He never claimed they were. It seems fairly obvious to me that he meant "in the audio spectrum of frequencies", as in, with a long enough wire antenna[1], you can feed such a VLF EM signal directly into an audio amplifier driving a speaker so enabling one to listen directly to the VLF radio waves without reliance on a detector stage. The detector stage, in this case, being the listener's own ears.
[1] A quarter wave ground plane antenna would only need to be about 37Km long in order to resonate at 2KHz and 15Km long for a 5KHz radio wave.
He is still completely wrong though. The 3K *microwave* background is so named for a reason. You cannot see back further than the surface of last scattering where the universe first becomes transparent at about a redshift Z ~= 1500 and a temperature of 3000K give or take.
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Only neutrinos would allow us to see past the region where the universe becomes opaque to electromagnetic radiation. It is entirely possible that the extent of the universe is so great that there are photons in very distant regions that can never reach us because the space between us and the emitter is expanding faster than light can close the gap.
I think what we actually see is misleading, as the speed of light is always the same if measured in the place where you are, but of course at the so called start of it all, there were no laws as the final laws of what we see as our universe had not been layed down. The period at the very moment of the universe appearing in whatever was or is there before was called inflation and the speed could have been infinite to us as at that time there were no laws or terms of reference to judge speed. It was all energy. Now of course we have to leave the what was there before question to others, I don't see how we could know. The only indication we have that the universe is expanding faster as we look out over the visible universe is red shift. as now in our frame of ref we can measure the speed of light and its the same except near large masses of course, the wavelength of the light is stretched out into the red end of the spectrum. So yes space is as much part of the universe as is energy matter and whatever else is out there. The horizon to us would be the distance that a photon can travel to us from a distant point in the time after the matter was created or the radiation started. Nothing beyond that would be detectable with light. One of the big questions is that is it actually getting bigger due to space itself stretching or more space being added or is there a force change that will in time eventually overwhelm the forces that hold matter together and then we have no matter. I certainly don't know and if you subscribe to the data model of the universe anything is possible.
Okay, well I still have plenty of stuff to read. The page helpfully linked by Halmyre
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At least provides me with the yes/no answer I was looking for, even if I don't entirely understand it :-) This bit especially interesting, because (if I understand it correctly), it suggests we can observe some galaxies that currently moving away from us faster that light. Although, no doubt, it is not that simple. Probably something to do with the fact that we are seeing the light they emitted a long time ago, and 'soon' they will eventually disappear.
"There are many galaxies visible in telescopes with red shift numbers of
1.4 or higher. All of these are currently traveling away from us at speeds greater than the speed of light. Because the Hubble parameter is decreasing with time, there can actually be cases where a galaxy that is receding from us faster than light does manage to emit a signal which reaches us eventually."
Korzybski's General Semantics was originally a method of self-improvement. Perhaps you could improve yourself by using an attribution when you quote his ideas.
Better still, you could take your cod-philosophising out of a D-I-Y group. I saw some unattributed Wittgenstein from you recently which hardly belongs here. Excluding that would provide even more improvement.
Even if you think you know what you are doing you'll look back at your efforts after 6 days and decide to give up as a bad job and take up another hobby.
A couple of important points. The speed of light in a vacuum is the true invariant. In any other medium the propogation of light or radio waves is slowed according to the refractive index.
That is one reason why neutrinos from supernova collapse arrive slightly before the photon flash. They get out immediately.
The laws of our universe work back pretty well to a miniscule fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Roughly down to the Plank time 10^-43s. Indeed one of the things that compels there to have been some sort of early exponential inflation (a la Guth) was that otherwise the speed of light was too slow for the microwave background to be as uniform as we see today. There would not have been time for parts that are now on opposite sides of the universe to reach thermal equilibrium. In HHGG terms the universe big - very very big.
It was all energy and particle anti-particle pair until it cooled sufficiently for things to condense out and spontaneous symmetry breaking allowed a slight excess of matter over antimatter.
If you are interested in this sort of thing then I would recommend the book "Just 6 numbers" by former Astronomer Royal, Prof Sir Martin Rees.
Of the online resources I quickly scanned this one sums up the present thinking in a reasonably accessible way (but by no means an easy read).
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You might want to try others in the series
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Actually there is red shift *and* the brightness of standard candles. It is observations of the standard candles that suggests the existence of dark energy accelerating the most distant parts away from us faster than was expected. The universe may be tearing itself apart.
Ironincally this means that the constant that Einstein added to his equations to allow his solutions to match the Steady State model that was prevailing at the time is now once again non-zero but in the opposite sense making things fly apart.
There comes a point where there is a horizon that no particle or photon can ever arrive from beyond it no matter how long you wait. Or put another way regions of our universe forever inaccessible to us.
Not sure that makes much difference. One thing that would is that if we are ever able to build a non-trivial quantum computer it makes it much more likely that we exist in someone else's simulation!
What do you think of the idea that if you go out into space you eventually come back from the other side. People were saying that when I was a boy, and thought it was silly, but still sort of believed it, because that's what people were saying. Nowadays, I sort of imagine our experience of the Earth's surface (it seems like a projected plane) in three dimensions, and try to imagine that the three dimensional universe we see is an externally observable thing in a four-dimensional space. Or something. Could we see the light emitted from these things we'll never see coming at us from behind, as it were? A silly idea, I know, but there you go...
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