is what all scientists say. Lots of really good images of turtles.

Dr. Josh Stout 22:15

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is not. This is not I this is not a cult type belief. This is the belief that the world must work this way. But we can't ever prove that it really does work this way. It just. We know it has to, because otherwise the world doesn't work. As you say, the insanity, right? It's chaos and insanity. Otherwise. And this can only be based on a certain kind of faith, but not not the kind of faith where you'd say, well, the world is 12,000 years old and I don't care about dinosaur fossils. Right. It's not that kind of faith. You know, it's a more rigorous approach to understanding that everything must have some sort of foundation. The turtle have to stand on something, right.

Eric 22:58

Even if we can't see it or prove it.

Dr. Josh Stout 23:00

It has to be because there's a something. Yeah, Yeah. And so, so so this idea is, is, you know, really seen through human history, human thought. It's something we've been working on for a long time. You know, that's where monotheistic ideas come from. It's where Pythagorean and neo platonic ideas come from. It's where a lot of the alchemists were coming from, certainly where Newton was coming from. And it's where, you know, many of the 20th and 19th century philosophers, what their ideas were, Hegel, Kant, etc.. All, all of this is working from, from from the same point of view. So when I was an undergraduate, I was reading someone called Nicholas Kosice. I was studying with a woman named Pauline Watts, who was a brilliant scholar. She translated him, she'd worked with her husband, Charles Trinkaus, and they were, you know, really the tops of the of of the Renaissance scholarship field. And, you know, I thought this was an interesting guy. He had lots of pictures of circles. And, you know, he was trying to get at neo platonic concepts, but I didn't really understand, you know, why something like this would be all that exciting. It was just something I was reading as an undergraduate and I was reading with this great scholar who fun to work with. And it was really, really great to work with. You know, the author of the book you're reading, who is the top in her field in the world? And, you know, I found that terribly exciting. And they released ten other students in the class with me. And, you know, it's.

Eric 24:37

Amazing.

Dr. Josh Stout 24:37

Sitting right next to her as she sits there and pulls on her rubber bands like she would just stare directly at the rubber bands and pull them the entire time. It was great as.

Eric 24:45

She had to have what is now called a fidget.

Dr. Josh Stout 24:47

Absolutely, yeah. In academia there's a lot of the non neurotypicals out there. We we often don't fit in the rest of society very well. We tend to do things like that. So anyway, I had a lovely time with her and I had some, some ideas that had grown out of that class, but I didn't worry about them too much because, you know, as an undergraduate you don't really think you have real ideas, you just sort of things that everyone knows because you just read them like everyone knows these things and later in life I was, was reading histories of, of, of science because I was interested and reading about people like General Bruno. He’s the theologian who said Galileo was right.

I'm listening to the pigeons outside. Yes. I'm hoping that they're going to pick up the mic too much.

Eric 25:47

I think. I think we can just move. So.

Dr. Josh Stout 25:48

So Giordano Bruno saw the work of Copernicus and Galileo and said there must be a cosmological principle. It's not just the Earth goes around the sun. Those stars out there, those are also suns. And they must also have Earth going around them. And if something is true here and we had Jesus coming to bring us the gospel, then there must be Jesuses on all of these worlds.

Eric 26:15

This follows the cosmological cycle.

Dr. Josh Stout 26:18

Exactly. And so he saw clearly. He's often depicted as that guy with his head sticking out through the sphere of six. So in the Middle Ages we thought there was a sphere of fixed stars and that they twirled around the earth.

Eric 26:34

Right? So why not? Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 26:35

So that there's this outer. And so it's like a dome, you know, for the earth is hollow. And I have touch the sky. I love it. Yeah. So, Giordano Bruno was that guy. He stuck his head out through this sphere of six stars and saw the universe as a whole. And so you see him in these medieval things where they're making fun of him as. As this foolish philosopher who stuck his head, stuck through the sphere. And he he saw that there must be an infinite universe. And it was actually partially due to the work of Pauline Watts, that it was understood that he wasn't actually the first who saw there being an infinite universe. It was actually Nicolaus Cusanus. And what Nicolaus Cusanus had said was he was trying to come up with metaphors for what God is. And what Nicholas A.A. had said is the universe is a circle whose center is equal to its circumference. And so the only way you can have a circle whose center is equal to its circumference, well, there's two ways you can have a non dimensionless point, a point with no dimensions. The circumference is the same as the center because they're no distant distance from each other. They are the same thing, Right? A point. Mm hmm. So that's one way you can have a circle whose center is equal to its circumference. Mm hmm. And the other way is with infinity in an infinite circle, an infinitely sized circle. Everywhere in the circle is the center and the circumference. Because there is no edge. It goes in all directions.

Eric 28:09

Breaking my head a little. But I get it. I get. I get.

Dr. Josh Stout 28:11

The idea. If you're standing in a spot. Yeah, it's. It's an infinite direction. Anywhere.

Eric 28:15

Anywhere you are. If you look it, it's infinite. So therefore, you're in the middle.

Dr. Josh Stout 28:20

You're in the middle. Exactly. Exactly.

Eric 28:21

It's the same in all directions.

Dr. Josh Stout 28:23

But if you pick any one direction, you know, you pick a spot that, that that spot could also be the circumference, you know, because it's infinite. It's infinite. Exactly. And so this was a concept he'd come up with. Gita Bruno did read Nicholas Cassandra, so he knew about this. And so they were coming up with the idea of the universe is infinite. And it's the same as what we see here everywhere for infinite directions. And so he was taking the cosmological principle. Boring. Well, somewhat boring. But then he got burnt at the stake for it because it meant there was no heaven and hell below us and above us. And, you know, we we.

Eric 29:02

Right, we weren't.

Dr. Josh Stout 29:03

The center of everything. And so there was multiple Jesuses and all this kind of stuff that you can't have. Yeah. So they, they literally burned him at the stake for this when he, you know, he, he lost his patrons and he was no longer supported and he kept insisting that everyone else was an idiot because they couldn't see the stuff that he could see exactly what Plato was talking about in the in the parable of the cave and the myth of the myth of the cave in Plato's Republic. The idea of the philosopher realizing that these are just shadows on the wall that we're seeing and he sees reality is likely to get burned at the stake by the people who see the shadows because he's coming in and telling him we're all wrong. And they they they're able to predict the shadows better than he is because he's concentrating on the actual source of light outside the cave and in the in the in the allegory of the cave, they actually say, no, the people in the cave will be able to predict their universe better because they're seeing shadows that they've been watching their whole lives better than the guy who can go out and see the sun.

Eric 30:04

Therefore, the guy who goes out and sees the sun seems insane.

Dr. Josh Stout 30:06

Seems insane, and gets burned at the stake. So that that, you know, he's the one who sees to the sphere of fixed stars. He's he's Giordano Bruno. And so this has been something that's been happening for a long time that we we get blinded by our own immediate world and we stop thinking about the cosmological principle and seeing a wider world. And every time someone succeeds in understanding how our world relates to the universe, outside there, we get a better understanding of the universe. And it just happened over and over again. And often the person seeing these things is is ridiculed. So while I was undergraduate thinking about Nicolaus Cusanus, you know, he had its picture of, of, of, of a dot being the same as circumference and talks about it and he had all these, all these things that were part of his his philosophy and predicting a an infinite universe. I, I, I was talking to Pauline and she was saying how, you know, there were a lot of researchers in Germany and the physicists were really excited about this because it was an early prediction of how the universe would have to be and the universe would have to be a circle whose center is equal to its circumference, which is really interesting to think about because the modern conception of the universe is not is no longer truly infinite. We started at a particular time. The universe has a beginning. Something that has a beginning is not truly infinite. It didn't go for all time.

Eric 31:44

But we don't experience time backwards. We experience time moving forward.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:48

So we have we have infinite leave it forward, right? So time is infinite in forward, but it is finite in the reverse.

Eric 31:56

So we believe, yes.

Dr. Josh Stout 31:57

There is other aspects of the universe that are not infinite. The speed of light is fixed and it is a fixed absolute. So there's a couple of fixed absolute points in the universe. One is the beginning and the other is the speed of light. And so these are things, you know, Einstein used the idea of a fixed point to come up with all of his physics. These these are things you can use as sort of a leverage to come up with a concept of how the universe must work once you have these fixed points. And so I really for the last, you know, 30 years plus have been thinking about this idea of a finite, yet infinite universe that's both bounded with bounds, ligatures of strong necessity, but also infinite in the sense of there's there's no real end to it in any direction ever. But it's still in some way bounded. And when you look at modern cosmology from the Big Bang, there is hints of this. One of the big hints of this is the cosmic background. Microwave radiation is the same in all directions this implies, and it should be the same in all directions. Anywhere you are in the universe. And so this implies a cosmological principle that anywhere you are in the universe, you would see the same thing on average, looking out in any direction.

Eric 33:24

Anywhere, anywhere. You need direction you looked from any point in the universe.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:29

You would see the same thing, you would.

Eric 33:30

See the same thing.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:31

And what that thing is, is it represents the big Bang itself. It's the beginning. And so the beginning is in all directions.

Eric 33:38

If you're looking out, you're looking back.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:41

You're looking back.

Eric 33:42

Any any out is back. And look back far enough. You hit the big bang.

Dr. Josh Stout 33:47

You hit the big bang, and the Big Bang released its radiation as it got big enough as it expanded. Right. The universe is expanding now. As the universe expands, there's a point when light can start expanding. Escaping, right? So light light was just going, you know, I don't even know. We can talk about the most particles. This is way outside my realm, you know, cosmological physics, high energy stuff.

Eric 34:09

Prior o expansion, I don't know if things were differentiated.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:13

They weren't right. So so at a certain point, you get far enough things are far enough apart that they're things. Yeah. And the photons that were just bouncing back and forth between them now can start spreading out.

Eric 34:24

Mm hmm.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:25

And they're now spreading out in this expanding universe. And we're still seeing those photons expanding, and that's the microwaves. So those microwaves are photons that over a very long period of time have gone down and down in frequency and until they're now very long wavelength microwaves and they are the remnants of this big bang as it got big enough that the photons could actually escape.

Eric 34:47

That's that's the earliest photons.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:50

Those are the earliest photons.

Eric 34:52

That existed at the Big Bang. That's the background radiation.

Dr. Josh Stout 34:56

Well, some time after the Big Bang after. Yes. But they existed in all directions from the beginning. And we see them in all directions from from anywhere. So. So where did they escape to? Where did these photons escape to? They escape to the universe from the universe everywhere, from the universe to the universe.

Eric 35:12

Everywhere.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:12

To to, to everywhere, from everywhere. Right. And so this has become a fundamental idea of the of the nature of the universe, is that it is the same everywhere and that it had the same energy in all directions from the beginning. And so this is this is this is sort of the standard model for the universe beginning is that this sort of energetic signature was was essentially homogenous. It was it was, you know, isotopic in the sense of same in all places, isotopes, you know.

Eric 35:50

All except for the tiny little pockets which created.

Dr. Josh Stout 35:53

Okay. So so we we think that there were actually fluctuations in quantum froth essentially.

Eric 36:01

Density of quantum froth.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:03

Yeah yeah. So, so so the weird parts of the quantum world are that you can't ever have anything that is exact things are more or less. And so more means you get a planet, less means you have an interstellar space.

Eric 36:21

More means you get a galaxy.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:23

A Galaxy.

Eric 36:23

Less means you have Interstellar space.

Dr. Josh Stout 36:25

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so all of these things are started by the original quantum fluctuations pulling pieces of matter together so that they can then coalesce. But again, even at this level, you're seeing quantum fluctuations writ large. You see patterns in the cosmic background microwave radiation that match what would have been a quantum effect when it was that size. When things were small enough, you would have gotten these quantum fluctuations which would then show up writ large, you know, 13.7 billion years later.

Eric 37:01

Mind boggling, mind boggling.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:03

So what I was thinking about when I was reading Cusanus was the nature of light itself. And looking back in time. And so I don't just see the background microwave radiation, I see the big bang, I see the beginning in all directions. So I am standing at the center of the universe with the Big bang everywhere in a circle around me. Anywhere you stand in the universe. This must be true because everywhere in the universe is the same age. This is not a like a wacky concept, right? Everywhere the universe starts at a certain age, right? Then it must be a certain age.

Eric 37:37

To the point you're saying. Not that like we know that the Earth is a certain age or we know that a galaxy is a certain age. You're saying that the the the, the universe itself, everything that exists wherever it came from, started at the same.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:52

Started at the same moment. And so therefore it must have the same age.

Eric 37:55

Right.

Dr. Josh Stout 37:55

And would look the same from anywhere from that point of view that you would see the same energy, the same background radiation everywhere. And people have largely accepted that even the ones who don't like cosmological principles are like, okay, fine fruit for this context, probably, but maybe it's a maybe it's different somewhere else. Maybe be outside the universe. I'm like, Stop it. I don't know what you're talking about. What would that even mean? But the idea that it's the same everywhere is, is fairly well accepted, but it has to be the same everywhere in terms of time as well, so that the beginning is in all directions around us. So everywhere in the universe is the center of the universe. If you were one of those photons starting at the Big Bang.

Eric 38:41

And you're just after the Big Bang.

Dr. Josh Stout 38:43

Just after the Big Bang, and you're moving in a straight line to my telescope or receiver or eye, my eye is seeing this light. It's too long away like to see as such, but some detector is detecting it. That light has now been moving for, let's say, 13.7 billion years in more or less a straight line outward from the center.

So the place that seeing it 13.7 billion years later is the edge. You can't be farther than that. There is no place in the universe that can be farther away from the center than 13.7 billion years from the center.

Eric 39:24

And everything Is that far.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:26

From everything Is that far from the center. So the everywhere in the universe is the center, and everywhere in the universe is the.

Eric 39:34

Is also the.

Dr. Josh Stout 39:36

So we are indeed in a circle whose circumference or in a sphere whose circumference is equal to its center. However, it's not quite the one that Cusanus was envisioning. He was envisioning an infinitely large circle where there would be no draw Bill Edge. But here we're talking about something where there's both a beginning and not exactly an end, but a point we've gotten to now. There's a now that is a straight line between the beginning and the now, and that now is the same distance from the beginning in all directions.

Eric 40:06

And we see that we have proven that everything is expanding, moving away from each other, which is exactly what this would say.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:13

This is essentially what this would say. Indeed. Yes. And so it's all expanding away from a center for the same distance, which is 13.7 billion years.

Eric 40:22

Yep. The center.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:22

Is everywhere.

Eric 40:24

Where the edge.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:26

Is everywhere.

