Comment by jefb

Comment by jefb 2 days ago

1 reply

My point was to illustrate that our physics models don't agree on the nature of this expansion (Hubble tension) so using it to dismiss the fact that the observable universe is dense enough to form an event horizon seems like a stretch.

pdonis 2 days ago

> My point was to illustrate that our physics models don't agree on the nature of this expansion (Hubble tension)

The Hubble tension is not an uncertainty about the "nature" of the expansion. No matter how that tension gets resolved, our underlying mathematical model of "the expanding universe" will not change. All that will change is that the value we use for one particular parameter in that model will be more accurately known.

> using it to dismiss the fact that the observable universe is dense enough to form an event horizon

I have not dismissed that fact at all. I have simply pointed out that, as a matter of physics, that fact does not mean our universe actually has an event horizon. "Dense enough to form a event horizon" is just a mathematical calculation. Whether that calculation actually means something, physically, does not just depend on the value it gives you. It also depends on the underlying spacetime model, and our underlying spacetime model for the universe as a whole (which, as noted above, is not in dispute at all, Hubble tension or no) is not the one in which the mathematical calculation of "dense enough to form an event horizon" has any physical meaning. (In more technical language, that calculation only has physical meaning in the Kerr-Newman family of spacetimes, but the FRW spacetime used to model our universe as a whole is not in that family.)