Universe is 13.8 billion years old.... how can we see light from 13.5 billion years ago?

I don't think the universe has an age.

A. We are limited to what we see 300 million years ago, I'd imagine most of the matter producing that light have been eaten by black holes or recycled into something else mysterious and unknown, like dark energy, i don't know.

B. The new telescope James Webb telescope is being launched on 30 March 2021. I can't wait... We won't see much earlier than what Hubble took but it should send back ultra high resolution imagery of the space around us, and see a lot of things that Hubble missed.

C. Personally I don't believe the big bang was the way scientists claim it was. I think the universe recycles itself when the energy is spent. Radiation has to slow down at some point even in a vacuum.

3. There are sub-atomic particles that move faster than light otherwise light itself wouldn't exist.

Didnt we move away from the single point origin? I thought I read someone saying that the current modern theory is not that everything was emitted from a single point but that everything sort of "spawn" at the same time, but still with a direction of motion.

originally posted by: flice
Didnt we move away from the single point origin? I thought I read someone saying that the current modern theory is not that everything was emitted from a single point but that everything sort of "spawn" at the same time, but still with a direction of motion.

Yes I've heard people saying something like that. There was a documentary which interviewed a number of theoretical physicists working at the Perimeter Institute, and some had an idea like that, some had other ideas, but they are theoretical physicists so that's their job, to come up with other ideas to test.

So now the question is, how do we test those ideas and figure out which idea is correct? If we can't do that, are the guesses any better than estimating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin? That's not a criticism of the theoretical physicists who are just doing their job, but for us to move toward some answer we need some evidence to support why that answer and not a different answer. I think we still don't know what happened immediately prior to the point where the universe was very hot and very dense according to the big bang model.

a reply to: Arbitrageur

I understand and respect that. Evidence is good. I have no idea how to prove the starting point, unless we could spot tvat everything was heading in a direction from a single point, but the scale is too large and our reference is too small?

I love idea myself the the universe on a grande scale flip flops.... going from inverted to this current state. Only the event is unfathomable because our own life span is a spec compared to the duration of a single flip. Ofcourse this implies single point origin...