Eric 40:27

Everywhere. Yeah.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:28

So it's difficult to to to conceptualize. So this is something that behaves like infinity in many ways and yet has a finite term to it. I had thought this was well understood because I had thought about it when I was like 20.

Eric 40:46

Huh. Well understood.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:48

Well, because it seems so.

Eric 40:49

Obvious somebody said this to you when you were 20. So you said, Well, of course it makes sense.

Dr. Josh Stout 40:54

And a guy, a guy from the 13th century said this to me when I was 20. So I'm like, sure, we know this. Yes. You know, we definitely know this.

Eric 41:05

And where did you walk around proclaiming this as if everyone knew it and get caught.

Dr. Josh Stout 41:09

Or no, I would I would say it randomly to mathematicians and they'd be like, Yeah, sounds right. But like not think anything of it because it seems so simple to them and me. And I would say to a physicist and they would sort of frow their brows, turn their head and say, There must be something wrong with what you're saying, or I'd say it to them and they wouldn't understand what I was trying to say. And they be like, Well, there is the cosmic background microwave radiation. I'm like, Yes, yes, but think about that. That's energetically uniform. Uniform. But we are positionally, uniform. So not only was the universe all one temperature at the beginning, everywhere in the universe was in the same spot at the beginning, relative relative to the universe.

Eric 41:51

Did you did you say that to somebody who initially disagreed with you?

Dr. Josh Stout 41:54

I've been I've been trying I've been trying to to figure out ways to save this better now for 30 some years so that I can I can I can talk to a physicist, know, start to get what I'm getting at. And when I've actually read cosmological stuff and they get the energetically, it has to be the same everywhere. But no one mentions positionally because it really seems like different places are in different spots.

Eric 42:21

It really seems that way. It really does seem that way. When I go from one place from here to there.

Dr. Josh Stout 42:28

It seems like I have moved and.

Eric 42:29

The language itself tells me that I was here and now I'm there.

Dr. Josh Stout 42:33

And so this is the this is the problem.

Eric 42:35

But the thing is that when you're there, you don't call it there. You call it here. Yes, it's always here, wherever you are.

Dr. Josh Stout 42:40

And wherever you are is the same distance to the beginning of time, everywhere. And so this is the problem that that community was having. This is why the the Hara cliche is the people who believed in many instead of one said, Do you, Parmenides, are crazy? Because if there's only one, I could never go from here to there. There would only ever be one. And then Zeno criticized, and Zino was a follower of harm entities and said, Well, if there's many, you can never go anywhere either because you only go halfway and then halfway. And then after half.

Eric 43:11

He's the one who said that.

Dr. Josh Stout 43:12

Zeno's paradox You'll never get there. You'll never, ever get there. So as soon as you start dealing with these kinds of things, you see things break down very quickly, very quickly. But the cool thing about modern science is you can actually look at things and observe background microwave radiation and say, Look, it's the same in all directions. Everywhere we can come up with, Oh yeah, the universe is expanding from a point. So there was this huge argument between sort of the Old Testament, New Testament people who thought the universe started beginning, and some of the Greeks who thought it existed forever with no beginning. And it turns out there's an answer. There was a beginning and it started and progressed from this starting point. And so these are things that you can you can make a prediction and actually look at it. And so that's why we now have a scientific way to think about what had always been merely concepts. And as science has progressed, there's been arguments between, you know, I, Galileo and the church because he thought of the cosmological principles saying, here's how the universe must be. And the church said, No, this is what the book says it must be. And so there was a disagreement, and eventually the church gave in because the universe has to be the way the universe is. And so I've been feeling this way now for some time about the idea of the universe being a bounded infinite of everywhere has to be the same distance, and it really has to do with the speed of light and the universe is 13.7 billion light years in all directions. As you get closer to the edge, weird stuff starts to happen as you start, as you see the first galaxies, they get bigger and bigger and bigger. Why are they getting bigger and bigger? Because they're everything they're getting, they're getting they're becoming a larger proportion of everything. Because at the very beginning it's everything. A very beginning. It's this one point. And that one point is spread equally in all directions around us. That's the microwave radiation. That one point of the big Bang is the outside of the shell we are living in. That is the that is the beginning of time in all directions. And it looks the same in every direction. But it started out as a point and that point has now been spread everywhere in all directions. Equally, galaxies start to do this as you look backwards in time, they get bigger and bigger and bigger because they're becoming closer to that original point that was smaller and space itself has expanded. And so the things from this time look larger. They giant, they have they have a bigger portion of if you could see the very beginning, you would see it the same equally everywhere. And that's what we see.

Eric 45:53

It would just be a dot, it would be a bright…

Dr. Josh Stout 45:56

Would be a.

Eric 45:56

Smear, would just be a smear of white everywhere, light everywhere.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:00

And not.

Eric 46:00

Tons everywhere.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:01

That's what the microwave background radiation is. It's a smear of the.

Eric 46:05

Smear of.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:05

Photons everywhere. Yeah, exactly. So we like so this is this is we can make a prediction and we see this. You say you look far back enough. Back in time things will start getting bigger.

