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You cannot speak about an absolute synchronicity among events happening in locations scattered among an arbitrary subset of the set of all visible galaxies The
by cygx 4y ago
You cannot speak about an absolute synchronicity among events happening in locations scattered among an arbitrary subset of the set of all visible galaxies
The cosmic microwave background gives you a physical realization of just that (but of course only approximately so), at least as far as cosmologists are concerned. The rules of relativity of course still apply, making this particular synchronicity convention just one of many others...
- enriquepablo 4y agoBut the cosmic microwave background refers to one single event, that has echoes everywhere, right? If I understand correctly, you don't need to synchronize anything to have echoes everywhere.
- cygx 4y agoBut the cosmic microwave background refers to one single event, that has echoes everywhere, right? An event is a single point in spacetime, whereas photon decoupling happens everywhere, defining a spacelike hypersurface we use for synchronization (in the idealized scenario). Subsequently, the CMB allows us to single out a particular reference frame (the one where it looks isotropic) and provides a measure of expansion via its redshift/temperature which we can then translate to cosmological time (ie time since the big bang as measured by an observer following the Hubble flow) via our cosmological models.