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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.'"

5 of 525 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Someone enlighten me.... by harks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  2. sceptical about all such theories by wjzhu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re: by farmy4700 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have actually used the hum of the florecent lights to tune my banjo before.

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    The phone is ringing, I cannot linger, watch out butt here comes my finger.
  4. Re:infinitely long and yet finite volume? by call+-151 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  5. Are we inside a black hole? I doubt it. by Genady · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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    What if it is just turtles all the way down?