Eric 46:15

As much as I love and adore this and you know, I've loved and adored this all of my life and all of our lives, It's still it's a little it's a little overwhelming.

Dr. Josh Stout 46:25

It's it's it's a little overwhelming. And it makes you start to think about things that don't work. Like you think of the universe as a balloon. It's expanding, but the universe isn't a balloon. We're not on a surface and it's not expanding in something. The universe is expanding itself.

Eric 46:42

We have to be on a surface the same way that we experience the surface, like the air or the atmosphere around the earth as just this giant three dimensional space, which really is this very, very, very narrow band. It's got it's okay. But then it begs the question, what's on the outside of that thing?

Dr. Josh Stout 46:59

So the surface that we're standing on in that concept, yeah, would be time itself. The present moment is the surface we're standing on. So there is no outside of because that's the future and there is a before, right? There is a past and we can see the past when we look back in time, when we look out there, you're looking back in time. So, so so inside exists. But outside doesn't exist for the simple fact that it's the.

Eric 47:22

Future hasn't been made.

Dr. Josh Stout 47:23

Yet. It doesn't exist yet. It is literally the future. So I thought that this was well understood. Everyone got this and this was exactly what everyone was talking about. When they talked about the Big Bang and that the people's metaphors were having difficulties because it was just really difficult to imagine dimensions that there's no more than, than three dimensions of space plus one of time. Mhm. But that leaves no dimensions for this to be expanding in. Mm hmm. So. So that means there's more dimensions. No I'm not adding any dimensions. The only thing we're talking about is expansion in three dimensions through time. That that's where I'm not, I'm not calling for anything extra.

Eric 48:05

So you thought everyone understood this?

Dr. Josh Stout 48:07

Yeah, but it seems like when I start saying it, it seems like I'm talking about a curved universe. Yes, I'm not talking about a curved universe. Everything is straight. A curved universe needs another dimension to curved in. Right? If. If, if I have a you know, I can make infinity.

Eric 48:23

Well, but but if you're target, if the big bang started, if it was a point and then that expanded out, it expands in all dimensions, in all directions. Right.

Dr. Josh Stout 48:33

So okay so let's think about when, when space really does curve. So I've got a gravity well like a black hole and it's curving space. The only way I can conceive about that is I could make a three dimensional model of curved space. But the curve has to be happening in a fourth dimension, right?

Eric 48:48

Exactly. The space itself is curved. And then you think of it as.

Dr. Josh Stout 48:52

Because you start off with a flat plane of space and then you curve it into third dimension. But the model is a three dimensional space that's actually being curved into a fourth dimension. I don't worry about that. Yeah, that's not what we're talking about.

Eric 49:03

Well, past anything.

Dr. Josh Stout 49:05

That is definitely not what I'm talking about. And people are now starting to think one will try and get there. People are now starting to think that space is not curved, it's flat. So I'm talking about a flat universe that is both infinite and bounded. It's infinite in that.

Eric 49:21

How can space be flat if it's clearly three dimensional?

Dr. Josh Stout 49:25

It's all right. We want to go there now. I was going to go there a little later, but I'm sorry.

Eric 49:30

I'm sorry. Let's go back to your track. Forgive me.

Dr. Josh Stout 49:32

I was almost there. Okay.

Eric 49:33

Okay. Forgive me. Forgive me. Okay.

Dr. Josh Stout 49:35

So. So. So the universe is beginning at a time and we exist at a time. That is later than its beginning.

Eric 49:42

Later than it's beginning. You're after the beginning.

Dr. Josh Stout 49:44

And we see the beginning in all directions. Because time has progressed the same equally everywhere. Again, this means that positionally everywhere in the universe would be the same in terms of how it would see the universe.

Eric 50:01

Its relationship to the center.

Dr. Josh Stout 50:02

There's No, there's no place you can go in the universe where you could see a universe that was older than 3.7 billion years old because the universe began at a time. It can't be older than that. So doesn't matter where you go, you would see the same thing in those terms.

This is contradicted by Google, and I think Google is wrong because for me the cosmological principle must rule so that if you look up and try it as a listener, not you, Eric as a listener, try it.

Eric 50:33

But still.

Dr. Josh Stout 50:34

Yeah, okay. Eric is now trying this here his mouse clicking and ask a question like Can the universe move faster than the speed of light? Or another question How big is the universe?

Eric 50:49

I want to do that one. How big is the universe?

Dr. Josh Stout 50:51

Either one of these questions, in my opinion, comes up with the wrong answer. And this means that these are well understood wrong answers that everyone in physics would support and that I am now contradicting. And I find this to be maddening.

Eric 51:04

Yeah, I think part of the reason I'm saying is because we may have discussed this before. I can't I don't understand how the universe is 93 billion light years, exactly what it says.

Dr. Josh Stout 51:13

Exactly. So let me tell you.

Eric 51:15

What your Google is 16.7.

Dr. Josh Stout 51:18

Because it has a beginning.

