Slashdot Mirror
The Universe May Be Shaped Like a Doughnut
NewbieV writes "The NY Times (reg., etc.) is reporting that data from the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotropy Probe may suggest that the universe might be shaped like a doughnut or a cylinder: it might be possible, like in the old video game Spacewar, to drift off one 'side' of the Universe and reappear on the other."
Hi Larry, I'd really like to know,
Do you like Donuts?
If so, what's your favorite type?
...the Cop of the Universe?
damn stephen hawking!
(ps. - third?)
Is that the universe is donut shaped.
I am a science fantasy fan
homer was right!
moo
Mmmm... Universe... (knew someone would do this, thought I'd try to get in first)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The Krispy Kreme Endowment for Excellence in Cosmology.
2 dimensional universes are shaped like donuts. 3 dimensional ones like ours are shaped like hyperspheres.
I guess they forgot to carry the 1.
I have been pwned because my
In this case, the obligatory Simpson's references really *are* obligatory.
Stephen Hawking: "Your theory of the donut shaped universe is intriguing Homer, I may have to steal it."
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
This fp is lost in the mysterious void that is the hole in the centre of the donut. All attemps to find it will result in falling down the -1, offtopic black hole.
Those of us who have played games like Space Wars, Asteroids and Star Castle were already well aware of the toroidal truth.
Matt Groening (sp?) came up with this concept no more than 4 years ago.
you mean to tell me the universe is actually shaped like a doughnut? Does this vouch for the existance of life (cops) on every planet in the universe? If this were really true, then this means that we really ARE living in the Matrix, but it's run by Homer Simpson. Yikes
"I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin"
no registration required link in printer friendly format (otherwise it's five pages)
More images from probe homepage
I watched Homer Simpson tell Stephen Hawking that a couple of days ago. Hawking even told him that it was an interesting possibility.
I didn't think that The Simpsons could predict the future.
What kind of donut? Cream/jelly filled? Eclair? I think it's BAGEL Shaped!
It's ASDFing to the Ultra!!!!!
March 11, 2003
Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate
By DENNIS OVERBYE
ong ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen.
Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side.
Real space couldn't work that way.
Or could it?
Imagine that the Spacewar screen is wrapped around to form a cylinder or a section of a doughnut so that the two edges meet.
That is the picture of space, some cosmologists say, that has been suggested by a new detailed map of the early universe. Their analysis of this map has now provided a series of hints -- though only hints -- that the universe may have a more complicated shape than astronomers presumed.
Rather than being infinite in all directions, as the most fashionable theory suggests, the universe could be radically smaller in one direction than the others. As a result it may be even be shaped like a doughnut.
"There's a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you'd return to Earth from the opposite direction," said Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The new data have generated both buzz and skepticism among cosmologists in recent weeks. Dr. Tegmark and other astronomers agree that the measurements are far from conclusive, or even persuasive about the shape of the universe.
But if true, the doughnut universe would force cosmologists to reconsider their theories about what happened in the earliest moments after the universe was born in the Big Bang; those theories predict an infinite cosmos.
The new findings have brought to center stage the hope that astronomers may be able to test speculations about the shape, or topology, of the universe that until recently have been relegated to the abstract mathematical margins of cosmology.
The results are part of the bounty of data produced by a NASA satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, built and operated by an international collaboration led by Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The satellite recorded the pattern of heat, in the form of faint microwave radiation, that fills the sky.
This radiation is believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, and thus constitutes a portrait of the universe when it was only 380,000 years old.
As the COBE satellite first confirmed in 1992, the microwave cloud is laced with ripples and splotches -- lumps in the cosmic gravy -- from which galaxies and other cosmic structures would ultimately form.
According to theory, these lumps are born as microscopic fluctuations during the first instant of time and then amplified into sound waves as the universe expands and matter and energy slosh around.
Now the new satellite has illuminated the findings of COBE (pronounced KOE-bee, for Cosmic Background Explorer) in exquisite detail.
By analyzing these waves cosmologists can determine many of the characteristics of the universe, which scientists have long debated, like its age and density. To their delight, the first results from the Wilkinson satellite, released last month, confirmed many of the strange ideas that cosmologists entertained in the last decade, including the notion that most of the universe consists of something called dark energy, which is pushing space apart at an accelerating rate.
"Cosmologists have built a house of cards and it stands," said Dr. James Peebles, a cosmologist at Princeton.
But to their even greater delight, perhaps, as they dig into the trove released last month, cosmologists are finding hints of even more strangeness.
In principle, in an infinite universe, the waves in the cosmic fireball should appear randomly around the sky at all sizes. But, according to the new map, there seems to be a limit to the size of the waves, with none extending more than 60 degrees across the sky.
The effect was first noted as a puzzle in the COBE data, according to Dr. Gary Hinshaw, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the Wilkinson probe team, and now seems confirmed.
If the universe were a guitar string, it would be missing its deepest notes, the ones with the longest wavelengths, perhaps because it is not big enough to sustain them.
"The fact that there appears to be an angular cutoff hints at a special distance scale in the universe," Dr. Hinshaw said.
Another analysis of the new map suggests that there is a special direction, as well as a special scale in the universe. While reanalyzing the Wilkinson data to eliminate radio noise from stars and our own galaxy, Dr. Tegmark, Dr. Angélica de Oliveira-Costa, also at Pennsylvania and married to Dr. Tegmark, and Dr. Andrew J. S. Hamilton of the University of Colorado have discovered that the universe appears lumpier in one direction through space than it does in another. When they combed finer variations out of the map, the remaining large-scale variations formed a line across the sky.
It could be a chance alignment, a statistical fluke, Dr. Tegmark said, or contamination from radio noise from the galaxy.
But in a paper posted on the physics Web site (at arXiv.org/pdf
If the universe is finite in one dimension, like a cylinder or a doughnut, Dr. Tegmark said in an interview, there is a limit to the size of clumps that can fit in that direction. They couldn't be bigger than the universe in that direction, just as a guitar string can only play a note so low, depending on its length. So the biggest blobs would have to squish out in a plane in other directions. The way home around the doughnut would be perpendicular to that plane.
Nobody is yet claiming that this is a revolution. The notion of a special direction is on less firm ground than the discovery of a cutoff of large structures. "More detailed work in needed to clarify what's going on," Dr. Tegmark said.
Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University," said he didn't think there was evidence for "anything crazy" in the data.
Even aficionados of finite universes are guarded. Dr. David Spergel, a Princeton cosmologist and Wilkinson satellite team member, called the results "intriguing," but cautioned that they could also be due to chance.
Dr. Hinshaw called the findings of Dr. Tegmark's team "surprisingly robust," but added, "I'm not sure it says something profound about the universe."
Dr. Alexei Starobinski, a theorist at the Landau Institute in Moscow, proposed in 1984 with his mentor, Dr. Yakov B. Zeldovich, that the universe could have been born as a doughnut. Dr. Starobinski emphasized that an infinite universe with ordinary Euclidean geometry was the most natural universe and still favored by theory.
"However, theory is theory, but observations might tell us something different," he said in an e-mail message.
The Science of Shapes
A Compact Universe
Like Mirrored Halls
The new work involves topology, the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes. Topologists are often accused of not knowing the difference between a coffee mug and a doughnut; because each object has one hole, the two can be deformed into each other and are thus topologically equivalent. In a similar vein, a figure 8 and a pair of eyeglass frames are also the same to a topologist. The more holes, the more complicated the topology.
The simplest topology is just the infinite space of the Euclidean geometry taught in high school. But some cosmologists have a hard time calculating how an infinite universe could have appeared in that kind of space. Nature, they contend, might have had an easier time making a small "compact" universe than an infinite one, and they assume Nature would take the easy way out.
"The basic idea is that God's on a budget," said Dr. George Smoot, a physicist at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a leader on the COBE team.
