Slashdot Mirror
Universe Shaped Like A Soccer Ball?
Rabid Rob writes "According to a New Scientist article, and prompted by data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), it's suggested the universe could be shaped like a soccer ball - the 'cosmic microwave background' has fluctuations, and a possible conclusion is that 'our Universe seems like an endlessly repeating set of dodecahedrons.' Oh yeah, the universe is only 70 billion light years across, so better buy up the real estate now while it's still cheap!" The NYT has more information (free reg. req.) on this theory, which is quickly being refuted by Wernstrom-like rival researchers.
Actually a soccer ball is not a dodecahedron.
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It is a mix of Hexagonal and Penatagonal shapes, more commonly seen as a C60 (carbon60) or Bucky-Ball.
Example here http://www.udel.edu/fth/java/MoleculeViewer/bucky
--- This meme is memory intensive
That's football, for our English readers ;)
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
...what's on the other side? Why isn't that part of the Universe?
The football game!
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
fortunatly you dont have to leave the universe, just calfiornia (dont let the door hit you in the ass on your way out). turning off your tv will solve your other problem.
right here
Since it is the universe itself expanding, the distance between objects can increase faster than the speed of light without the objects themselves moving at all.
More here
I have a blog.
Because the expansion of *space itself* is not limited by the speed of light, which travels *through* space.
I know - it's weird, and I'm not sure I buy that explanation either.
Clear, Dark Skies
You'll notice that population growth is inversely proportional to (technological) development. So that throws your hypothesis out the window. If anything, one should expect population to decrease with development.
Also, keep in mind that the earth can support the population. In fact, I claim that earth can support 50 billion. The problem, of course, is the modern day lifestyle. We need to be environmentally friendly and improve efficiency (in an environmental sense, not in a capitalist sense). The developed world may pollute far more than the undeveloped world, it still manages to do some things better. For instance, water distribution is far more effective. Yes, people waste a lot more, but the means of recyling is better. It is not inconceivable for humans to significantly reduce pollution and environmental destruction by switching to more environmentally-friendly systems. Of course, no one wants to do that now but it can be done.
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
nope, inherent problem with your powers of imagination. You are extrapolating from your everyday experience, in which every finite body/shape is embedded in another. So you can't imagine a toroidal topology except as being the actual surface of a donut-shaped object. But there is absolutely no mathematical reason to do so. You can define all the essential properties of a toroidal space (for example) without any reference to an "outside" space in which it is embedded. The assumption of embedding is just an extrapolation of our extremely limited experience of living in a 3-d space.
But there are many examples of non-embedded topologies. For example, take the space of all numbers. Real number can be mapped to a line. You might argue that this line is itself embedded in a plane representing all complex numbers. But there;s nothing in which that plane is embedded; there are no numbers that can't be expressed as a sum of real and imaginary part. Or consider the momentum space of waves in a regular lattice. Accoring to both classical and quantum physics, physical space and momentum space are complementary views of reality; neither is more valid than the other. But the momentum space of waves in a regular 3D lattice is indeed a 3D closed space: any wave momentum greater than a certain value in the momentum is remapped to another portion of the space. But there's no 4D momentum space in which these waves are embedded. (OK, you can consider energy as the momentum equivalent of time to build up a 4-d space, but then you hit the buffers -- there's nothing for that 4-d space to be embedded in).
True advances in scientific understanding normally come about when someone realises that "common sense" is wrong, and that an alternative explanation fits the data better. So until Copernicus, it was obvious the world was flat adn the stars went around it. Until Galileo, it was self-evident that the natural state of matter was to be at rest. Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck: each revolutionised science by rejecting "common sense" and instead adopting an (initially) unintuitive approach that actually fits the facts.
Ultimately, your argument is a lot like the argument for the existence of the ether: "in our experience, waves can only move through a substance. therefore there must be a substance through which light waves move". Of course, no-one ever found any evidence for the existence of the ether, and eventually Einstein proposed doing away with the idea altogether.
The authors of the paper claiming the universe is closed claim that this explanation fits better with observations than an infinite universe, so let's assume for now it's true. You say it's self evident that if the universe is finite, it must be embedded in some bigger space. Now, where's your evidence for that? I'm not saying it's not possible that our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space. A lot of unification theories assume that our universe contains more dimensions than we see (string theory usually needs 11 dimensions), and some that our universe is indeed embedded in a higher dimensional space (brane theory) -- but that's very different from your assumption. In particular, physical theories involving higher dimensional spaces still allow the possibility that that higher-dimensional space is itself finite and closed, without being embedded in a still-larger space.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.