Eric 51:20

But, how, I.

Dr. Josh Stout 51:20

Okay, So let me let me let me tell you what Google says. What Google says is that, yes, we can see let's say let's say I can see 13 billion light years. So I see a 13 billion light. I see 13 billion light years in one direction. And I see a star. I see 13 billion light years in another direction. And I see a star. These two stars are therefore 26 billion light years away from each other.

Eric 51:48

Where do you get to 93 now?

Dr. Josh Stout 51:51

In the course of the age of the universe, these these stars have been expanding, right? The universe itself has been expanding. The rate of expansion can be measured by the distance of any two things. The further something away is, the faster its the more redshifted it is. So this is well understood physics. Something is further away. You can actually calculate distances by its redshift in an expanding universe. Yes, in an expanding universe, when things are moving away from you because of the Doppler effect, the wavelengths are further apart. So they move closer to the red end of the spectrum. And so this is, you know, the redshift and it shows ages of things. Something that's more red is older. So these these two these two stars that you've now calculated are 23 billion light years away from each other, even though they're only 13 billion light years away from you.

During the course, the universe have been expanding. And because they're now 23 billion light years away from each other, and there's a formula that tells you how fast the universe is expanding and you've now plugged in the 23 billion light years into the distance between two things and you're looking at the expansion rate. It turns out that these two stars have been moving away from each other at faster than the speed of light because they're that far apart and because.

Eric 53:19

Then how do we even see them? Like, I don't understand. I'm so confused.

Dr. Josh Stout 53:23

Only relative to each other, right? They'd be moving faster than we. Faster away from each other, fast in the speed of light relative to each other, because the universe is expanding.

Eric 53:32

Relative to each other.

Dr. Josh Stout 53:33

And because the universe itself is expanding, it doesn't violate the going faster than the speed of light. Now each of these stars can see another star, and that star is another, you know, distance away from each other. And that's also been expanding. So they add all these things together and they come up with a number of because of the things we can see in both directions, the total size of the universe is 93 billion light years apart.

Eric 53:59

Well, I just I mean, Bing is actually saying that this is only the observable universe. The entire universe might be 250 times larger, saying that it's at least 7 trillion light years across.

Dr. Josh Stout 54:13

Yeah. So anyway, so these things are based on things moving faster than the speed of light and they're based on idea of not everything is how we see it. It's going against the cosmological principle in my opinion, and it's breaking some rules because these stars are not 23 billion light years away from each other. They're only 13.7 billion light years away from each other. And it doesn't matter if I see 113 billion light years in one direction and another 13 billion light years in the other direction. Because if I'm standing on one of those stars, how far can I see? I can only see 13.7 billion light years. And so Earth is only going to be point 7 billion light years away from the very beginning. If I'm looking at something that's 13 billion light years away. So if I'm looking 13 billion light years, I'm standing on another star or planet that's 13 billion light years away from Earth. From Earth. If I looked at Earth, Earth would only be point 7 billion light years from the very beginning. At that time, it would have been right next to this other star. Mm hmm. And so that other star itself can't be more than 13.7 billion light years away, because that's the very beginning. Once you get that far back, you're looking at background microwave radiation. You're looking at a shell of the beginning. As things go further and further away, they they fill more and more of the sky. And so if you're looking at something that's further away than the beginning of the universe, you're looking at something that has filled the sky entirely or is outside of the universe and is older than the universe, and there is nothing older than the universe by definition. To be further away than 13.7 billion light years means you're older than 13.7 billion light years. By definition.

Eric 56:15

Here is what you're saying. Because of the way that you led me into this, I'm just amazed that that that right now, you know, beings I is absolutely accepting that the universe.

Dr. Josh Stout 56:26

Yeah no everyone says I am wrong.

Eric 56:28

7 trillion there's 7 trillion.

Dr. Josh Stout 56:31

Everyone says I am wrong. And the reason is is because the universe is a big expanding faster than the speed of light. And then there were periods of expansion that were faster than they are now.

Eric 56:41

Because because what's explained in this explanation of the 7 trillion light years of space that that there is is actually easier to comprehend than some what sounds like gibberish that every spot is both the middle and the edge. Like that's a very difficult thing to wrap your head around.

Dr. Josh Stout 57:02

Right. So let's let's let's let's talk about some modern physics that is a little bit easier to understand, but just as wacky, this is this is what I was talking about with Einstein and his thought experiments. They come up with a lot of great math. But Einstein didn't start with math. Einstein started with an idea. Some people had done an experiment. So Michelson morally did an experiment, and they were looking for the universal ether.

Eric 57:28

The universal ether.

Dr. Josh Stout 57:29

And the universal ether is what the waves of light moved through. So just like waves move through an ocean, the universal ether is the thing that waves up and down when light moves.

Eric 57:44

The thing that waves up and down, right?

Dr. Josh Stout 57:46

So the ocean is what waves up and down the ocean. The waves are not the ocean. The waves are the energy moving through the ocean. Okay. But the ocean is its own thing that is separate from the waves. And the waves are made of the ocean.