The simplest of these compact universes is something called a 3-torus, a doughnut wrapped in three different dimensions. This object is essentially impossible to visualize: it is the equivalent, in a way, of a cube whose opposite sides are somehow glued together. In two dimensions it works just like the Spacewar screen.
Living in such a universe would be like being inside a hall of mirrors, Dr. Tegmark said. Instead of seeing new stars deeper and deeper in space, you see the same things over and over again as light travels out one side of your cube and back in the other.
This mirror game is not limited to cubes and doughnuts. Over the years mathematicians, particularly Dr. William Paul Thurston, now at the University of California at Davis, and Dr. Jeffrey Weeks, an independent mathematician, have speculated about universes composed of various polyhedrons glued together in various ways.
In 1996 the French astronomer Dr. Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues Dr. Roland Lehoucq and Dr. Marc Lachieze-Rey, both of the Center for Astrophysical Studies in Saclay, France, developed a method called "cosmic crystallography," using galaxy statistics to detect and diagnose the repeating periodic patterns that would be created in the sky by light going around and around in differently shaped universe.
Finite or Infinite?
Problems Are Posed
For Favored Theory
Why would the universe want to do this to us? Partly to avoid the difficulties of the infinite, said Dr. Glenn Starkman, an astronomer at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Besides being difficult to create, an infinite universe is philosophically unattractive. In an infinite volume, he pointed out, anything that can happen will happen.
"Somewhere there are two guys having this same conversation," Dr. Starkman said in a telephone interview, "except that one of them has a purple phone."
Moreover, the idea that dimensions could be curled in loops occurs naturally in theories that try to unite gravity and particle physics, several physicists pointed out. For example, according to string theory, the leading candidate for a theory of everything, the universe actually has 10 dimensions -- 9 of space and 1 of time -- rather than the 4 we are familiar with. The extra dimensions are curled up into submicroscopic loops, like the threads in an uncut carpet pile, so that we don't notice them in ordinary life.
"This is the same idea on a very large scale," Dr. Smoot said.
Knowing that all nine of the spatial dimensions predicted by string theory are finite and thus on the same footing could help string theorists decide among the nearly endless possibilities allowed by the theory, scientists say.
But a finite universe would create big problems for the reigning theory of the Big Bang, inflation theory. It posits that the universe underwent a burst of hyperexpansion in its earliest moments. Among other things, it implies that the observable universe today, a bubble 28 billion light-years in diameter, is only a speck on the surface of a vastly greater realm trillions upon trillions of light-years across.
"There's no natural way yet proposed to get the inflation to stop and give a space that's big enough to house all the galaxies but small enough to see within the observable horizon," said Dr. Janna Levin, a Cambridge University cosmologist who wrote about finite universes in her 1992 book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots, Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space."
Dr. Spergel added, "If the universe were finite, then this would rule out inflation and require something new."
The Search for Patterns
One Convincing Sign
Of the Doughnut
So far, sporadic searches for repeating patterns of quasars or distant galaxy clusters that would occur in a hall of mirrors universe have been unsuccessful.
For finite universe aficionados, the first encouragement of note was COBE's discovery that the universe appeared to be deficient in large-scale fluctuations. There were no structures extending more than about 60 degrees across the sky. But the finding was subject to large statistical uncertainties, astronomers said.
There are other possible explanations for the cutoff in fluctuation size, Dr. Starkman explained. According to inflation the biggest longest waves are created first, and thus the missing notes are the earliest ones that would have been strummed by inflation's guitar. Perhaps, he said, this is telling us something about the beginning of inflation.
Dr. George Efstathiou of Cambridge University has pointed out in a recent paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the Wilkinson satellite data are also marginally consistent with yet another finite shape, namely a sphere. In that case, fluctuations larger than the radius of the sphere might be dampened, he said, producing the observed cutoff.
The most convincing sign of a doughnut universe, if it exists, astronomers say, could come from a search of the satellite data now being performed by Dr. Spergel, Dr. Starkman and Dr. Neil J. Cornish of Montana State University. "We're looking for circles in the sky," Dr. Starkman said.
In a 1998 paper they point out that if the universe is small enough, part of the cosmic background radiation, which essentially fills the sky surrounding us, will hit the sides of the "box" or the space war screen we are in and appear on the other side. The result, in the simplest case, would be identical circles on opposite sides of the sky with the same patterns of hot and cold running around them.
In the simplest case, the size of the circles would depend on the distance between the "walls" of the universe: the smaller the universe, the bigger the circles.
Success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. "It would be fantastic if something like that was found," Dr. Hinshaw said of the circles.
But success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. If the universe is finite but still much larger than today's observable universe -- 28 billion light-years in diameter -- the circles will not show. "Usually in science when we see an intriguing pattern that appears to contradict existing theory we do a better experiment," Dr. Spergel wrote in an e-mail message, but in this case, "Ultimately we will be limited by the fact that we can only observe the `visible' universe."
Dr. Levin was doubtful, "I suspect every last one of us would be flabbergasted if the universe was so small," she said in an e-mail message. When she first heard about the new satellite data, she reported, "I tried on the idea that we were really and truly seeing the finite extent of space and I was filled with dread.
"But I'm enjoying it too."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
Mmmmmm.... donuts!
...on the Simpsons. It was Homer's idea, actually. And now that I think about it, I think that was actually Larry Flint...
Don't you hate pants?
....cosmic size donut with solar sprinkles.
/me drools
Since doughnuts can be deformed from coffee cups, it explains why caffeine makes my world go around.
There are no karma whores, only moderation johns
Then in theory, we'd be able to see the same part of space from two vantage points, assuming that they're not farther away from us than the distance that light could have travelled since the universe came into being, assuming that one believes in the big bang theory.
So, would this mean that if we can't see one point from two directions now, that if we suddenly can, we've reached the halfway point of the life of the universe? Would we lose the redshift in favour of a green shift?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
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That is kinda vague. What kind of donut, as we all know the jelly filled ones take on a different shape than a fritter.
ich bin ein berliner ~ jfk proof that he is god *ducks*
if it wasn't for that horse, i wouldn't have spent that year in college.....
Would that make the Milky Way and other galaxies the sprinkles on the galactic doughnut? And, do you think the rich, chocolatey coating represents "dark matter" or the other way 'round?
Would doughnut holes be alternate universes? Or does God just use the holes to carry the doughnut(s) around on his fingers?
I'm going to go get drunk and ponder this...
Not the doughnut shaped part, because I wasn't sure if it would be render-able in a three dimension shape, but rather just connected at the ends, if that makes sense. I always though it would be interesting to take a light speed trip around the universe and see how humans end up doing in a bzillion years. (that's the scientific term for a lot, I think).
I had a math teacher at the Naval Academy that specialized in donut-shaped mathematics. I bet he's calling up all his math friends right now and yelling at them "See! I told you I wasn't wasting my time!" He did have a really cool poster of the earth if it were shaped like a donut and he spent several class periods describing what the gravity and climate would be like on such a world.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
... since the longest distance possible in the universe is going forward to what one is having behind, I think that not all will be so nice.
Is there anything they can't do?
mmmmm Universe...
sig
I found the story very interesting but skipping over the details to keep it lively. I would be interested in reading something of the level of Scientific American on this elsewhere on the web.
The article made it seem like this idea is far from proven. If it IS so wacky then why such attention paid to it?
Did anyone here actually *read* A Brief History of Time? Hawking described how the gravity of the universe may be so intense that it causes the universe to wrap around into a spherical shape. Of course this was just a theory back when he wrote the book.
...the shape is called a torus.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
At BASF, we don't make the Universe, we make it, more doughnut like.
"I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin"
Namaste
"And that, my liege, is how we know the earth to be banana-shaped."
- Sir Bedevere
C8H10N4O2 | Developer > Code
This isn't really new news. People have been thinking this for quite a long time. Nothing new.
Coffee? Void? Dark Matter? Does that question even make sense? I'm not up on this and would be most interested in getting a better understanding of this.
But then what the hell is the jelly?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Voyager could also become the first device of our civilization to sail around the entire universe?
