If the universe expands at faster than the speed of light, does it begin to go back in time?

The universe is no longer expanding at faster than the speed of light.

The Universe is the past, future and present. Time has no bearing on the Universe nor does distance. These are our limitations as we live a 3 dimensional life and exsistance here. More will become clearer to us once we leave this exsistance.

@MeinTeil The expansion rate is increasing, not decreasing. That is if we are reading what we think we are when we observe red shifts of objects at different distances from our point of observation.

@JustmeAman At my age, I appreciate that confidence.

I think that you can go faster and faster, but your rate of change is slower and slower as you approach the speed of light. (You know how you can never get to the Antelope Freeway?) Essentially, your speed would be infinite when you hit the speed of light (I don’t know that, it’s just an intuition). At an infinite speed, you would cease to exist as far as this universe is concerned. I’m not sure what that would mean, but it occurs to me that the universe could be shedding matter and time into a kind of universal heat dump this way.

Things might look like there’s a lot of matter out there, but it could constantly be being recycled into the universe creation machine. Clearly, if things are speeding up, then there’s something out there pulling on it gravitationally. Unless the original explosion of the universe gave it enough speed, but surely that would be constant?

Something’s out there. Sort of. If it is the disappearance of matter and time at infinite speeds, it wouldn’t be a thing we could quite conceive of. There would be a transfer of matter and time into something else that only mathematicians could understand. I can sort of picture it in my mind. It seems like it would be a universe sized Kline Bottle. Stuff pours out, and yet because the inside is the outside, it is still here.

Ok—that’s my free speculation for the day. I could be completely whacked out, but if you want more, you have to pay me! There’s wear and tear on the brain cells, you know. ;-)

@wundayatta That would be true if you were in an accelerating spaceship. But galaxies are not in an expanding spaceship. They are in expanding space-time, or appear to be. There does not appear to be a limit on the speed of space-time.

Let me check with a team of Nobel Prize-level physicists and I’ll get back to you.

@Austinlad Gah! I am looking forward to that!

Okay, here’s what my team of Nobel Prize-level physicists say…

Who knows?

Perhaps it’s easiest this way – the movement of spacetime can be measured theoretically at a certain “rate” from our perspective, but it doesn’t mean the object is moving, simply that the space around it is being expanded – in terms of one object “moving,” think of a table with a dinner plate on a tablecloth. If the tablecloth is space, it might be conceived of as pulling the tablecloth from under the plate until it’s on a different place on the tablecloth. The plate didn’t move, but it’s in a different place.

Now, put dots on the tablecloth. These are the galaxies. Imagine the cloth is super-stretchy, have people at it’s four corners, and start pulling. The space in between the dots will increase, but the dots (galaxies) don’t really move. Because this isn’t movement as we conceive of it in a normal physical sense, the four people can pull the tablecloth as fast as they want without being limited by the speed of light. From the perspective of the dot or galaxy, things are moving away from it at something faster than the speed of light – but they aren’t moving, the spacetime between them is expanding.

I don’t pretend to know how this works (and I don’t think that the nobel-prize winning physicists do either ;-)). But conceived of in this manner, the objects aren’t moving at all, and therefore from the object’s perspective it’s not going back in time at all. However, looking at any other object, interesting idea – time “travels” at the speed of light, so for an object viewed at one point and then again later, where spacetime between it has expanded, you could argue that the object viewed later would have to be the object as it was at an earlier time as that light would have traveled a greater distance.

But that doesn’t seem to be how it works, as we observe the expanding universe…and if this were the case it would seem that the universe were contracting. I think that it probably works out due to something about the wave/particle duality of the photon and the relative nature of the speed of light to itself, and light from its own perspective…but as @Austinlad
says…who knows. ;-)

@Austinlad And here I didn’t take you seriously at first. Clearly, you do have a team of Nobel laureate physicists. :-)

@iamthemob GA. Thanks. I am with you in believing that the seeming nonsensical feel of all this is because it actually is largely nonsense. Someone once told me that a subject which is too complex is not well understood by its professor. That has yet to prove false.

To follow the tablecloth model. Would the quality of “stretched” space time be different from the quality of unstretched space time? You know. How the table cloth is much stretchier further out.

@wundayatta

I kind of wonder the same thing myself. In a lot of ways, if spacetime is expanding like this, I wonder if it’s an even distribution – I mean, it should be. If so, it means that the space between every particle is expanding at this rate – essentially, that we ourselves from the perspective of any particle within us are accelerating away from ourselves at faster than the speed of light. That the keyboard in front of me is doing the same thing. But if it’s even, are we really just growing or “expanding” at a speed faster than the speed of light?

And if that’s universally true, then shouldn’t it also be the case that we wouldn’t perceive the change, as all things are expanding toward each other at the same rate? In much the same way that I don’t notice that the space between my fingers and the keyboard is expanding?

My head hurts.

The universe can expand faster than the speed of light. As long as no matter is traveling faster than the speed of light, nothing is traveling back in time.

@iamthemob The odd thing is that galaxies move apart from one another, but not form things within themselves. The electrons shells around the nucleus of an atom aren’t stretching their position with relation to the nucleus.

Observation of the cosmic background radiation indicates that there has been and remains a high degree of homogeneity within the Universe. From our vantage point, we appear to be at the center of the universe with an array of things around us, the most distant in any direction about 13.75 billion light years away. Our best guess is no matter where else you are in the Universe, you would see it as centered around you. Wrap your three-dimensional brain around that one to fix that headache. :-)

@PhiNotPi So how does the Unioverse pull off this trick of moving two objects apart faster than the speed of light without either of them moving?

Time is a simple system that humans have created to make sure we know when our lunch break is. I’m no astronomer, but I’m pretty sure that if you were to compare the time in our solar system to the time in any other solar system, it would be completely different based on the distance from the sun and the speed of rotation. So there is no set time to go backwards.

@Blobman Not really. Time seems to exist outside human constructs. Chemical clocks exist, for instance..Solar systems have orbital periods, as do entire Galaxies. Nuclear clocks are our most accurate timepieces, and there we are simply observing a phenomenon of physics, not the workings of a machine of our making.

Time is relative to the viewpoint of the observer, but it isn’t easily influenced. The time in a distant solar system would be rather close to the time here unless you were on a planet with a very great or very small mass, or your speed of motion relative to us were very different. I suppose if you were on a planet orbiting ever closer to a super massive black hole such as the one at the center of our galaxy, time would be very slow for you. But it wouldn’t matter because you couldn’t survive such conditions long enough to care how time moved. :-)

If indeed the universe expands then what soever it expands into is greater than it.
So the question should be what is greater than the universe.

But since there is nothing greater thaan the universe, it need not expand and measurements do not belong to it.

I am as the universe is.
The universe feeds me.

The universe is my belly.

No question but that the Universe is weirder than we think.