Everything has just always been, and will continue to be, dissipating.

Hi T_Wake, You wrote:

There is no page at UCSD.EDU/Astronomy/evidence.htm

Oops... I accidently droped the ExoBio. prefix, sorry about that, it's:
ExoBio.UCSD.EDU/Astronomy/evidence.htm

You said:

it is strange that searching for significant keywords doesn't bring it up.

I had no problem finding the link again, it took 30 seconds, not 25 minutes.
I just googled for this phrase in the opening sentence:

distant explosions of massive stars

I quoted:

The 1998 data sets [ from Adam Riess and others ] were detailed studies
of distant explosions of massive stars, the Type 1a supernovae.

And you replied: Supernovae are well known and well documented. So what ?

It was a major landmark in Cosmology... Right ? !
That's how we know space-time is expanding at accelerated rate.

Combined with WMAP data, Einstein's lamba has become the prevailing theory,
....the universe has net negative mass-energy.
Net entropy _Always_ goes up, dissipation is intrinsic to mass_energy.

I quoted:

And they seem to always have the same inherent brightness,
so they can be used as the long-desired "standard candles"
or uniform beacons in deducing distances,
always a tricky business in astronomy.

And you asked:

Does the article explain how they were determined to have
the same inherent brightness ?

Yes, a little bit.
Do you know what black body radiation is ?

It's like a fingerprint, a known signature.
GR and SR posit that the laws of physics are the same everywhere,
all the time.

You wrote:

Also, the "value" for H_0 was determined through the study of these
supernovae so I don't know what "something has been added" means.

Acceleration was added, that's what.
Older, more distant, standard candles are flying apart slower,
and are dimmer than would be expected if the expansion wasn't accelerated.

Speaking of the net negative mass-energy of the universe,
possibly from the virtual, negative pressure inherent in the vacuum of space,
You wrote:

I assume they are referring to "dark energy" here
- which is not a negative anything. It is the force
( often credited to pair-creation which you allude to below )
which creates an outward pressure, also theorised
as being the driving force for cosmological expansion.

What you call Outward_Pressure is Negaitice_Pressure,
and because it takes energy to maintain a vacuum like that,
it's a virtual energy deficit and, because E = mc², it's negative mass-energy.

And yes, this is also where the dark energy comes from, probably.

You asked me:

Does the page explain how the value for lambda was derived ?
Is it from first principles or was it shoe horned into the formula
to make the equation match the evidence ?

Thanks to supernovae and WMAP data,
the Lambda-CDM model is the leading theory.
Lambda has negative value of around: 10 ^ - 35 / Second_Or_Meter ^ 2

Either seconds or meters can be used here because
time and length are observed to be the same thing at cosmic scales.

Only a NASA satellite, similar to WMAP,
observing thousands of supernovae, could pin-down that number down better.
But that might be 10 or twenty years from now... sorry.

You commented: Again we hit signs it has not been written by a scientist.

If you read the New_York_Times' Science_Times,
or Scientific_American, you'd have no doubt about what I'm saying.
It's all leading theory... from hard evidence.

See:
NYTimes.COM/2004/02/21/science/21DARK.html?ex=1392699600&en=3ed3eeb542e19f74&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND
February 21, 2004

Rather than seeing the changes in the push that many theorists had predicted,
Einstein's unchanging cosmological constant
fits the data better than any of the alternatives.

" What we've found is that it looks like
a semipermanent kind of dark energy," Dr. Riess said.
" It appears like it's been with us for a long time.
_If_ it is changing, it's doing so slowly.
Einstein's theory is looking a lot better than before this data. "

And:
SciAm.COM/article.cfm?articleID=000C589A-DAE3-1FF9-986C83414B7F0000
February 24, 2006

In the past few years, though, astronomers have solidified the case for
cosmic acceleration by studying ever more remote supernovae...

You told me:

Sorry, I missed which parts of those posts gave me
the percentage that space-time was curved.

Not to mention where they said space time was negatively curved.
Can you point it out to me ?

Best data, very recent data, e.g. the WMAP and Riess landmarks,
show that the expansion of space-time is _Accelerating_.
That's hyperbolic, negatively curved, like a horn with no edges.

Discover Magazine, which rarely shows drawings,
has shown that cosmic shape on their cover before.
Again... you obviously don't read much.

You imagined: Unknown is not the same as random.

Yes it is, I posit, and no other postulate is as good. Einstein said:

People like us, who believe in physics, know that
the distinction between past, present, and future is
only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
...
Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end,
by forces over which we have [ little knowledge of and ] no control.

It is determined for the insects as well as the star.
Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to
a mysterious tune intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.

Hawking said:

In summary, the title of this essay was a question:

Is_Everything_Determined ?

The answer is yes, it is.
But it might as well not be, because we can never know what is determined.
...
In relativity,
there is no real distinction between the space and time coordinates,
_Just_As_ there is no difference between two space coordinates.

You asked me:

You can rotate an object through spatial dimensions (a ball for example) and
it may or may not retain symmetry. Can you rotate an object through time ?

In GR, absolutely... because there are so few unknowns.
You could do it at the quantum level too... if there weren't so many unknowns.

You asked me:

If there are four (or more) spatial dimensions can
you explain to me why gravity and the strong force act as they do ?

Sure... it's leftover density from the start of the big bang,
everything has just always been, and will continue to be, dissipating.

It's only unknowns -- a.k.a. randomness -- that makes
life, gravity and photon spins seem like they're in a casino,
only winning in the short-term, consuming, glomming on,
....always losing in the long-run.

.

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