According to Hoyle Day 2024 is on Thursday, August 29, 2024: how long has the universe existed according to the steady state theory?

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Forever.

The steady state theory held that the universe expanded and new matter somehow was created to fill up the expanding void. This process would have been unspecified. Fred Hoyle was the proponent (& Biondi & Gold). It was at least a plausible theory in 1948 but the business of new matter creation caused strong doubts and kept it at the margins.

After a while other evidence such as the cosmic microwave background radiation began to validate theories of a "Big Bang" which in fact was at first used as a put-down by Hoyle in 1950, but like so many put-downs, was adopted by the people who were derided. And it is succinct!

You basically have two choices in cosmology. You can choose the always-is always-was, which means, that there is this huge effect (the universe) with no explainable cause. That's the steady state theory.

You can choose the once-upon-a-time there-was-a-beginning. That gives us a Big Giant Cause, with a visible effect, but we don't know how the Big Giant Cause came to occur. That's the Big Bang Theory. It is strongly backed by theory and observation, but one never knows, maybe some day some other theory will come along. Theological explanations ("let there be light") don't get around the what-made-it-happen problem. They shift the causation to God but leave us without recourse as to explaining the cause of God. It gets around to: there's something happened and it defies description. There are certain things one can say, such as a condition of no-time no-space is inherently unstable but that's just saying that we're here so therefore this happened because otherwise we wouldn't be here.

It is well to remember that in these theories we are always talking about the beginning of time as well as of space and stuff in space (like galaxies and us). If you try to imagine a big black empty box, and then something happened in it leading to stuff, like galaxies, you're not there, you're not at what the theories are talking about. Because the big black box you're thinking about is space, and that is the thing whose beginning is under discussion; and the thing that we imagine as happening in that big black box, the big explosion, has a moment of before: we think in our heads there is this space, and this explosion happens, the creation, so there's a moment before, and a moment after. That's not what this is all about. When they say NOTHING they mean NOTHING as in no time no space no matter. It is safe to say that the condition of no-space no-time is unimaginable to the human mind, which is a point made (of all people) by the philospher Kant. But you can get there (actually there is no there there) with some fine mathematics.

Now, however, there is a new category of explanations that posit multiple dimensions and collisions of branes that make for the creation of universes and all that. This theory amounts to saying well there is this big bang that happened, so Gamow and Hawking and all those guys are right about a Big Bang, BUT behind that big bang is all this other stuff which theories can't specify but anyhow if two things that we've never seen and cannot prove were to collide we'd get a universe with our physical laws. In short, these are pre-Big-Bang speculations move us back to the always-is always-was category. Now we get the spontaneous and on-going (in other universes) creation of matter but instead of explaining it by waving the arms around, like Hoyle, we explain matter via the Big Bang as a one-time event in *our* universe even though *our* universe is only one dimension out of many. So in these theories your answer would also be "forever" but one would qualify it by saying that time as it runs in *our* universe has only been ticking for about 13.5 billion years. As for the pre-big bang we can't specify because we're not sure things like time would work there....but all considered, in the pre-big-bang brane way of looking at things, "forever" is probably as reasonable a word as any.

That's pretty much it.

hope that helps,

GN

Since God is still resting in the seventh day doesn't that mean a creative day is thousands of years long?

The Hebrew word 'yom' which is translated into the English word 'day' is not restricted to meaning a period of 24 hours. It can mean an unspecified length of time. In Genesis 1 the Sun, Moon and stars aren’t created until the fourth day. Origen and Augustine realized that the word ‘day’ was being used differently. Origen (circa A.D. 225) asked how (days 1-3) there could be both morning and evening without Sun, Moon and stars, while the first day was even without a heaven.

Prof. Sir John Houghton, Physicist explains how the Big Bang involved extraordinary precision in order for the universe to be as it is now. If it hadn't been so precisely set up, human life wouldn't have been possible. He quotes the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose who calculated that if you work back from the disorder in the universe now to the beginning, the degree of order had to be set to one part in 10, that's 10 times 10 x 123 times, then 10 times 10 that many times. "This is an extraordinary amount of order and precision. There aren't enough atoms in the universe to describe that number. For humans to be here we need the whole universe. The formation of galaxies and stars is responsible for the 100 plus chemical elements of the periodic table which constitute life. We couldn't be here if it wasn't for that." (pages 123-125)

Cosmologist Fred Hoyle did some major work on the nuclear reactions that go on inside stars to form all the chemical elements out of the simplest building block, which is hydrogen. He discovered that there needs to be a very fine balance of the forces in nature in order to make carbon, and then to make oxygen without destroying the carbon. Hoyle said that his work led him to the conclusion that there was a super-intellect behind physics, chemistry and biology; and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. Right back at the beginning, the mass-energy needed (for the universe to be what it is) had to be within 1 part in 10 to the power of 60. That’s 10 with sixty noughts after it. That kind of accuracy would be the same as firing a gun from one end of the universe to the other (10 billion light years away) and hitting a coin you were aiming at.

You need the universe to be as old as it is – 13.7 billion years old – and as vast as it is to have life anywhere. Life on Earth (life anywhere) couldn’t exist without all those one hundred thousand million other galaxies.

Given these episode titles from "MAVERICK," can you write a comical story, just 4 the pure fun of it?

I love playing Rummy on line but some of the people I play with are quite weird, rummy not being all the rage it once was, but a woman with the screen name of (8) Arizona Black Maria takes the cake. When we first played, she was a (3) diamond in the rough, but has improved greatly since then.

She has always been a bit odd (unlike myself who is so normal.) Despite her screen name, she usually calls herself The Fortune Teller (with stress on the word "The" by pronouncing it "Thee"). Secretly I call her (7) The Misfortune Teller as she seems to always predict dire futures for her clients.

Anyway, we were in a five-handed on-line game a while back (I have got to get a life) and she had the best of me. However, due to a (11) technical error, the results of the game were discarded. It seems the program did not think everything had been done (1) according to Hoyle. As a result, I kept my number one ranking at the site and Maria remained in 2nd.

This apparantly irked her to know end, because a few days later we were playing again when, like a (10) bolt from the blue, she challenged me to a Rummy (6) duel in person, one on one, mano a tellero. She vowed I would never be heard from again in the Rummy world after this match, or as she put it - (12) Last stop: Oblivion.

I foolishly agreed to meet her as I discovered we were actually within driving distance of each other. But as the (4) day of reckoning approaches, I am getting a little leery of actually meeting her face to face. Since the challenge, I have learned more about her, and am not so sure that would be a good idea. You never know what people you meet on-line are really like, and, maybe I should not give her the (9) benefit of the doubt. I laughed over the "Oblivion" remark but am starting to wonder if maybe I should have taken it a bit more seriously. What if she meant it literally? I picture myself trapped somewhere by her and trying to text "Hostage!" on my cell phone before the battery runs out.

I have decided not to take the chance but don't really want to tell her I won't be there. So, if Maria happens to ask you if you know where I am, just tell her I am on (5) holiday at Hollow Rock. I hope they have lots of gin there (and I don't mean Gin Rummy).

Thanks