Didn't Einstein favor a static non expanding universe because he thought it would break GR? Now we have a universe with accelerating expansion and stuff falling off the edge of the particle horizon, seems already broke to me.
Einstein was thinking from a static universe perspective, but he understood that a static universe is unstable: all it takes is for one thing to move to begin a cascade of instability that would lead to a universe that's no longer static. Thence came his original attempt at "fixing" this by imagining the cosmological constant as a sort of ad-hoc correction pulling against the push of gravitation. If indeed dark energy comes from GR (that is still open research), then he'll have been right for the "wrong" reason basically.
Didn't Einstein reject spooky action at a distance for the same reason?
Einstein rejected this because he wanted to preserve both realism and locality in quantum theory; this was more of a philosophical preference than an attempt to fix anything.
If I move a mass from point A to point B then I totally understand the effects of the distortion will not propagate faster than light.
If I remove a mass from the known universe I punch a hole in the fabric of space time, wouldn't the effects be measured across the entire universe at the same time?
No, the effects would ripple out at the speed of light. If the Sun poofed from existence right now, we'd peacefully have no idea for a little under 9 minutes: we'd still see a glowing ball in the sky and Earth would continue to orbit the spot where it was for the same amount of time.
Are you familiar with force carriers? Gauge bosons like gluons, photons, W and Z bosons; in QM and gauge theories these carry the forces: a magnetic force uses photons to carry the force for instance, so magnetism "travels" at the speed of light, though the field is infinite and permeates all space. Likewise with gravity, the graviton would be the gauge boson in this case, so it would be fair to oversimplify it and say the gravitons already "emitted" from the sun would "still be traveling" for the 8+ minutes until the last one that was emitted before the Sun disappeared arrives.
That's simplified, but perhaps helps conceptualize.
We can't remove a mass from the known universe because it violates conservation of energy and breaks GR, right? Yet isn't that exactly what is happening when stuff falls over the edge of the particle horizon when gravity is limited by the speed of light?
The cosmological horizon is specific to reference frame. Where we see a horizon, someone in Andromeda would see a different horizon. People on the edges of the visible universe (with Earth as the reference frame, to define the "edges") see vastly different horizons (like venn diagrams barely overlapping). So nothing is truly "leaving existence" in this way. It's just leaving our causal frame.
Another question... If the universe is expanding and the particle horizon is real, why do we see cosmic background radiation on the horizon no matter which direction we look? Shouldn't we see... "Nothing"? Maybe the CBR is misunderstood and has nothing at all to do with the big bang?
Does anyone know how gravity works???
Thanks again!
The furthest CMB we see is the time of last scattering, a period when the universe went from being opaque (photons having a mean free path* greater than their horizon at the time) to translucent: it is the furthest "back" that it's possible to "see" because of this.
(* -- the mean free path of something is the average distance it takes for a moving particle to collide; so a very short mean free path means that the particle is interacting very often; for photons this would mean scattering, absorbing, emitting, etc. So a very short mean free path or having a mean free path proportional to a horizon would mean you have something opaque).
The inflationary period actually did blow apart the CMB, but the CMB permeates space. It's precisely because of inflation that we can look on one side of the universe and find a patch of CMB anisotropy that's the same temperature as a patch on the other side of the sky: because those patches were once causally related (close enough to each other) prior to inflation.