All replies alluding to the Homer Simpson should be modded down... Mmmmmm Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe
So what is the radius?
The universe is going to end in a few minutes, as soon as Homer Simpson hears about this!!
Repeal the DMCA!
I dont whant the universe to be un donut ( cry ) then how can i get a house att the end of the universe
...the shape is called a donut.
During the meeting down at Dunkin' Donuts, I explained how the torus is a great shape for confining stuff with fields (think cyclotrons, eg). This suggests that we are just part of some big experiment. When the experimenter's funding runs out, our donut is toast.
the universe is an ever decreasingly point.
Just aslong enough souls believe something it becomes our reality since more and more start believing. Its like a sort of Matrix...
One person thinks its a donut, then he convince's person two etc, etc, until the universe is what we think it is. Isnt this why science keeps coming with new improved idea's ?
its all in our mind...happy dreaming
I knew all those hours watchning the Simpsons were worth it.
In certain types curved universe the behavior would be quite different. If you start out going in one direction and continue going long enough, you may end up where you started. There would be nothing discontinuous about this motion though. A "straight" path in a curved universe isn't really what we would think of as straight. As you go along your "straight" path the stars that appear to be ahead of you would impercibly change as time wore on. Eventually you could end up back where you started, but considering the likely size of the Universe, it might take you longer than the age of the Universe to do it.
Anyway, curved space is weird to think about, but not as weird as Space War.
Preventive War is like committing suicide for fear of death. - Otto Von Bismarck
We're talking about a Torus, not a spherical universe. If true, the universe is still 'flat', there's no 'wrapping' as you put it, it just repeats in all directions.
I am a science fantasy fan
Instead of the big bang, you insensitive clod!... :)
I can't find the original write up about it, but Tetrisphere on Nintendo 64 wasn't really a sphere at all, but a doughnut. I found an old article about it on Google, but it doesn't go into as much depth as the original one did:
http://www.n64cc.com/CCTET.HTM#Fun%20Glitch
The original article was on Nintendojo.com if anyone can find it...
That doesn't look like a doughnut to me!! It looks more like a black hole!
That diner image gives me whack dejavu/nostalgia... what's the original? It appears to be a bit of a recurring theme.
"[A] high IQ is like a Jeep; you will still get stuck, just farther from help!" --Just d' FAQs, c.g.a
Kent Brockman (on TV): "Scientists announced today that the universe is a giant doughnut."
Homer Simpson (drooling and gurgling): "Mmmmmm.... Doughnut..."
Still #1 -- Lonely Gay Geek
I imagine the big bang as the inflation of a point shape baloon with the 3 dimensional space of the universe projected to the baloons surface.
So yes: when you start walking forward on the baloons surface you will reapear where you started. I even thought about a way to prove it:
Survey the sky and record objects parameters such as size, distance, velocity and direction. Look deep and long enough and in theory - since you are always looking back to yourself - you should find same patterns - or at least very similar ones, as the space the light travels through to reach the instrument travels though, varies depending on the direction one looks in.
-- Contradictions only exist in thought - not in reality.
like to post a Homer Simpson quote? I mean, there have only been about 20 so far!
I guess thats what -1, Redundant was made for!
mmmmmmm...Universe
if (particle->position.x < LEFT_LIMIT)
particle->position.x += RIGHT_LIMIT - LEFT_LIMIT;
else if (particle->position.x >= RIGHT_LIMIT)
particle->position.x -= RIGHT_LIMIT - LEFT_LIMIT;
"Your theory of a donought shaped universe intrigues me."
Haha Homer I love you!
"Pushing little children, with their fully automatics, they like to push the weak around"
.... ... }
int main (void) {
In other news, a second universe has been found shaped like a coffee cup. Photo's at 11.
Theonlyuse of monkeys is to testthings onthem.Some peoplemay say"Hey That'scruel!"and myresponse is"I don't like monkeys
Doughnuts... is there anything they can't do?
--Homer
what if the afterlife is nothing but a big maze where you eat globing gobs and are chased by gigantic, pixelated ghosts?
From http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/mr_content.html:
"WMAP has determined, within the limits of instrument error, that the universe is flat."
Hmm...
Honestly, I've often thought that the Universe was in a donut shape. However, the question still remains: what the hell's outside of it?
[insert witty comment here]
... black doughnut hole! Thank you. I'll be appearing here all week.
I've admired Dr. Tegmark's home page since he was a grad student, not so much for the design skills (ha!) but as an exemplar of mixing serious and non-serious publications for other colleauges and onlookers to enjoy, explore, and learn from. Tegmark gets the web. As for the science, some of it I can actually understand.
I would also commend to the curious Slashdot reader a couple items I found facinating from the 'non-serious' section of his website:
a very cool diagram of "Relationships between various basic mathematical structures" from his Theory of Everything paper
and another paper addressing the question: Why does the universe have 3 spatial and 1 time dimension?
--LP
A cockring? (you can decide whose I mean ;-)
Space is a toroid with finite size? Augh, I must be trapped in a static warp bubble! CleverNickName, this is all your fault!
I think the universe is round, like a hollow sphere. The portion that we can detect is really just a speck on the edge of the sphere. Sort of like how if you just go into an open field and look around, the Earth appears flat. But if you go up high enough into the atmosphere, you can see that it is, in fact, a sphere. I think the same principle applies to the universe. The universe is so unimaginably massive that what we currently perceive to be the entire universe is just our view of the "horizon". As technology improves we will get closer and closer to a more curved appearance. Perhaps what these scientists are actually detecting is just the opposite side of the sphere?
Which place makes this huge a Doughnut?
Is every eaten Doughnut a destroyed Universe?
Is "The Restaurant at the end of the Universe" a marketing gag?
If the Universe is bent how do we really look? I mean I see a whole lot of Fashion coming up: "Elvis, the bent jeans. Made to fit the REAL you"
And finally, does the inventor of Doughnuts sue God because he stole the patented design?
... is our perception of the universe warped along with the toroid shape? If so, couldn't we eventually look so far that we see ourselves?
I'm curious how we'd test that, given that the distances involved would mean that we'd see events so long ago that we wouldn't recognize them. It would explain how the universe would seem infinite, though...
-Begin Jargon-
A torus (dougnut) is topologically equivalent to a square with sides identified (like the Space War).
-End Jargon-
Discontinuous or stuff like that is not really important concept. Whether you are "magically" transported or not when you reached the end is just a matter of choosing the right coordinates.
Also, curved universes do not enter the argument. Curvature is a statement on Geometry of the Universe, while being a Dougnut is a Topological Statement.Both of completely independent of each other. A Toroidal Universe can be flat (like, hey , a square with sides identified!). A curved universe can be a plain sphere.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
After having initially said it was more like a pancake, their only comment about the donut was
Doh!
Dougie as General Disarray: "Simpsons did it!"
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
March 11, 2003
/astro-ph/0302496) late last month, the three cosmologists wrote that it was "difficult not to be intrigued" that their results bore all the earmarks of what are variously called small, compact, finite or periodic universes.
Universe as Doughnut: New Data, New Debate
By DENNIS OVERBYE
ong ago in the dawn of the computer age, college students often whiled away the nights playing a computer game called Spacewar. It consisted of two rocket ships attempting to blast each other out of the sky with torpedoes while trying to avoid falling into a star at the center of the screen.
Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side.
Real space couldn't work that way.
Or could it?
Imagine that the Spacewar screen is wrapped around to form a cylinder or a section of a doughnut so that the two edges meet.
That is the picture of space, some cosmologists say, that has been suggested by a new detailed map of the early universe. Their analysis of this map has now provided a series of hints -- though only hints -- that the universe may have a more complicated shape than astronomers presumed.
Rather than being infinite in all directions, as the most fashionable theory suggests, the universe could be radically smaller in one direction than the others. As a result it may be even be shaped like a doughnut.
