Is The Universe Entirely Electrostatically Balanced?

[Hypognosis]

Astronomers observe that the universe is not just expanding but that the expansion is accelerating. Frustratingly, the TV shows which try to popularise science among the masses have to stop short of explaining the mechanism proposed by theorists.

In the absence of that, I offer up some ideas which I trust you will relish disassembling (I trust that jim360 will).

i) is there any reason to suspect that the energy of the big bang condensed into *precisely* equal numbers of protons and electrons?
ii) How imbalanced would the numbers have to be for fields as weak as EM to exert the 'push' force, currently posited to be accelerating the expansion of the universe. (I ask despite realising that EM can push matter rather than help stretch spacial dimensions but seek to establish my level of ignorance of the evidence (of accelerating expansion))
iii) Do protons and electrons decay at precisely the same rate? If not, what ought to be in excess, 14bn years on?
iv) Is neutron star material 100% electrostatically neutral?
v) If it had the slightest impurity of proton content, would it be incorrect to regard it as a super-sized atom and would it have electron orbitals? (Even if the gravity would pull in stray electrons, they would have to cross paths with an unpaired proton in order to be squished into another neutron, causing a time delay.)

[Hypognosis]

jim, were planning to return to this thread? You concentrated on one area and hinted you would return to address other aspects later. I appreciate that you are busy but needed to know whether to close (& BA) the thread?

[Peter Pedant]

// Dawkins was on Newsnight, last night, reminding us how little the Arabic world has contributed to science, since the middle ages. //

um yeah - and the Greeks havent contributed to Literature since around 100 BC - and the Latins or whomever I mean they're even stopped speaking the language for chrissakes !
And the Anglos - they're never been able to write decent music - Handel was German by the way

and the point is...?

and he might as well say - and the British have stopped winning Nobel prizes....or
German nuclear physics was Great ! in the thirties and then it seemed to go phut !

[Peter Pedant]

Jim360 mathematicallys is like Night-rider !
slow in coming but when he does....

or is that a quote from Fifty Shades of Einstein

[jim360]

I was considering q's iv and v, but figure that in the end any answer I give to those would be pretty much just speculation. For what it's worth, I think the answer to iv is yes, and to v that any imbalance would last for such a short time that there would never be a chance to form such orbitals, although they would be weird things as the gravitational attraction would dominate at such a scale. I think then that neutrons stars form because indeed the gravitational attraction destroys any chance of electrons forming stable orbitals, resulting in them pulling in and reacting with the protons as you say with a delay, but never having a stable orbital and so never being viewable as a super-sized atom. But that is little more than an educated guess. Hopefully my answers to i, ii and iii are more accurate and helpful.

[Hypognosis]

Thanks jim.

I don't mind it being speculative. No probe is ever going to get close enough to one to do actual science in the forseeable future. Food for thought is good enough for me.

[Hypognosis]

@Peter Pedant

"and the point is?"

Oh, that was just Dawkins being Dawkins. The phrase "the Muslim world contributed massively to science" is a cliché which keeps popping up in theological debates, so his response was just to knock that down by stating that it had an end-point, centuries ago.

[jim360]

True. Although it did contribute massively to Science, and it seems a shame to play that down. Indeed, all but rescued the damn thing by preserving, copying, translating and eventually improving upon the Greek stuff that would otherwise have been lost.

[gangesboy]

Astronomers observe that the Universe is not just expanding but that the expansion is accelerating
Can someone explain to me how we can be certain of this given that the light takes millions or billions of years to reach us from the distant galaxies and therefore the proof of expansion data (red shift) is millions or billions of years old. What if the universe stopped expanding say 5 billion years ago. We wont know that for another 5 billion years? Needless to say, I am a layman on these matters

[Hypognosis]

@gangesboy

Good question, worthy of its own thread.

I don't know if this article is sufficiently in layman's terms but by all means ask again.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerating_universe#Evidence_for_acceleration

[Hypognosis]

@jim360

We have no way of knowing but it would be cool if they'd acquired copies of the kind of stuff which was lost in the fire at the Library of Alexandria. Understandable if they kept all the stuff they could use - technical and scientific - and ditched all the Greco-centric stuff (history, literature, art etc).

[jim360]

It's actually not an unreasonable question. One simple answer might be that "we don't" -- physics relies on the assumption that the laws of physics are identical regardless of where you are in the Universe, and this seems to work as an assumption, but it's not really provable.

For your specific question, a sudden "stop" of the expansion rate can be reasonably safely ruled out. There is a general principle that most things happen fairly smoothly, so a sudden stop can be ruled out on those grounds, although again it's more a principle than a fact. On the other hand, the data we have on expansion comes across a whole set of effective age ranges from just a few tens of millions of years to almost the start of the Universe, so we can be confident that the Universe was expanding over almost all of its life so far. Since in that time the expansion rate has also appeared to increase, it seems unlikely that suddenly in the last couple of million years that picture has changed to no expansion at all. In order to achieve this something would have to happen at every point in space to reverse the expansion rate. Whatever that thing it you can bet its consequences would be fairly spectacular and not go unnoticed even at local scales.

All the same, it's not really certainty. But the next best thing, "overwhelming balance of probability".

[gangesboy]

Thank you hypognosis and jim360 for your prompt replies. I will give this some more thought

[Hypognosis]

You are welcome.

And now, a gratuitous shot of comet 67P, with the beginnings
of a tail from multiple jets

http://wp.me/p46DHN-15U