Eric 57:59

That sounds like some tortured thinking.

Dr. Josh Stout 58:03

Well, it made sense for how we understand waves. Have you ever seen a wave of nothing? No. You have to have a wave of something, right? The thing doesn't move. If you take a string and you make waves, you are two people holding hands of a rope. You're making waves in the rope, traveling from one end to the other. That's exactly how light moves. The rope doesn't move. The energy is contained in the wave, but the wave is made of a rope. So we thought that light was made of a rope of of of a universal aether. There was this thing that waved up and down. And that's what made light. And so Michelson morally figured out that the fastest thing that they had on Earth was Earth itself. Earth spinning around the sun was moving faster than anything they could produce in their in their facility and still put a decent detector on it. You know, if you try to make something move that fast, it's really hard to have accurate measurements. Whereas if you just use the speed of the earth itself, you can tie things down really nicely and get really good, accurate measurements.

Eric 59:04

Just bolt them to the earth.

Dr. Josh Stout 59:05

Bottom of the earth, and but.

Eric 59:06

Use what to measure If the earth is moving.

Dr. Josh Stout 59:09

You use light itself. And so there is what's called interferometry. When you have a wavelength of light and it encounters another wavelength of light, there are places where it cancel itself out and there's places where it increases itself, just like waves in a pond. When waves in a pond meet, there'll be some waves that go higher and some waves where they disappear. It's just where the where the down part meets the up part, it disappears where two up parts meet each other, it accentuates. Right. That's interferometry. Yeah. And so once you've calculated these things, you can have two light beams shining at each other that create a pattern where if that if those things change at all, you'll see differences in that pattern of interference between the two lightweights. Mm hmm. So they calculated that if the earth is moving in a particular direction through the universal aether, light, going in one direction will be slightly faster than light moving in the other direction because one of them is moving with the direction of the earth, and one of them is moving against the direction of the Earth.

Eric 1:00:15

Sure. That, yeah, that seems to make sense.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:17

And if there's a universal Yeah, if there's a universal aether and you're, and you're, and you're measuring at the, at the distance of the wavelength of light itself in nanometers, you should be able to figure out, yeah, we see a difference. And that would be detecting the universal aether that there is a difference in speed between light speed plus the earth and light speed minus the earth. Right?

Eric 1:00:40

Right.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:40

That these two numbers can't be the same.

Eric 1:00:42

This should be measurable.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:44

A speed x x x speed one plus speed two must equal a different speed then speed one minus speed two.

Eric 1:00:52

When did they do this work?

Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:53

Like 1920, something like that.

Eric 1:00:56

Good work. Sounds like a great experiment.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:00:58

Great experiment. And they did not find anything. And they're like, Huh, There's something we don't understand. Yeah. Light is the same in both directions and interesting.

Eric 1:01:07

We still don't understand it.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:01:08

But they just said it. And so Einstein, working in his patent office, was just reading papers like, Huh, Light's the same in both directions. I'm getting goose pimples just thinking about this. What does this mean? It means that two beams of light moving towards each other are not moving at twice the speed of light. They're moving at the speed of light towards each other. Even though it's two beams of light moving each one speed of, light plus one.

Eric 1:01:37

In other words, if you are right, speed of light, one of the speeds, one of the light beams, beams, wave particles. Yeah. When you're writing one beam of light and you are measuring the speed of the other one coming at you, you'd still get 186,000 miles.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:01:52

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, so, so light doesn't matter which two ways to going does matter. If you can boost something up, you can't get past it. You can't go faster than it and light becomes related to time itself.

Eric 1:02:03

It's not. It's a speed limit.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:02:05

It's a speed limit that's related because time is motion across distance measured by time. Right? The less time you take to go a certain distance is, the faster you're going, faster.

Eric 1:02:17

You're going.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:02:18

Right? So velocity is is is distance over time.

Eric 1:02:22

So light has an absolute fixed speed.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:02:24

An absolute fixed speed velocity. And doesn't matter what you do to.

Eric 1:02:29

It doesn't matter how you look at it.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:02:30

Exactly. And so this is the world that I am thinking about. I am thinking about a world where the velocity of light is indeed fixed, even if you have an expanding universe, if the universe has expanded somehow faster than light, you wouldn't be able to see it for sure.

Eric 1:02:54

Right? It would be gone.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:02:55

But it would also be moving backwards in time. It would be the reason it would be gone is it would now be before the Big Bang.

Eric 1:03:04

Because we can't see past we can't see.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:03:07

Past the beginning because we're seeing backwards in time via light. And light can only move at one speed. And so if you go faster than that speed, this is this is why time travel and all these things are related to the idea of relativity. Light itself does not experience time because if you have two light beams moving towards each other, each moving at the speed of light and two times the speed of light is the speed of light. That means that one of those light beams is stopped and the other one is moving at the speed of light.

Eric 1:03:41

Which we know is not true.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:03:43

But it's exactly the same as what's happening.