"There's a hint in the data that if you traveled far and fast in the direction of the constellation Virgo, you'd return to Earth from the opposite direction," said Dr. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
The new data have generated both buzz and skepticism among cosmologists in recent weeks. Dr. Tegmark and other astronomers agree that the measurements are far from conclusive, or even persuasive about the shape of the universe.
But if true, the doughnut universe would force cosmologists to reconsider their theories about what happened in the earliest moments after the universe was born in the Big Bang; those theories predict an infinite cosmos.
The new findings have brought to center stage the hope that astronomers may be able to test speculations about the shape, or topology, of the universe that until recently have been relegated to the abstract mathematical margins of cosmology.
The results are part of the bounty of data produced by a NASA satellite known as the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, built and operated by an international collaboration led by Dr. Charles L. Bennett of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The satellite recorded the pattern of heat, in the form of faint microwave radiation, that fills the sky.
This radiation is believed to be the afterglow of the Big Bang itself, and thus constitutes a portrait of the universe when it was only 380,000 years old.
As the COBE satellite first confirmed in 1992, the microwave cloud is laced with ripples and splotches -- lumps in the cosmic gravy -- from which galaxies and other cosmic structures would ultimately form.
According to theory, these lumps are born as microscopic fluctuations during the first instant of time and then amplified into sound waves as the universe expands and matter and energy slosh around.
Now the new satellite has illuminated the findings of COBE (pronounced KOE-bee, for Cosmic Background Explorer) in exquisite detail.
By analyzing these waves cosmologists can determine many of the characteristics of the universe, which scientists have long debated, like its age and density. To their delight, the first results from the Wilkinson satellite, released last month, confirmed many of the strange ideas that cosmologists entertained in the last decade, including the notion that most of the universe consists of something called dark energy, which is pushing space apart at an accelerating rate.
"Cosmologists have built a house of cards and it stands," said Dr. James Peebles, a cosmologist at Princeton.
But to their even greater delight, perhaps, as they dig into the trove released last month, cosmologists are finding hints of even more strangeness.
In principle, in an infinite universe, the waves in the cosmic fireball should appear randomly around the sky at all sizes. But, according to the new map, there seems to be a limit to the size of the waves, with none extending more than 60 degrees across the sky.
The effect was first noted as a puzzle in the COBE data, according to Dr. Gary Hinshaw, an astronomer at the Goddard Space Flight Center and a member of the Wilkinson probe team, and now seems confirmed.
If the universe were a guitar string, it would be missing its deepest notes, the ones with the longest wavelengths, perhaps because it is not big enough to sustain them.
"The fact that there appears to be an angular cutoff hints at a special distance scale in the universe," Dr. Hinshaw said.
Another analysis of the new map suggests that there is a special direction, as well as a special scale in the universe. While reanalyzing the Wilkinson data to eliminate radio noise from stars and our own galaxy, Dr. Tegmark, Dr. Angélica de Oliveira-Costa, also at Pennsylvania and married to Dr. Tegmark, and Dr. Andrew J. S. Hamilton of the University of Colorado have discovered that the universe appears lumpier in one direction through space than it does in another. When they combed finer variations out of the map, the remaining large-scale variations formed a line across the sky.
It could be a chance alignment, a statistical fluke, Dr. Tegmark said, or contamination from radio noise from the galaxy.
But in a paper posted on the physics Web site (at arXiv.org/pdf
If the universe is finite in one dimension, like a cylinder or a doughnut, Dr. Tegmark said in an interview, there is a limit to the size of clumps that can fit in that direction. They couldn't be bigger than the universe in that direction, just as a guitar string can only play a note so low, depending on its length. So the biggest blobs would have to squish out in a plane in other directions. The way home around the doughnut would be perpendicular to that plane.
Nobody is yet claiming that this is a revolution. The notion of a special direction is on less firm ground than the discovery of a cutoff of large structures. "More detailed work in needed to clarify what's going on," Dr. Tegmark said.
Dr. Martin Rees, a cosmologist at Cambridge University," said he didn't think there was evidence for "anything crazy" in the data.
Even aficionados of finite universes are guarded. Dr. David Spergel, a Princeton cosmologist and Wilkinson satellite team member, called the results "intriguing," but cautioned that they could also be due to chance.
Dr. Hinshaw called the findings of Dr. Tegmark's team "surprisingly robust," but added, "I'm not sure it says something profound about the universe."
Dr. Alexei Starobinski, a theorist at the Landau Institute in Moscow, proposed in 1984 with his mentor, Dr. Yakov B. Zeldovich, that the universe could have been born as a doughnut. Dr. Starobinski emphasized that an infinite universe with ordinary Euclidean geometry was the most natural universe and still favored by theory.
"However, theory is theory, but observations might tell us something different," he said in an e-mail message.
The Science of Shapes
A Compact Universe
Like Mirrored Halls
The new work involves topology, the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes. Topologists are often accused of not knowing the difference between a coffee mug and a doughnut; because each object has one hole, the two can be deformed into each other and are thus topologically equivalent. In a similar vein, a figure 8 and a pair of eyeglass frames are also the same to a topologist. The more holes, the more complicated the topology.
The simplest topology is just the infinite space of the Euclidean geometry taught in high school. But some cosmologists have a hard time calculating how an infinite universe could have appeared in that kind of space. Nature, they contend, might have had an easier time making a small "compact" universe than an infinite one, and they assume Nature would take the easy way out.
"The basic idea is that God's on a budget," said Dr. George Smoot, a physicist at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and a leader on the COBE team.
The simplest of these compact universes is something called a 3-torus, a doughnut wrapped in three different dimensions. This object is essentially impossible to visualize: it is the equivalent, in a way, of a cube whose opposite sides are somehow glued together. In two dimensions it works just like the Spacewar screen.
Living in such a universe would be like being inside a hall of mirrors, Dr. Tegmark said. Instead of seeing new stars deeper and deeper in space, you see the same things over and over again as light travels out one side of your cube and back in the other.
This mirror game is not limited to cubes and doughnuts. Over the years mathematicians, particularly Dr. William Paul Thurston, now at the University of California at Davis, and Dr. Jeffrey Weeks, an independent mathematician, have speculated about universes composed of various polyhedrons glued together in various ways.
In 1996 the French astronomer Dr. Jean-Pierre Luminet of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues Dr. Roland Lehoucq and Dr. Marc Lachieze-Rey, both of the Center for Astrophysical Studies in Saclay, France, developed a method called "cosmic crystallography," using galaxy statistics to detect and diagnose the repeating periodic patterns that would be created in the sky by light going around and around in differently shaped universe.
Finite or Infinite?
Problems Are Posed
For Favored Theory
Why would the universe want to do this to us? Partly to avoid the difficulties of the infinite, said Dr. Glenn Starkman, an astronomer at the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Besides being difficult to create, an infinite universe is philosophically unattractive. In an infinite volume, he pointed out, anything that can happen will happen.
"Somewhere there are two guys having this same conversation," Dr. Starkman said in a telephone interview, "except that one of them has a purple phone."
Moreover, the idea that dimensions could be curled in loops occurs naturally in theories that try to unite gravity and particle physics, several physicists pointed out. For example, according to string theory, the leading candidate for a theory of everything, the universe actually has 10 dimensions -- 9 of space and 1 of time -- rather than the 4 we are familiar with. The extra dimensions are curled up into submicroscopic loops, like the threads in an uncut carpet pile, so that we don't notice them in ordinary life.
"This is the same idea on a very large scale," Dr. Smoot said.
Knowing that all nine of the spatial dimensions predicted by string theory are finite and thus on the same footing could help string theorists decide among the nearly endless possibilities allowed by the theory, scientists say.
But a finite universe would create big problems for the reigning theory of the Big Bang, inflation theory. It posits that the universe underwent a burst of hyperexpansion in its earliest moments. Among other things, it implies that the observable universe today, a bubble 28 billion light-years in diameter, is only a speck on the surface of a vastly greater realm trillions upon trillions of light-years across.
