Does anyone who reads this know if the red shift expands in a spherical manner or otherwise?

I have this crackpot theory that the observed density of black holes is due to a long funnel(bath tub) and that space time is formed to the contours of the funnels.

If the red shift is the proper shape the Big Bang could just be the galactic effluent from a funnel.

It’s a shame I can’t just email Sagan.

Odds they’ll monitor the state of the neutrino, anyone?

Likely close to nil, unfortunately :[

At last, word salad served as it ought to be! Sadly, not a very good word salad. It's word salad trying to be deeper than word salad; no faster way to wilt it could be imagined. One must feel that eating a word salad of this kind is akin to listening to a great performance going on from the theater lobby; there is an incredible show, some great point being made, but whatever it is, you're not getting it. Below, I have prepared a word dressing that those with discerning appetites will find pairs nicely with a large glass of fine bath salts.

An endless amount of fractals can be generated by viewing smaller and smaller sections of the Mandelbrot set color-coded by calculation time. This can be iterated down to a level so fine, it would overheat a supercomputer, without even being close to the number of fractals yet to discover within the full set. Yet, a Mandelbrot set, even color-coded, is in the end an extremely fine band of color surrounding a beautiful but empty core on one side, and white nothing on the other. This, then, is basically the world in a nutshell, a thin band of infinite fractals, bounded by greater infinities on both sides. These are, by the way, uncountable, rather than countable infinities. The only things which can be counted in the end are the set itself and the negative space around it.

This is making me miss my schizotypal episodes. Uncle Fester was right, the psychosocial plane sucks dingdongs. Now if I only remembered where I put that tryptamine extraction guide...

PS Charles I really need to lend you my copy of Liber Null some time so we can put all this to bed.

2 Thanks. I’ve never been able to get a definitive answer on that.

Yeah, gravity as say, a marble on a loosely held sheet of paper.

This came about when I was wondering about the disc-like shape of many galaxies and how they came to be.

What I was saying is this - if you were to observe a very, very long, comparatively very thin whirlpool from the “top” - flowing away from on you - this could appear to have an incredibly high mass, and I assume the rotational velocity of matter heading down the rabbit hole would only add to the illusion.

The unknown “other side” of the whirlpool / funnel / prospective black hole could spew out matter in a disc-like shape due to centrifugal force.

Just the musings of some guy.

If God could just get rid of RepubliKKKans and rabid Trumpists marching in lockstep.....

Seriously. Every time some self-serving corporate shit wipe brags about his tax write-offs, fat annual bonuses, and allegedly being such "an exemplary Christian", all the while lobbying to gut federal funding for Planned Parenthood, union wages, environmental preservation, strip voters of their rights, cruelly separate children from their migrant parents and send them to camps, I'm surprised God hasn't gone after their worst offenders--particularly the Shithead in Chief. RepubliKKKans are not making God look good.

@6 & @8 jackass: I didn't vote for the orange shit wipe stinking up the White Trash House. If you proudly voted for that monster you can burn in your own self-made hellhole. Trolling idiots like you turned against your neighbors and cheer on an egotistically inept, xenophobic monster who is now fulfilling its evil agenda out of selfishness and spite to make as many people as senselessly miserable as inhumanly possible. You deserve the misery you proudly support thrust upon you tenfold.

@10: Maybe you've got nothing of any intelligence to add. Your ignorance level is pathetic.

There are barn doors
And there are revolving doors
Doors in the rudders of big ships
And there are revolving doors
There are doors that open by themselves
There are sliding doors
And there are secret doors
There are doors that lock
And doors that don’t
There are doors that let you in and out
But never open
And there are trapdoors
That you can’t come back from

A few more Science Facts:

A neutrino doesn't pass right through you because you're mostly empty space, a neutrino passes right through you because it has no electroweak interaction with the baryons you're made of (but photons do-- this is why photons at visible wavelengths do not pass right through you, why you can't see through people even though they're mostly made of space between particles).
A galaxy is not a black hole, and a blazar is not a galaxy. A blazar is a quasar with a particular orientation in space. A quasar is a black hole. Quasars do not necessarily have to be at the center of a galaxy-- when a galaxy containing a quasar collides with another galaxy, it will take some time before the quasar is centered in the new, combined galaxy.
The word 'humans' applies to all members of the genus Homo. Humans (Homo Erectus, specifically) first left Africa at least 1.75 million years ago, long before the first anatomically modern Homo Sapiens migrations around 130k years ago. There is no extinction event of Homo Erectus in the African fossil record, there's just gradual change of the species becoming more and more "modern," (i.e. more and more like Homo Sapiens) in Africa (though not outside it). They is us, in other words. Paleontologists still tiptoe around this, but there aren't a lot of strenuous doubters left alive.
Archea, Bacteria, and Eukaryotes are the three domains of life. They are not a "kingdom," that is a word used at the top of the old Linnean taxonomy, which the three domains have replaced.
Newer theories of abiogenesis do not consider the sun to be the source of the energy gradient in which life arose, but rather the earth. The earth is not so cool, it is nothing like a frozen lump of mud in space. The earth's core is kept molten in part by residual heat from the formation of the solar system, but also in part by an active process: nuclear fission. We are living on the surface of a nuclear reactor. This reactor produces hydrogen, and some of that hydrogen escapes. It is the sites of this escape (specifically hydrothermal vents, midoceanic or closer to the surface, like Yellowstone lake) where we even today find the energy gradient -- a hydrogen (or proton) gradient -- which many researchers think provided the power needed to form the ingredients and early forms of life.

Good gravy, we can't even have numbers at the beginning of paragraphs to form lists now?

What are your shiftless programmers going to take away from us next? Exclamation points and semicolons? There are much, much larger sites out there that can handle input sanitizing just fine without completely crippling their users' ability to format text.