Eric 1:03:46

I once read this fascinating account that if if a photon were created in a star, and you were that photon from the moment you were created and eventually ejected out of that star flying hundreds of thousands, millions or billions of light years until you reached someone's eye and went in the moment that you were created, in the moment you went into the person's eye were the same.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:04:12

Yeah, essentially, because the light light is completely reversible. It has. It has.

Eric 1:04:16

No, but it's I think it's more of what you said is that it doesn't even.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:04:19

Experience it doesn't experience light. And that's part of what makes it reversible. And so for all of these things to be true, I think I think we must live in the universe that I am describing. And not the one that Google is describing, that we live in a bounded universe that is both infinite and finite. It has a finite beginning, it has an infinite directional future, outward expanding into the future because the future has no end point. And I also think it is flat. That's what we were talking about before, that you're asking how can something that's three dimensional be flat? So it's flat in the sense of there's different ways you can conceive about the universe. If there's enough mass in the universe, eventually it will expand to a point. If you think of expansion as positive energy, throwing everything apart, gravity is negative energy, pulling everything back together again. If the positive energy is exceeded by the negative energy, eventually the universe will come back together again and form a new black hole beginning. And so some people think it's it goes that way.

Eric 1:05:22

If the positive energy is exceeded.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:05:24

By the negative energy, eventually everything will crush back in again what's called the big crunch.

Eric 1:05:29

But doesn't the negative energy have to exceed the positive energy for that to happen? Yes.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:05:33

Yes. So negative energy is gravity. So if gravity exceeds the expansion of the universe, Right. So the expansion of the universe.

Eric 1:05:41

Would eventually slow down and pull everything back.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:05:43

Is what people call dark energy, right? It's the energy that throws everything apart. So gravity could exceed that and the universe would collapse again. Another possibility is there is more positive energy in the dark energy than there is gravity. And the universe keeps expanding for ever and never gets pulled back.

Eric 1:06:02

Mm hmm. It's a very sad and lonely concept.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:06:05

The people who measure dark matter think that there is so much dark matter out there that it seems to be perfectly matching the dark energy. So the energy pushing us apart seems to exactly balance the amount of energy pulling us back in.

Eric 1:06:25

So the why would we be moving at all?

Dr. Josh Stout 1:06:29

Well.

Eric 1:06:30

Something has to be out of balance there.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:06:34

That's the thing. That's why I say the universe is zero. The universe is all of it's in an infinite negative. An infinite positive. It's it's the the universe is X bending, but in a not curved way matter curves the universe and basically if you if you can think of the curve happening outside of our three dimensions, right, the matter curves the universe in one direction and dark energy curves it in the other direction.

Eric 1:07:10

Therefore it's flat.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:07:11

And therefore it's flat because there is no curve.

Eric 1:07:13

So So the Big Bang, instead of is conceiving of it as an explosion, moving out in 360 degrees like a balloon or a ball, it's it kind of sped everything out flat.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:07:27

And that flat is indeed a ball. That flat is a sphere, but it's a flat sphere in terms of it's neither positively nor negatively curved over over space time. In that sense, having.

Eric 1:07:43

A hard time you can conceptualize but.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:07:45

But, but but but but itself is is is a sphere bounded by time itself. Mm hmm. So. So the edge of the sphere is the beginning of time. And there is no outside that's here. Sphere at the beginning of time is 13.7 billion.

Eric 1:07:57

I hope. I don't know. I hope that you're right. And it's, it's a very appealing concept. The thing is that, you know you're you have quite an uphill battle to get the word out against Google.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:08:10

I know I'm doomed. I'm absolutely doomed. I really hope someone listens to this podcast part of why I've done this podcast doesn't have a lot of human evolution in it. Every other thing I've done have at least mentioned human evolution. There has been some cultural evolution discussion. We've definitely mentioned culture, the build up of this idea where this idea comes from historically, how it, how it fits into a larger narrative. I've done that, but the reason I've done this podcast is I would like to be able to send an email with an attachment and say, I didn't write a paper, but here's my idea. Well, I don't think anyone will ever listen to me. Not anyone important. Well, but I'm trying.

Eric 1:08:46

Hey Guys, there is a transcript of this. And that's.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:08:49

True. Someone could read.

Eric 1:08:50

www.mindbodyevolution.info is the website and you can read it all there. But yeah, this is you have quite, quite a battle, especially when even the AIS are collating this information and saying, no, it's 73 billion lines across.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:09:09

So I just wanted to mention this as a hobby of mine is finding disciplines in which I know nothing and coming up with ideas contradict the entire discipline and it's a hobby of mine that I really enjoy, but it's somewhat of a doomed hobby.

Eric 1:09:25

This one. It sounds like you should sit down and try write a book because if nothing else, to piss people off and get people talking because it sounds like there's something to it from the the nothing that I know. Anyway, fascinating. Thank you, Josh.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:09:38

Thank you.

Eric 1:09:38

All right. Until next time.

Dr. Josh Stout 1:09:41

Until next time.