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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.
No-one is ever going to solve the problem of an infinite Universe, because it would involve the proof of travelling to the end of it (or not), something I doubt will ever happen before the end of the human race!
At first I was confused that they kept saying 'finite and small,' I mean, seriously, if you think 70 billion light years is small, what-are-you-smoking-and-can-I-have-some?
But towards the end they mention something about small-Universe and large-Universe models, and imply that the two are scientifically meaningful terms.
Anyone out there got a clue?
Conor
Programmer, Consultant, Geek, CTYer.
Sure, you make jokes now, but just wait till your kids are asking you why they have to go to school in the slums of the universe.
On a serious note, creationist research Russel Humphreys proposed a model of space that was in line with the creationist model of a young earth. For years creationists acknowledged that astrophysics was the weakest part of our research (sure, I know all the hundreds of replies I'll get about weaknesses in other areas - trust me, I've heard them before). His model was based on two assumptions that were different from our current ones:
1. That the universe began from a theoretical white hole, not a black hole
2. That the universe is finite in size.
By changing these two assumptions about our universe and it's origins resulted in a young earth and an old universe.
Surprisingly, the main criticisms for this model come from old earth creationists, and not others.
For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend checking it out here.
This is something that continually perplexes me, and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Every time I hear or read about space from news stories or published papers, it's always as though they're talking/writing about a thing, as though space had a physical presence.
My understanding of space is that it's a big zero, empty, nothing, spotted with clusters of various materials that are in the form of gases or solids.
There is no physical boundary to our solar system, we just made one up in our heads to differentiate between "in here" and "out there".
There's no fence at the outer "edge" of our galaxy which says "last plasma matter/anti-matter fuel stop for 1000 ly, 0.5 ly on your left".
It's just a big empty. Nothing. There's no "flat plain" of space. There's nothing stopping you from flying perpendicular to the orbits of our planets and taking a long distance picture.
Blackhole's do _not_ lead down a funnel. They reduce to a singularity, a point in space where upon one element may occupy the same space - and presumably time as well - as another element. It's a freaking dot that weighs an infinite amount, not a vacuum cleaner.
Maybe it's because I haven't studied astrophysics or advanced quantum theory, but it just seems to me that a lot of the time when a scientist says the universe is shaped like a soccer ball, or a donut, or a freaking celtic knot, he really has no idea.
It's space, nothing, a huge empty. If it's shaped like anything than what the hell is outside?
Zero Kelvin.
It is part of the Universe.
Imagine a square sheet of rubber (so we can stretch, bend as we like). It has a finite area, and four edges. We choose one edge and glue it to its opposite edge. Now if you start from one point and draw a line in the right direction, you'll get back to where you started. Otherwise you'll just spiral around until you hit an edge.
Now we take the two circular edges and we glue them together, giving a donut (a torus). Now if you go in [what you see as] a straight line in any direction, you'll never reach an edge. The surface of the donut doesn't have any sides in the way the original sheet of rubber did, but it still covers a finite area.
N.b. The problem with this example is that it's difficult to think of just the surface of the donut, without imagining it being 'in' some larger space such as the 3D world.
Now if you want a headache, try to imagine doing this starting not with a square, but rather a cube, and joining opposing faces together. The first pair is easy - you get a sort of square donut shape. The second pair gives you a donut with an inner donut removed - something like the inner tube in a tyre.
The third one is the real bugger - you have to imagine joining the inner surface of the tube to the outer one, without going through the tube. I've seen a video that included a representation of what a similar manouvre (sp?) would look like in the 3D world that the cube started in, and I still can't fully get my head around it.
No matter what direction you moved in this weird twisted-cube-thingy, you'd never see an edge. It would give you the same effect as if there were an infinite array of cubes , with the exact same thing happening in each one. When you reach the edge of one cube, you ust move into the next one ... which is identical to the last one.
This article says that the Universe is doing the same sort of thing, only starting with a dodecahedron instead of a cube (i.e. 6 pairs of faces instead of 3). Don't seriously try to picture this, or your head'll explode ...
Oh, and the part where they are measuring the background radiation and determining that the vibration patterns don't coinside with an infinite universe? Rubbish! Even though space is infinet, the matter and energy are obviously not as plentiful, so don't confuse matter/energy with space.
Space by itself has some amazing properties even without matter/energy, but unfortunately you have to use matter and energy to observe/measure it.
--
No matter how attractive you think she is, some guy out there is long since tired of putting up with her crap.
By definition there is nothing outside of this universe. If there was, it would simply mean that the universe is bigger than we thought ....
Just like the line in Gattaca:
Q "What if someone exceeds there potential"
A "You cannot exceed your potential, it just means that we assessed the potential incorrectly in the first place." (or something to that extent).
The speed of light is constant. Most of physics is grounded in this assumption. Most of the equations that physics uses to describe the macro and micro universes rely on that assumption. If the assumption is broken, a lot of work needs to be done to fix physics broken infrastructure.
When light "wraps" around the universe it has traversed the entire distance from one side to the other in an very tiny slice of time. Indeed, 70 Billion light years in a tiny amount of time will break physics cardinal rule of "the speed of light is constant", since our usual value for the speed of light is much smaller.
Now lets get into the more difficult question: how is light instantly transmitted from one side of the universe to the other? "Wrap around" is poetic (may as well say the hand of God moves it), lets talk physics here.
How about a tougher problem? What happens when matter goes over this threshold? What happens to you when one half of you is on one side of the universe, and the other half is on the far side?
Similarly, think of us on the 3D surface of a 4D sphere. There is no outside or inside, just the surface. It's hard to imagine in 4D, I'm not sure anyone actually can, but the analogy seems sufficient to understand how it could work.
There's no "space" in between things, like an invisible ruler defining where you are. It's the juxtaposition of mass that defines the space between it. So there is nothing outside the universe, because there's nothing out there to be next to. And, as it turns out, things that are "close" in a euclidean sense far away in one direction, could be close to things in a completely different direction if you travel far enough. How these straight lines loop back on themselves describes the shape of the universe.
I haven't studied the theory enough in a while, but as I recall, it's actually the curvature of space time due to gravity that actually causes these loopbacks. You can imagine firing a photon in one direction, and it's path is curved by all the existing relationships, and maybe if you trace it's path with a finger, it looks like it's curving around, but to the photon it was a straight shot.
These effects are inescapable, and in a sense, it sort of puts a absolutely outer boundary on the distance between any two objects in the Universe, no matter how hard you try to "get away".
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice