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When we receive light or energy from the most distant objects of the universe, that energy only tells us about what happened in the past. For example, if I was 10 years old and transmitted a picture of myself to someone who was 20 light years away, they would get the picture of me at 10 when I am 30. In that picture, I am riding my bike west toward the setting sun. In the 20 years since I sent the photo, I only drove my bike about a mile, came back home for lunch and never rode that bike again. But based on that picture at 10 and careful calculations of my velocity and direction, one might assume I road my bike around the world many times in a westerly direction over twenty years.

 

When we talk about things 10B light years away, all we can say is what happened 10B years ago. We can't say what is happening "today" at a place 10B light years away, for another 10B years. We can say 10B years ago it was expanding at a given velocity. If the perimeter of the universe at 10B light years away, made a u-turn 5B years ago, we won't know for 5B years. We might say it is moving outward (riding the bike west) like did when it was 10B years younger, and be totally be off, simple because our data is stale history data and not fresh data.

 

The closest galaxies to us are blue shifted. This is still stale data, but not as stale as the more distant data that is showing a red shift. The analogy for this difference in data is the picture of me at age 10 versus a picture of me at 20 years old. Neither is the current at age 30, but the data at 20 is a little fresher but still may not reflect the true picture of 30.

 

The data we see in the cosmos is a history book of the universe. The most distant objects are moving away the fastest. This stale data of very ancient history is a record of very early universe history when the expansion was the fastest. That is why it is called BB. That is when I rode my bike west, at age 10. As the data gets closer in distance and time, we can say in the mid-history of the universe (picture of me at 20) it was expanding but getting slower.

 

If light was shined into space, it would form a big arc and return to its source. What we may be seeing, relative to the ancient history objects of the universe, is the playback of ancient history after the original light went as far as possible and curved back to the source. We see the second pass-by appearing to come from way out there in all directions. A BB will shine in all directions.

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