All wonderful speculation and interesting thoughts.

But I would point out one thing that people get confused on - even (especially?) scientists.

There is a big difference between the meaning of the words 'how' and 'why.' Just because people use them as if they are synonymous doesn't change their actual meaning and the idea behind the meanings. They are not synonymous.

The realm of science addresses 'how' the universe operates. Science is the exciting search to discover all the rules that govern how everything in the universe functions. "Discover." Science doesn't make any of the rules.

"Why" it all operates the way it does is not the realm of science. Science is incapable of answering 'why.' The entire scientific method, the foundation of 'science' actually precludes answering 'why' - as it should. "How" variables interact in an experiment is the foundation of 'proof.'

Science should not be worried at all about 'God.' It is a distraction from proper science. Leave it alone.

"How" is the realm of science. "Why" is the realm of religion. Trying to mix the two leads no where and just adds to distraction and confusion for both. It is a useless effort and beneath a proper scientific approach.

I think the concept of Schrodinger's Cat proves that there is a God. Our reality is what is in the box. Each opportunity for decision by each individual on the planet (billions of people and billions of decisions each day), all create a possible state (a cat). Each of these possible branches their own quantum superposition.

But at some point, there must be an observer. And the observer must be outside the box, which means outside our universe/reality. If there is someone outside our universe (God) and they are constantly observing, then these quantum superpositions collapse into one reality.

If you truly believe there is no God, then there is no observer. This means that there are billions upon billions of possible realities, all just waiting to collapse when an observer does finally come along.

And what do you think the odds are, that you are an entity who happens to be living in the one reality that will remain, once it is observed? Your odds of being in that reality are nearly nothing. This means you are merely a simulation, waiting to end. You are nothing.

So it really all boils down to what you believe. Do you really believe you are meaningless. You are nothing, just waiting for your quantum superposition to collapse?

Or do you believe that you are actually living in reality. That you having meaning and consequence. Because if you do believe that, then all the quantum superpositions, an endless number of possible realities, must have collapsed into one reality. For that to happen, there must have been an observer, who exists outside our reality. And that observer would be God.

Amazing. This article is, at this very moment, at the top of the Science section of Google News Top Stories.

Congrats, Charles!

This is so dumb. Scientists don't know nothin' about how things were "created". The ONLY real and true made up "GOD" is the Flying Spaghetti Monster and SHE is really nice and just laughs that so many think that some Guy "GOD" took 6 days to create everything and then He needed a day off to rest? Really? The Flying Spaghetti Monster created everything you can think of on a Tuesday afternoon while getting HER nails done. And, if you don't like HER, you can just have lunch and move along. No burning up in a really hot place or name calling or cutting off your head like those other "GODS" do to 'Ya if you don't like them. It is called The Last Lunch. If you want things done quickly and efficiently call on a Girl "GOD". Even some Scientists try and deny that SHE did it all. They are WRONG. Join us. Pastafari!! rAMEN

"Mind Orders, nothing else does, therefore the Universe is Ordered by an Agency of Mind." You can always find God in a simple deductively logical statement based entirely on observation if you want to as well. But each to their own :)

Scientism at its almost best, except for the bad science.

The 'unmoved mover', as Aristotle thought. The infinite inward and outward dimensions of Reality can not be conceived by our feeble minds and senses. Our minds project into 'reality' in such a way as to never have Ending or Final results of the nature of things in this corporeal realm.

We are reflections of light. Shattered infinite pieces of a mirror called life. Each unique, unremarkable, resisting the gradient until we succumb. The end? Photons once again.

I like it- so what is the force that pries open this entropic window and seeks to replicate itself? Could we call it the soul?

Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me to you." Kinda the same idea, just stated more succinctly.

There's a starman waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks it'd blow our minds.

Who can turn the world on with her smile?
Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?
....

"A hurricane that wants to go on a date."
I married that hurricane. Possibly one of the worst decisions I've ever made. So chaotic. And such a mess to clean up afterwards! Still, 'better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all', I suppose.

@1 - There's some who think that Black Holes might be universe generators, condensing matter & popping new universes into existence in some other realm or dimension. IDK. Sounds fun. Hopeful at least.

And there are some who think that /everything/ is conscious:
https://www.inverse.com/article/22200-stars-consciousness-physics-greg-matloff-panspychism-rocket-science-astronomy

As for 'God', well, as the Torah teaches us, as soon as you conceptualize god at all you've strayed off the path & missed the point. (Which is my main beef with AmeriChristians who assert they know what 'god' is and is not, wants and wants not. They've strayed into idolatry, obvs.)

In my view, the entire Universe is god. Inconceivable, implacable, always dancing just outside of our models of reality, operating in ways we'll never understand. There is no 'outside'. It's all there, and we're a part of it.

Onward and onward...

Please, this god thing, let it go. The cat is happy being meaningless without being watched.

@20

Oh you poor sweet thing.

I'd tell you how GOOG decides which links you see when you load the 'news' frontend of its search engine, but it would break your heart.

@14 jackkay: Okay, I over-reacted a bit. Sorry--I thought you were trolling. Nice to see we agree on some issues. And you're right that a life fueled by hate os no way to live. I didn't vote for Mein Trumpfy, either, and wouldn't if that inhuman monster was the only name on the ballot.

Hi, God is pure spirit. God created the physical world, but nothing physical is spiritual. So waves & particles cannot be god. Physical forces like gravity etc maybe better analogy in the physical world, but still not god. We can’t see/feel gravity but it exists.

God can be known by reading the Bible. Believe in New Testament Greek actually means trust. So God never wanted blind faith from us, but trust from deep knowledge of God.