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Is the Universe Shaped Like a Funnel?
DrMorpheus writes "A new theory of the shape of the Cosmos posits that the Universe may be shaped like a medieval horn, according to Frank Steiner at the University of Ulm. This theory, if true, could explain several strange observations about the microwave background radiation. The Universe would be stretched out at one end into a long tube and flared out into a bell at the opposite end. The technical name for this shape is a 'Picard topology'. To quote the article, '...our Universe is curved like a Pringle, shaped like a horn, and named after a Star Trek character. You could not make it up.'"
...our Universe is
As opposed to the other universe that somebody else owns.
I assume by shape scientists mean the curvature of the space-time topology, outside of which nothing exists. Kinda like a quake map, where you turn off clipping and go outside of it nothing exists but you can still say what the map is "shaped" like.
From what I've read, the universe is in three dimensions what the earth is in two: It is finite in size but has no boundary. Going in one direction long enough will bring you back to where you started.
Good, now that we got that in place, could someone then please tell me what is outside the horn. I really don't care about the shape of the univers, it could be in the shape of a giant moose for all i care, but I what to know what's outside the univers.
While I respect all the hardwork at detecting various scientific evidences and dreaming up models to fit the data, there is always the reality that, upon finding a tooth, people will glamorize the whole enterprise by drawing up a whole mammoth, and tell you the entire history of that mammoth and what color its eyes are, ... Then the public will be so enamor with the whole story that they forgot what part is fact, what part is fiction, and what part is marketing techniques.
Something else that makes no sense but is going to get someone a research grant.
-B
It was done externally since he was on the surface of the Earth... Had he been inside the Earth, such as the 4 miles down, he would not have been able to measure the curve of the Earth nor have the external sky to use as references.
I could guess that gravity could give hints, but still it would take measuring from many points to determine.
"Do you think Ptolemy went up in a space capsule to see the shape of the earth before he told everyone it's round?? In 250 BC, Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the earth to within 10% of its actual size.
None of that was done "externally"."
Think of it like this, we could say the work was flat, but it was not till we were able to look at it from an external view.
But, that's the thing, scholars knew the earth was round long before were able to see it from space, and long before Colombus made his first voyage. They were able to observe the effects of its shape.
They noticed the horizon, celestial activitiy, etc.
The same types of observations we would use to determine the shape of the universe.
For a geometrical argument:
Say you were able to precisely measure your own motion relitive to a starting point. As you traveled around the earth you would realize you were traveling on a curved surface, and after one trip around the world, you would decide it was a sphere. After two different trips, an oblate spheroid.
At the end of this, you've determined the shape of the earth without ever leaving it.
Life is too short to proofread.
Hmmm. The big bang posits a long period of time where everything is compressed, followed by an explosion which flares stuff out in all directions.
A long thin period, followed by a huge flare...that is sort of the shape of a trumpet. These are the guys who tell us that distance equals time, too...not to pretend to be a cosmologist, but isn't it possible that we're seeing a trumpet shaped universe because our input data (i.e. energy) followed a trumpet-shaped distribution curve over time?
I have actually used the hum of the florecent lights to tune my banjo before.
The phone is ringing, I cannot linger, watch out butt here comes my finger.
There are plenty of ways that something can be infinite in extent yet have finite volume. The point that just because you are adding up infinitely many things, you do not necessarily get an infinite sum. For example, 1/2+1/4+1/8+1/16+... is an infinite sum which converges to 1, or a repeating decimal like .33333 can be thought of as 3/10 + 3/100 + 3/1000 + ... which converges to 1/3. For volume, we can imagine a horn-shaped region which gets skinnier as we move along, so the first meter of length may have volume 1/2, the next meter may have volume 1/4, and so on. It will be infinitely long yet have a finite total volume of 1.
There are plenty of examples of phenomena such as this illustrated in a standard calculus text, so you can look for more details there.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
Developing a Theory on the shape of the Universe may help explain questions in other Theories, such as "strange background radiation" as mentioned in the original post.
It also helps explain why Captain Picard got laid so often. "Hey, baby, your talkin' to the guy they named the Universe after..."
As to your example about being 4 miles deep in the Earth, even though you may not be able to "see" the outer surface of the planet, you could still use seismic observation to map the size and shape of the earth from the inside. By observing radiation and light-shifts we now have the new and improved "shape of the Universe".
If you still think that knowing the shape of the Universe is useless, men have been searching for useless explanations to equally useless questions since the dawn of man so there should be no surprise there.
Computers are useless. They can only give answers. --Pablo Picasso
Not entirely. The universe may be empty to a good approximation, that doesn't mean that it can't support standing waves.
Spacetime itself is elastic (assuming that you believe in General Relativity or something similar to GR) and so can distort in a periodic manner. These distortions are called gravity waves and there's some indirect evidence that they exist. Searches for direct evidence are underway.
Similarly, any other long-range field can support standing waves. I see no a priori reason why electromagnetic waves can not exist which have wavelengths which are integral fractions of twice the universal scale.
Likewise, I can see no a priori reason why any of the possible standing waves should not have observable consequences.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
Remember though that the arrangement inside a blackhole is that of maximal entropy. No matter how you shake a blackhole it can't get any more disordered. Looking around the universe over time it's obvious that it is not in a state of maximal entropy, if it were time wouldn't appear to flow.
Now... our Universe could be just another 3brane in a larger multi-verse of multi-branes. There's nothing that says that a braneworld has to have a certain level of entropy, or that the levels of entropy can't change over time.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
But when you are making your triangle on the surface of the earth, you know where to place the vertices. Just put them on the ground. "Where" do we "place" the "vertices" of the "triangle" in our Universe? Or, what other technique would we use? As it stands now, don't they just look for repeating patches of background radiation and things like unexpected shapes of galaxies?
Also, how does a being in a 2-D world measure the angles? The best I can figure is by using time, but we just do it by stepping back and looking down from the next dimension up where we can compare ratios and thingies.
p
That entirely depends on your viewpoint... if you want a captain who is very capable and will most likely get you out of any dangerous situation, go with Picard. If you want a "party" captain (bring on the green alien chicks!) go with Kirk. Up to you, really. Kirk is much more likely to throw a ship-wide kegger than Picard, but Picard is a little less likely to make you wear a red shirt, beam you down to an unknown alien world and send you off to investigate behind that big pile of rocks while the officers all chat a safe distance away.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Whether or not the universe actually is curved or flat or banana-shaped is really immaterial. All we really care about is what we can observe, and more importantly, what we can expect to observe in the future. If rules and laws and principles we come up with accurately predict how objects, forces, etc. will interact in the future, then those laws are "correct" as far as we know and as far as we care. Newton's laws of motion and Einstein's laws of relativity are both considered "correct" even though they contradict eachother. They're correct because they can be used to accurately predict the future.
After all, when you drawing out your calculations for how to send a monkey to Mars, it really doesn't matter what shape the universe is if you know for certain that it at least behaves as if its shaped like a donut. Your donut-based calculations will still get chimpy to Mars--and it's the results you're after.
As our perception increases, we notice that our existing models do not adequately describe the reality we observe. So we come up with another (probably much more odd) model that describes the results we see, but that still agrees with the results we've previously attributed to the old model. The new model is considered "correct" and the old model is still considered useful.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Then why isn't it filled with beer?
I'm no scientist, but it seems kind of obvious that the universe would appear to have this shape? If the universe is constantly expanding, and if as we look further away from earth we're actually looking further back in time because of the time that it takes light to reach us, then what these guys are seeing is a smaller universe in some areas which would have been the case at the point in time that the light we are seeing now was generated. So in theory you could say that the funnel points toward the big bang or whatever sarted the universe expanding.
Of course, I could be completely off.
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