[Andy Ross]

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I asked my teacher who gave me some BS that the laws of the universe weren't in affect then? pfft.

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Hahaha, awesome stuff.

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How did space expand so rapidly during this first period of time, when the laws of physics state that nothing can move faster than the speed of light.

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The short answer is that nothing has to move faster than the speed of light for space to expand so rapidly.

I think that the problem here is that everyone kind of "gets" special relativity. Nothing moves faster than light etc. The problem is that the intuition that worked well in special relativity hinders us when we look at the larger universe.

I hate these analogies (they never really work)... but think of expansion like this. You are standing on an elastic floor. You jump a metre forwards. Mid-jump, someone stretches the floor. A measuring tape shows that you jumped two metres across the floor. Let's say that it took you a second to make that jump: you didn't move at 2 m/s, but you are two metres from your start point.<font color="white">ugh</font>

When the farthest light started its journey, it was going to be a 14 billion light year journey to get here. As the light moved, the universe expanded, and the distance ended up being 47 billion light years. The light is from 47 billion light years away, but it only took 14 billion years to get here. There is no contradiction in that: nothing exceeded the speed of light. You can't multiply a cosmological time by the speed of light to give you the distance that light travelled. Neither can you divide a distance that light travelled by the cosmological time taken to give you the speed of light.

Galaxies can, and do, recede from us faster than the speed of light. The speed of photons towards us is the speed of light minus the recession velocity: c-v_rec. The Hubble Sphere is where the recessional velocity is the same as the speed of light. IF the Hubble Sphere were constant, a photon at this distance would stay there, and never approach us. Light inside would come nearer to us, and light outside would move away from us.

The Hubble Sphere isn't constant: it varies with time. There are galaxies which were outside the Hubble Sphere in the early universe. They were receding from us superluminally: the light emitted was moving away from us. Over time, the Hubble Sphere expanded, the light from those galaxies entered the HS and began to move towards us, eventually reaching us now. Therefore we can see galaxies that were, and are, receding faster than the speed of light. Again there's no problem with that. Nothing is "overtaking" photons, and the speed of light will locally be measured to be c everywhere.