"There's no natural way yet proposed to get the inflation to stop and give a space that's big enough to house all the galaxies but small enough to see within the observable horizon," said Dr. Janna Levin, a Cambridge University cosmologist who wrote about finite universes in her 1992 book, "How the Universe Got Its Spots, Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space."
Dr. Spergel added, "If the universe were finite, then this would rule out inflation and require something new."
The Search for Patterns
One Convincing Sign
Of the Doughnut
So far, sporadic searches for repeating patterns of quasars or distant galaxy clusters that would occur in a hall of mirrors universe have been unsuccessful.
For finite universe aficionados, the first encouragement of note was COBE's discovery that the universe appeared to be deficient in large-scale fluctuations. There were no structures extending more than about 60 degrees across the sky. But the finding was subject to large statistical uncertainties, astronomers said.
There are other possible explanations for the cutoff in fluctuation size, Dr. Starkman explained. According to inflation the biggest longest waves are created first, and thus the missing notes are the earliest ones that would have been strummed by inflation's guitar. Perhaps, he said, this is telling us something about the beginning of inflation.
Dr. George Efstathiou of Cambridge University has pointed out in a recent paper submitted to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society that the Wilkinson satellite data are also marginally consistent with yet another finite shape, namely a sphere. In that case, fluctuations larger than the radius of the sphere might be dampened, he said, producing the observed cutoff.
The most convincing sign of a doughnut universe, if it exists, astronomers say, could come from a search of the satellite data now being performed by Dr. Spergel, Dr. Starkman and Dr. Neil J. Cornish of Montana State University. "We're looking for circles in the sky," Dr. Starkman said.
In a 1998 paper they point out that if the universe is small enough, part of the cosmic background radiation, which essentially fills the sky surrounding us, will hit the sides of the "box" or the space war screen we are in and appear on the other side. The result, in the simplest case, would be identical circles on opposite sides of the sky with the same patterns of hot and cold running around them.
In the simplest case, the size of the circles would depend on the distance between the "walls" of the universe: the smaller the universe, the bigger the circles.
Success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. "It would be fantastic if something like that was found," Dr. Hinshaw said of the circles.
But success or even a definitive failure is not guaranteed. If the universe is finite but still much larger than today's observable universe -- 28 billion light-years in diameter -- the circles will not show. "Usually in science when we see an intriguing pattern that appears to contradict existing theory we do a better experiment," Dr. Spergel wrote in an e-mail message, but in this case, "Ultimately we will be limited by the fact that we can only observe the `visible' universe."
Dr. Levin was doubtful, "I suspect every last one of us would be flabbergasted if the universe was so small," she said in an e-mail message. When she first heard about the new satellite data, she reported, "I tried on the idea that we were really and truly seeing the finite extent of space and I was filled with dread.
"But I'm enjoying it too."
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
some people have theorized that the universe is like a circle turned inside out
Jolan Tru. (If you know what this means, you're a tru geek)
Bet the collective Police Departments of the world are killing their fund drive for the Police-Person's ball and diverting that funding into the creation of a super shuttle, complete with cargo bay full of coffee...
Sorry, I just couldn't resist...
Imagine you're a 2-D dude wandering the earth (which is really a 3-D globe like you'd find in a classroom). You can walk and walk and never hit a wall but there's a finite amount of 2-D space. Now imagine you're a 3-D dude... This is where my feeble brain says 'help!'.
The analogy would seem to back up the article; whatever direction you take if you walk long enough you end up where you started.
This comment made my day :)
It was discovered that the internet is shaped like a pringle.
I think the Flintstone's house is it's own tightly bounded universe with high curvature... notice when they run in a straight line, they nevertheless keep passing the same circular window and pelican ash tray? Perhaps they have floating bubble universes they get trapped in from time to time.
"I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
All I could think was Pacman. Ooooh, little pills and repetitive music.
Doughnuts, is there anything they can't do? -Homer, in the monorail episode.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
If I read this right, then the shape they are describing can pretty much not be thought of as a three dimensional object. And I don't think there would be any way to look at it and make it resemble anything like a doughnut. I think the best description was in the article itself:
Then again...three doughnuts whose surfaces rotate, one for each dimension, in the same spot at the same time, and movement would be rotation of the surface of those doughnuts... Nah, sorry. I can't visualize it.
Reinard
Mario is cooler
The universe is a donut.
If you travel through the universe far enough you will get back to where you started.
I guess the ancient ones were wise to this when they said:
No matter where you go, there you are!
On learning of this news Ford Motor Company immediately sent the universe a "cease and desist" letter, claiming violation of their trademark "Taurus."
While someone was trying to explain to a Ford executive that "Taurus" was a different word, and only applied to to an abstract portion of space, not the universe, and the word "Torus" refered to a donut shaped object, said executive got a blank look in his eye, muttered the words, "Hmmmmmmmmmmm, Donut," and wandered off.
KFG
The universe is not round I'm telling you! It's flat! I guess we're back to that old argument again...
Eric Jaakkola
Check out a book called "Time Travel in Einsteins Universe" I forget the name of the author though.
Anyway, this idea is explored fairly in depth, and explains how it would be done... and how it would allow people to travel in time, or at the very least, see into the past.
With a sufficiently powered telescope, you could see what was *actually happening* during the big bang, if the universe is indeed shaped like torus or the universe is mapped out onto a sphere (as opposed to being an expanding sphere that we are inside of).
It's a very interesting book, and a fairly quick read. Has a lot of nice explanations for the physics challenged as well.
Pick it up!
I wonder what color our sprinkles are.
paintball
Interesting... let's assume for a moment that the universe's expansion was frozen.
... hmmmmm... I'm having trouble picturing what this 3-d curvature would look like. Anyone have a helpful mental image of this?
Now, if I threw a baseball in a straight line from point x,y,z in the universe, at some point, that baseball would again pass through one of the planes of its starting location? (I'm neglecting all interferences, including gravity)
3-d space curving
Actually it's a fine analogy. The problem is the display screen, not the Space War universe. If you were to map a torus onto a flat display, it would seem that you're magically transported. In reality, the discontinuity is the display, not the universe. (In similar games, I'm not sure about this one in particular, you can be "right on the border" and see your ship halfway on either edge. Perhaps Space War lacks this "sophistication".)
Anyway, this is like saying "that is not a picture of something 3D, because the picture is 2D". Just because it's 2D doesn't mean it can't represent something 3D.
Besides, if you want to be really pedantic, the real problem would be the dimensions of the toroid universe in question... it wouldn't really map exactly to a rectangular screen unless you changed a few "universal constants". ;-) (Not that I have a problem with this. ;-))
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
Homer was right about you too.
If true, the universe is still 'flat', there's no 'wrapping' as you put it, it just repeats in all directions.
Au contraire, if the universe is a torus there is plenty of curvature. Points along the inner half-torus have a negative curvature, points along the outer half-torus have a positive curvature. The only points where the curvature is zero are along the circles where the inner and outer halves meet.
Duh .. talk about 'silly students'
Most of this is based on the low quadrupole in the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) power spectrum.
But... it's not really that much lower than in the concordence model, and is more likely just a result of cosmic variance - you can only measure 2 quadrupoles over the entire sky. The quadrupole power in our observable universe happens to be slightly below average - if you did the same experiment at many random points in the universe (esp. if you include points outside our horizon), you'd get a distribution of values whose mean was the concordence model value, with our observation slightly on the low side of the distribution.
[TMB]
Hawking described how the gravity of the universe may be so intense that it causes the universe to wrap around into a spherical shape.
IIRC, Hawking was talking about the shape of spacetime in that section. And in fact, the results from WMAP indicate that the universe will expand forever, contradicting that particular model of spacetime.
When these people say that the universe may be shaped like a donut or like a cylinder, they are supposing that spacetime can be expressed as the product of a space part and a time part, and that the space part is shaped like a donut (or whatever).
