rationalskepticism.org

AMR wrote:
You conflate conventional ideal gas laws (gas pressure-volumes and temperatures) with the vacuum energy that is believed to be the source of the "Dark Energy" driving the accelerating expansion of our universe. The consensus is that vacuum energy cannot be harnessed to generate free energy thus the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy. Let me ask you if a force which drives apart 100 billion galaxies does not constitute "energy" what is it?

I see the problem now. You think that something is moving galaxies and super clusters apart from one another, as if they were being moved around in space; pushed or dragged from one position to others faster and faster. This would indeed take an awful lot of energy in ever increasing amounts, and might even indicate or imply that some sort of energy is being added from an outside source.

But this is not what is happening. Even without expansion every cosmic body is moving in relation to other cosmic bodies, this is explained by kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy. Dark energy has nothing to do with moving cosmic bodies around. It acts only on empty space, and the effect, at least for the present, is that it increases it so that bodies that are not gravitationally linked get further apart. And since each cubic centimeter of empty space has to have the same infinitesimal potential energy level as every other, the overall energy of empty space increases.

So, where does this increase of potential energy come from if it is not being added from outside the isolated system that is our universe? Heat loss. Which brings us back to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and increasing entropy due to heat loss.

Let me ask you something, why did you write this?

AMR wrote:
The consensus is that vacuum energy cannot be harnessed to generate free energy thus the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy.

I know which wiki page you plucked it from, but you changed it a bit didn’t you:

wiki:
However, consensus amongst physicists is that this is incorrect and that vacuum energy cannot be harnessed to generate free energy.[2] In particular, the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy.

You changed “In particular, the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy.” to “thus the second law of thermodynamics is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy.” You changed a reason why vacuum energy cannot be harnessed to a conclusion that the 2nd law does not apply to vacuum energy, but even in this you went wrong. It doesn’t say that the vacuum energy is unaffected by the 2nd law. It says that the 2nd law is unaffected by the existence of vacuum energy. What you mined but failed to portray accurately actually supports the 2nd law in this case.

Oldskeptic wrote:
You really need to do some reading of the actual material, or just pay more and closer attention to Wiki. I know that it seems intuitive and only makes common sense that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old that the farthest observation to be made would be 13.7 billion light years away, but surprise! That is not the case, the edge of the observable universe is more like 40 billon light years away.

AMR wrote:
Here you confuse the distance of objects at the time the light was emitted (my preferred measure), with the so-called cosmological or particle horizon (about 14 billion parsecs [46.5 billion light-years]). A distant quasar we see now that emitted its light 13.1 billion light years ago has likely resolved into some mass that is "now" some 40 billion light-years distant, but of course whatever it is it's no longer a quasar and we can't "see it now".

And here you evade the point again. You invoked dark flow:

AMR wrote:
There are only two possibilities here as I see things 1. energy is being created out of the growing vacuum of space or 2. energy is being added to the universe from outside; and I mean outside the universe as a whole itself, not just outside the observable part of our universe (which given the recent discovery of "Dark Flow" must be far greater than the total mass/energy of what is visible out to a ~13 billion light-year radius).

Here is my full un-cherry-picked response:

Oldskeptic wrote:
You really need to do some reading of the actual material, or just pay more and closer attention to Wiki. I know that it seems intuitive and only makes common sense that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old that the farthest observation to be made would be 13.7 billion light years away, but surprise! That is not the case, the edge of the observable universe is more like 40 billon light years away. Go figure. That was the last, but largest, glaring mistake in the above paragraph that I noticed. So lets go back to the beginning.

It really doesn’t matter what the possibilities are as you see them. You’ve already demonstrated that you rely more on intuition than actually finding out what is factual. Energy is not being created out of a growing vacuum, nor is it being added from outside of the universe. And Dark Flow is not a recent discovery, it is one hypothesis of why it appears that one part of space seems to be expanding at an accelerated rate a tiny bit more than the rest.

We could quibble forever over what you meant by the visible universe, but not about your portrayal of “Dark flow” as a recent discovery that has somehow been verified and accepted. Why did you not respond to the salient part of the post?

Your misunderstanding of and/or intentional misuse of science in general and cosmological physics in particular combined with cherry picking Wikipedia articles is getting tedious and a bit aggravating.

The difference between you, I, and people like Hackenslash is that we at least try to understand what we are talking about, and speaking for myself make an effort to verify that what I assert is backed up by real science.