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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.
When will the US finally realise and stop playing all those other silly sports with Joan Collins style shoulder pads
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
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
What's on the outside of the universe?
... If I go there, will I escape Governor Conan and reality TV?
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.
That's football, for our English readers ;)
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
Not only is it not just a matter of life and death, but football is an integral part of the universe...
In my country (the Netherlands) most people think that the world revolves around football (that is soccer). So let's all keep this quiet, and not let all those soccer fans know that in reality the whole universe now seems to revolve around, and is shaped like, a football...
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.
From the New Scientist article
I wonder how that sentence should be interpreted......what's on the other side? Why isn't that part of the Universe?
The football game!
I have over 70 freaks, do you?
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.
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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).
Some of those "huddled, wretched masses" are, right at this very moment, sitting idly and contemplating the universe in all its glory.
Think about it.
KFG
right here
So if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and the universe is supposed to be 7-15 billion years old (depending on who you ask), how ca n it be 70 billion light years across? Hmmm. Answer me that one scientist.
You're right and you're wrong. They're the same in that both are based on assumptions or faith. They're different in that science makes testable predictions. I haven't seen any good prophets around lately.
Physics: Making the universe open source.
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
You are so right. We should only focus on research that gives instant economical profit. I propose that most research funds should be given as loans, so that we won't get useless science like this.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Sweet finally, screw light speed. I'll move my ships 1d6 hexigons per turn.
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
12-sided ones to be exact.
Did no one else think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy parallels with the game of cricket?
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$tar -xvf
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.
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
Um, this flies in the face of the evidence. The better fed and cared for people are, the lower their population growth rate. Check into the figures yourself. It appears that the biggest danger to a society where few are poor, and even then it's a relative sense of poor, as pretty much everyone gets all the food and whatnot they need, the biggest danger is at that point, population growth tends to bottom out and start going negative. The US would already be shrinking if we weren't getting better and better and keeping people alive longer and longer, and we still have immigration. This tends to be true in any richer nation. If the would could be brought to the US median standard of living, evidence suggests there would be no worries about overpopulation, rather we'd have to start worrying about whether our lifestyle is going to lead to our eventual extinction due to our failing to have two children each.
We are already too many on this earth.
Why do you say that? We grow enough food today to feed over 12 billion people, and throw half of it away every year. And we could easily grow many times what we do with the land we have available. We have plenty of fresh water available, even if we aren't always the best at distributing it. We really have no problems with overpopulation, what we have are problems with population density in certain areas (while other areas, sometimes even more habitable ones, are completely unused), and these could be easily solved if we had the will to do so. We have political problems masquerading as population problems. We have precisely zero actual population problems.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."