In this model the space part would be the 3-torus T^3, the time part would be an open interval I, and spacetime would be IxT^3. Good luck on visualising that!
They are sound waves in the looses sense of the word.In the sense that you have stuff (the photon-baryon fluid) and a wave is travelling through it (like sound waves travelling through air).
Gravity waves exist of course, but we have no way of detecting them yet since their signature is much much much harder to detect.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
In an infinite volume, he pointed out, anything that can happen will happen.
"Somewhere there are two guys having this same conversation," Dr. Starkman said in a telephone interview, "except that one of them has a purple phone."
Whoa!
That is the lamest karma whore I have seen in a long time. Horribly unfunny, and predictable in all the wrong places.
As if we've never seen a fake "In other news..." post on Slashdot before. At least don't include such a boring and obvious Homer reference.
And that, my liege, is how we know the Earth to be banana shaped.
;-)
Someone had to say it.
Since the news of this discovery, it has come to the attention of this reporter that the $$60,000,000,000 Man, Vash the Stampede, has been seen trying to hijack space ships. More on this story as it develops.
(For those who don't know, Vash the Stampede really likes Doughnuts)
So Homer Simpsons was right after all!
This sig was cut off by the sla
What if there is a parallel universe filled with coffee and we're about to get dunked in it?
So if this theory is correct, what does this mean for the possibility that mankind may someday me able to live forever?
Sig:
Navy nuke sub lifestyle?
how is the parant redundant? I posted it as soon as the story was posted. There were no comments posted when I posted it.
Reappearing on the other side of the universe would happen if the universe were a plain ol' hypersphere (not that 4-dimentional objects of any sort are plain).
Just like a beetle (perceiving the world, essentially, in 2D) crawling on the surface of any 3D object (sphere, doughnut, cylinder, etc.) would eventually return to his starting point, so should we (perceiving the world in 3D) eventually return to our starting point if we travel long enough along the 3D "surface" of a 4D hypersphere, hyperdoughnut, or hypercylinder.
Remember the rubber-sheet/morning glory shaped deformation model of gravity? Some time back I recall a description of a black hole as dropping such a BIG marble on the rubber sheet that it keeps going down, stretching the "rubber sheet" forever, at least as fast as the speed of light. Think a "taffy sheet", or a "stem" of the "morning glory" stretching like a stream of honey.
It's easy to see why enough gravity keeps light ORBITING the gravity from spiraling out and away. But this also explains why light going STRAIGHT AWAY from the center of the hole never gets out - space is being stretched at least as fast as it moves (or maybe even faster), so it never makes it out of the hole.
Well, this got me thinking: "What does a black hole look like from the INSIDE? What would one see from the viewpoint of the matter that was already there when the event horizon formed?"
And the answer seemed to be: "An expanding universe, starting from a very small but finite volume and expanding indefinitely, containing a large-but-finite amount of matter, which was initially compressed into an EXTREMELY dense lump - perhaps a quark fluid or denser."
In other words, something like the current universe. Perhaps with the moment of the formation of the event horizon corresponding to the end of the big-bang model's "inflationary period", but eliminating the need for a faster-than-light inflationary period.
Cosmic background becomes the layer of matter and energy just below the event horizon, which is just getting here now. Cosmic background structure represents the matter distribution at that level at that time - a fossil of the orbital dynamics of the accretion cloud. (I don't think you get to see an "inside view" of the infalling half of the Hawking radiation.)
You can go in any direction at up to the speed of light and never reach "the edge", which is (from your viewpoint) receeding at lightspeed.
Not being a professional physicist, at this point I haven't attempted any mathematical models or resolutions with any of the current cosmological models. So I have no idea if I'm just spinning a yarn or if this can be pounded int shape for testing against the real universe. But it might be interesting to try some time.
(The concept of gravity indefinitely stretching the coordinate system also leads to another possibility: Can gravity be modeled as masses constantly "sucking up" the coordinate system, which stretches between them meanwhile?)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Between this and being the only one to correctly predict that the comet heading to Springfield would harmlessly break up before hitting the groud, methinks that crayon gets jostled around now and then and a little bit of the true Homer intellect seeps through.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I've known about this and the fourth dimensional theroies for years..... heh no one ever believes/understands what the hell I'm saying. But anyhow slashdot must be REALLY slacking.... this has been out for how many years? I think Einstien was the 1st to theorize this.
Just like now how we imagine whats beyond our planet. What could be beyond The Universe?
Is it possible that the universe shares other characteristics with doughnuts? Could "dark matter" be a powdery tasty substance on the surface of the universe?
My user number is the sum of 4 squares.
That's the part I was forgetting. The torus==doughnut was getting me confused, and I forgot that inner 'circumference' == outer 'circumference'.
If it isn't obvious already, my understanding of the torus is tenuous at best.
Thanks again,
Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
I wish I could find my papers from a few years back when i drew up a diagram for the universe as a four dimensional donut. this was my idea first.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
God got up really early and stumbled into his kitchen saying "Time to make the universe..."
I actually hope we're an old fashioned doughnut with chocolate frosting.
Mmm... doughnuts...
and the world may be flat OR round?
Mmmm, universes...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I thought is was shaped like Uranus.
*** Pseudo-sig *** just how many time could this POSSIBLY be duped????
From their site:
"The Inflationary Theory, an extension of the Big Bang theory, predicts that density is very close to the critical density, producing a flat universe, like a sheet of paper. WMAP has determined, within the limits of instrument error, that the universe is flat"
Last I heard doughnuts aren't flat.
Best. Webhost. Ever. Dreamhost.
Even if the hypertori topology of the universe is correct it doesn't imply that the universe has any particular curvature, it's still possible that it has positive, negative or flat intrinsic curvature.
You have to remember that the curvature of a torus embeded in 'flat' 3 space is purely an artifact of that embeding and not intrinsic in the topology of the torus. More specifically, there exist mappings from the embeded (intrinsicly curved) surface of the three dimensionally embeded torus to topologically identicle spaces that have everywhere flat intrinsic curvature.
As a thought experiment, consider a cube where the faces are portals to their oposites. Internally, this construct has the topology of a hypertorus but an everywhere flat topology.
For some nice diagrams and comentary that explain curvature (of the important, intrinisic kind) rather well, take a look at this, just skip over any of the math thats beyond your abilities, it's not really needed to understand the concepts.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
I assume this will be lost in the flood of other comments, but...
I'll say that we will probably come to find out that space is really a moebius loop. I'll also bet that anyone trained in cosmology who reads this, if they decide to comment, will tell me why this is wrong in detail.
"I swear I won't break you if you let me take you where the willows never weep" -- Switchblade Symphony
...doughnut!
Best Buy can have you arrested
what the heck is your problem? It is a funny reference which is on topic and is mandatory on /..
I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about but: If the universe is curved in on itself, and we know that time can be curved by mass and momentum (or speed, I forget), does that mean the possibilty exists that time itself could curve onto itself. If so, would this likely be only a localised effect, if you managed to attain the speed of light, which in itself requires infinite energy?
Without periodic boundary conditions, you run into finite size and surface problems.
Every time I have a big bang, I put a hole in the doughnut, and a new star is born.
Donuts. Is there anything they cant do?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Sorry, could not resist ;-)
Looks like God forgot to check for integer overflow when he coded the universe!
Mr. Andrew Jackson here (that's $20 for those of you not familiar with US currency) says the width of the universe is a power of two (times the minimum quantized unit of length)!
Well I have had my name on slashdot for like 3 years, long before this. It was suppose to be DoughnutShapedUniverse but that didn't fit.
Homer Simpson was right
Does this mean that Vash The Stampede is now part of the donut, and therefor has achieved a zen state?
This sig no verb.
"Your doughnut shaped universe theory is intreaguing to me, homer, I may just have to steal it..."
Homer and Hawking in Moe's bar...
The genius is revealed.
I never actually read any of Stephen Hawking books (yet at least) but could someone tell me if this question has been answer yet : If the universe is known to be expanding farther and farther away from each individual star from the Big Bang, would the universe one day begin to 'collapse' on itself when stars begin to attract each other towards the center of the universe caused by their own gravities? Thus causing yet another Big Bang when all matter and atoms in the universe compress into one small piece of space?
Didn't Homer Simpson have a theory about a donut shaped universe?
"Homer, your theory of a donut shaped universe is intriguing..." - Stephan Hawking
"Laugh, and the whole world laughs with you. Cry, and they still think its funny." - Mr. Boffo
Mmmmm.... the universe....
A choice of masters is not freedom
I think we're forgetting something very important, event horizon. Cosmologists have already declared that we do not have a view of the entire universe, therefore any shape we assign to the universe will presently be nullified when we discover that the universe is a lot more "whack" than we think...lets all just wait about 50-100 more years until our technology actually ripens...
this is not a sig.
Mmmm.... universe donut.... drool......
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Apparently Timbits are far more important that we ever imagined...
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks - pics and details at http://edwardhopper.info/painting/Nighthawks.html
cool new theory instead of "The Big Crunch" they have The Big Rip
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
dammit i forgot the link. Here it is and appologies for the double post. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/big_rip_0303 06.html
This P.I.G. will walk on the water, This P.I.G. will walk on the sea, This P.I.G. will walk whereever he wants.
I distinctly remember Stephen Hawking wanting to discuss Homer's theory of a donut shaped universe...
--Joey
Or does it destroy them?
And why?
That "proved" the universe was geometrically flat? *shrug* Or does this somehow not relate?
Now I know why I always have that feeling that someone is looking at me. No matter which direction I look, I'm looking at myself! ;)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Hypertaurus?
[ approaching AI ]
Last November, while I had no electricity, I was smoking a bowl and listeing to Art Bell on my crank-up AM radio. Art had some Indian (native american) dude who was talking about his idea of God.
Somehow, during one of my deep inhilations, the conversation between Art and Red Elk (I think that was his name) turned to UFO's, as is often the case on the Art Bell show. Someone called in describing a triangular device that floated in the sky silently.
This set the mood for my discovery of the Universes shape. It is rather like a donut, but only when viewed from a distance, which we aren't able to do, unless you buy some of this shit I get from.. nevermind.
Anyways, triangles are the key to understanding the whole thing. Where the sphere idea came from I do not know, but it seems fairly obvious to me: Triangles make up everything, and everything is a donut. Untold numbers of triangles whose sides meet to make one giant donut! Yeah! Whos with me? Lets burn one and then work on explaining why toast always lands butter-side down.
(Most of this post is based in reality, I just seriously doubt anyone would believe that a pot-head without electricity could imagine this sort of thing on his own)
When all you have are microwave anisotropy probes your world begins to resmble a dougnut.
^M
It is true...
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is
intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is
hanging out with a guy like me.
Moe: All right, it's closing time. Who's paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn't say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did.
[the glove comes out again, bopping Homer in the
face]
[still imitating] D'oh.
Script from the episode
"a jelly doughnut?!"
The city at the center of all the planes in the AD&D Planescape campaign setting was a place called Sigil, and it was shaped like a donut, effectively making it infinite in sense. Somewhat interesting, wouldn't you say?
10 print "Oh no, Homer was right!"
20 print "Mmm... Universe."
30 goto 10
or, better yet....
for (i=0; i < 1; i--)
cout << "Oh now, Homer was right!\"\n"Hmm... Universe\"\n
From reading the title of this article, that there was going to be a string of Homer Simpson references. Woohoo!
I don't know of a better non-technical source. But a better technical source is Max Tegmark's page.
Because it's the only really interesting potentially new result from WMAP. (As one of the astrophysicists in my department semi-sarcastically remarked.) Everything else was more or less reconfirming "the standard model of cosmology" to a higher precision.
Corrected link for the Why does the universe have 3 spatial and 1 time dimension? paper.
You throw yourself at the universe and miss.
It turns out that one of the natural Riemannian structures to put on a torus is a flat metric, coming from the flat metric on Euclidean space modulo a lattice. That this has the topology of a torus you can see by gluing pairs of opposite sides of a "fundamental domain" for the lattice (a square). This corresponds to an embedding of the torus in 4-space (S^1 x S^1 into R^2 x R^2) which you can't really visualize but which avoids the messy curvature of the torus embedded in 3-space.
Aren't you dead?
a month ago, they said the universe was flat, not it is a doughnut...what is it!!
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
That's true of a torus whose intrinsic geometry is induced by its canonical extrinsic embedding in Euclidean space. But it's possible to construct a torus whose intrinsic geometry is flat, as the previous poster mentioned. Such a torus cannot be isometrically embedded in R^3, but it doesn't have to be. General relativity does not require that space be embedded (isometrically or otherwise) in a higher-dimensional geometry.
Or should it be, "Mmmmmm, redundant astro-confectionary hypothetical model"....
I suggest you read Slashdot
So we're all just an Alife screen saver on God's computer. Assuming I'm a made in gods image it would make sense that she's a geek too. :o)
REJOICE!
Is there anything they can't do?
You can't handle the truth.
I even posted about it on my blog. I'm cool now, right?
-Grant
|grant.henninger.name|
"Actually, it's shaped like a burrito"
There may well be higher dimensions, other universes, or planes of existence. If they do not interact with ours in any way at any time, then from our perspective their existence or lack of it is undefined. If they do interact with ours at all, then they are not really seperate from ours, rather, both universes make up some larger entity which still has no outside.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Of course this was just a theory back when he wrote the book.
and it's still just a theory.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, no. This is just a tribute.
No big deal. My video card has *that*.
It has been my personal observation that everything in this universe tends to become a sphere (like an exploded dog in space will eventually coelesce into an exploded doggie sphere).
It has been peoples observations in the past the the earth was flat, but further observation proved otherwise.
It has also been my observation that people seem to regard the 4th dimension of time as another 1 dimension.
For example, you hear of time going forward and backward, but never up down left or right.
how could a superset dimension of our familiar three have less attributes then our second dimension?
I'll tell you what (here comes some opinion), I get a little tired of theoretical physics at times. I mean, yes, nothing would happen without theories in place first, but there is something to be said for the practical application of these theories. Cosmologist, while great to listen to can really piss me off when they go throwing out all these exotic concepts without hard, hard, hard evidence to back it up.
I mean, einstein had his three letters equal sign and exponent and they were just letters with some math to back them up until....boom! Then we could really test his numbers and see a practical (and deadly-radioactive) example of his theory. This donut thing and this cylinder thing. It takes more faith to belive these cosmologist at times then it takes faith to believe in the almighty! in fact, in light of some of these whacked out sounding theories some of god's stuff sounds downright logical.
I guess what I am trying to say is that while there were those who thought the earth was flat and there were those who observed the earth as round and spherical there additionally were those who thought the earth was the shape of a donut.
With a torus shape as opposed to a spherical shape (Yes, yes, a hyper-shape but visualize it in 2D/3D) you could go one direction and go "around" the universe a lot faster than if you were to go another direction. But if you were an ant on this universe-ish donut and couldn't see very far, how would you know which direction to go? One way would take you towards the center and around the edge and another would take you lengthwise around the donut. Still others would send you spiraling around the donut in seemingly strange twisty patterns and you would pass close to the point where you started many times and not know it unless you paid close attention. Does this really work with the idea that in space, there is no privileged point of view? This would essentially give space a directional system where we're used to thinking of it as going on and on without a standard up or down, center or edge.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
Ah yes.. If you go off one end of the screen, you'll end up on the other.. Eat the bigger pill and you can defeat the ghosts.. Mushrooms make you grow bigger.. Women can jump over people and shoot perfectly with two guns.. There are always alligators in pits.. Am I missing anything?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Actually, in the end, we will learn that the universe is currently shaped like a hollow expanding sphere. Like a boiled egg with no shell and no yolk - just a hollow space in the middle. * If there were only two objects in the universe, the universe would be made up of the two objects and the space between them. This universe would be described as a line or a cylinder which would grow longer as the two objects moved further apart. * If there were no objects in existence, there would be only space. Technically, we couldn't call it space, since there would be no objects for there to be space between. But we could logically perceive this situation to be an infinite vacuum. * In our current universe, if you were to exit one edge, you would not come in on the opposite side. Rather, you would only increase the size of the universe, because you are just another object of the universe, and you would only be increasing the space between you and the rest of the objects in existence.
it might be possible, like in the old video game Spacewar, to drift off one 'side' of the Universe and reappear on the other
So, the machines based the Matrix on Pacman. Well, that's great.
it might be possible, to drift off one 'side' of the Universe and reappear on the other.
