Moon and Venus

Friday 27 - Stoney invited me over for dinner to finish off them beans and rice, but we couldn’t quite manage to do it and fed the rest that was left to the rabbits. I took a shower while I was there and I’ll be nice and clean for potluck tomorrow. As I was getting into the Gross Polluter to leave for home I saw the Moon and Venus very close to each other in the evening sky. I got out my camera and took several pictures of them. When I got home I called Seimi and had him go outside for a look-see. Very cool!

Cosmological Principle

        I went for my evening walk listening to an astronomy lecture on “Homogeneity” which has to do with the Cosmological Principle, and how the universe is both Isotropic and Homogeneous. Isotropy is the uniformity of the universe in all directions that we look. Homogeneous is the composition of matter spread out in a very large area, is the same everywhere; the larger the area you view the more Homogeneous it becomes, the smaller the area you view the less Homogeneous it is (this is a tough one to understand). Okay, let’s try this: If you spill a pound of salt thinly and evenly on a large floor and you look at it very closely you would see the individual grains, but if you stand at a distance all you will see is a white flat surface. The Cosmological Principle is what scientists use in their mathematical models of the universe and the beginnings of the Big Bang.        There was one part that was of interest to me when they talked about after the Big Bang, how was it that matter was able to “talk” to each other so that matter would be the same everywhere. They said this was due to Cosmic Inflation, but they also said that there are other theories, one being that light could travel faster early on in the Big Bang; I’ll have to read up on this because it kind of goes along on my thinking about Black Holes shrinking, where matter is squeezed to a point that it loses space time and that exotic particles can exceed the speed of light and escape from a singularity. (Of course this is my imagination exceeding the limits of my knowledge)