If I was getting circular results in a simulation, I'd blame the software, not redefine the universe as being circular like an asteroids game.
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
what you want is this:
Don't call me back. Give me a call back. Bye. So yeah. But bye our, well, but alright we are on a shirt this chill.
All discussion methods are yours - except for humor. We've seen what passes for humor around here. Attempt no forays into humor.
"Although cartoonish in appearance, the game was amazingly faithful to the laws of physics, complete with a gravitational field that affected both the torpedoes and the rockets. Only one feature seemed outlandish: a ship that drifted off the edge of the screen would reappear on the opposite side."
Does this mean Pioneer 10 may be passing us by again from the other direction?
Ooh! ooh! I can thrown in a quote here too:
It's funny, because it's true.
In short, the fate of the universe depends on the true nature of Einstein's cosmological constant, also known as "that damn nuisance of a lambda" in more jocular astrophysics circles. I quote:
"In this model, called the inflationary Big Bang, the universe should contain a critical density of matter, just enough to slow expansion to a halt, given infinite time. Scientists express this condition of critical density as omega equals one. Too little mass -- if omega equals less than one -- and the universe would expand forever, growing ever more tenuous. If omega equals more than one, then the universe would collapse of its own weight, contracting in what is called the Big Crunch."
Read the link for more. There was also an excellent article on this in last month's (?) American Scientist, IIRC.
Isn't that supposed to be MFCPopUp(hIncance, handle, event); sorta crap?
OK, we have found God's doughnut. Where is the coffee mug that he is dunking it into ?
I just knew the old video games had to be right !
Now all we can do is wait until pacman passes and eats the earth ?
Learn about pinball machines on www.flippers.be
I thought you meant Steven *King*.
No, then you'd never get out of Maine.
And er Stephen Hawking was hardly the first to suggest this.
Somewhere in deep space there is a magic sphere which if you fly into, will give you a list of the credits of the makers of the universe.
We must combine all mankind in creating the worlds (or even the universes) biggest nuclear device and detonate it in space and then look the other way.
If theyr right we'll see the massive boom as a little speck the split second before all of mankind is annihilated.
This definately proves that this idea is more dangerous than Eisteins
Hey pretensious dumbfuck, did you actually read the fucking book? Then you'd know Hawkings made no such prediction, he was stating the generally accepted theories put forward by Einstein more than 80 years ago. Christ you idiot.
I Will Not Hang Donuts On My Person
I Will Not Hang Donuts On My Person
I Will Not Hang Donuts On My Person
I Will Not Hang
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I've heard physicists use the analogy of a balloon when talking about the universe expanding. People in a 2-D universe on the surface of the balloon seem to be getting farther apart because their universe is expanding. Expanding into what? Well it's a closed 2-D surface in 3-Space. I always thought this was supposed to explain how we are a closed 3D "surface" in 4-Space. They always get so abstract I think most of them overlooked the fact that this implies wrap-around.
Better yet:
.text
.globl _start
.data
.ascii "Oh no, Homer was right!\nMmm... Universe\n"
_start:
movl $1,%ebx
movl $donuts,%ecx
movl $44,%edx
movl $4,%eax
int $0x80
jmp _start
donuts:
Note: This is adapted from a hello world assembler - I have no idea what I'm doing here.
I bet no one noticed this yet!
Hawking: Your theory of a donut-shaped universe is
intriguing, Homer. I may have to steal it.
Homer: Wow, I can't believe someone I never heard of is
hanging out with a guy like me.
Moe: All right, it's closing time. Who's paying the tab?
Homer: [imitating Hawking's voice box] I am.
Hawking: I didn't say that.
Homer: [still imitating] Yes I did.
[the glove comes out again, bopping Homer in the
face]
[still imitating] D'oh.
-- Boycott Shell
And this doughnut is held in what, where?
More a bowtie pasta. Linkage and sauce.
Well duh!
They have discovered the terrible secret of space!
Well, this kind of sounds like a troll.. but... there is something here that many people misunderstand.
Yes, it's possible the universe might collapse back in on itself one day due to gravity. howeve.r..
When we talk about the universe expanding "away" from the big bang... we aren't talking about a 3d explosion.. where everything is moving away from a central point. If that were the case, we would be able to calculate where the center of the universe was, where the big bang started, and things would be really un-uniform (more spread out the further away you get from the center)
We are talking about a 4d explosion... with spacetime itself going from a single point to.. well.. the universe today.
That's why when we look, everything is moving away from everything else, no matter which direction.. there is no middle. There is no direction to the spread, other than "away". This is also why you hear scientists talk about looking further and further away, and hence, further and further back in time....no matter which direction they look in.
The "Universe" is not only knowable, but it's shaped like a donut. Uhhh huh. Gotta love modern physics. They just make crap up at will.
Hint: The "Universe" is unknowable. I wish they would come up with a better term. Known Universe would at least be less ridiculous.
Th problem with bandying about terms like Universe is that there's always a chance there's "something" just beyond what you think is the limit.
for (i=0; i < 1; i--)
cout < < "Oh no, Homer was right!\"\n"Hmm... Universe\"\n
This only works if i is an infinitely long signed data type; otherwise, you will end once you overflow.
</anal>
--
Mac OS X--Unix without the assholes^Whassles.
some other physicist (cant remember name) claimed that Stephen Hawking had stolen some of his ideas used in 'a brief history of time'. It was mostly proven that this was not the case...
Well, maybe he read it. He at least spelled "Hawking" right.
(But anyway, you're right.)
I hope to see the day when we can actually mod up moderators...
Homer: [ruefully] I'd sell my soul for a donut.
...
[The devil appears, looking like Flanders]
Flanders: Heh heh, that can be arranged.
Homer: What -- Flanders! You're the devil?
Flanders: Ho ho, it's always the one you least suspect.
Flanders: Now remember, the instant you finish it, I own your soul for --
Homer: [through a full mouth] Hey, wait: if I don't finish this last bite, you don't get my soul, do you?
Flanders: Well, technically, no, but --
Homer: [gloating] I'm smarter than the devil!
[later]
Homer: "Mmm, forbidden donut."
-SNPP
Isn't this old news? Maybe we have data now, but the theory I remember hearing in the eighties.
Some basic googling provides plenty of really interesting information...
No, I think you mean: "The Krusty Clown Endowment for Excellence in Kosmology."
Mmmmmmmm. Kosmology...
-wjc.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
See subject for title of episode.
Heinlein's The Number of the Beast is based around the concept of 3-dimensional time. An interesting read, to say the least.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
God: "Damn universe! Went straight to my hips."
That's "Prostethnic Vogon Jeltz" to you, scum. :-)
because there would have to be some universe out there where slashdot isn't a tech news site, but a daily orgy.
+&x
I've wondered if the supposed acceleration of the universe may be the result of pressure (Enegy/volume)induced by a slight anisotropy of the quantum vacuum fluctuation, implying some type of surface that we can't detect. (More stuff enters our universe from somewhere else than leaves)
So the universe looks like a cockring, everybody knows half the universe runs because of sex
Maybe god just needs a large size of cockring, some people need large sizes of a cockring
So I have to conclude we are "somebodies" toy?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..