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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.'"
I just have to jump in and be the first one to make the reference to Sir Bedevere's remark at the end of what could only be assumed to be a lengthy explanation to King Arthur, "...and that, my Liege, is how we know the earth to be banana shaped."
Imagine if he'd said, "...and that, my Liege, is how we know the universe to be shaped like a trumpet." Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones might have been Nobel Prize candidates.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Last year it was a dodecahedron, this year a funnel, what's it going to be next year?
How can the universe, the sum of everything which exists, have shape? What, then, is outside this funnel? Isn't it infinitely large by definition?
If it is shaped like a funnel, does it point up -- like a Dunce Hat, or down -- like a toilet bowl?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Does that have something to do with the shape of Patrick Stewart's bald head?
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
If the universe is shaped like a horn, curved like a pringle, and named after Jean-Luke Picard.
Then it is all my favorites rolled into one.
The universe blows, is made out of mashed potatoes, and is named after someone i look up to.
Sorry couldn't help myself.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Eat your heart out Kirk!
Why do we continue to classify the shape of the Universe? Realistically, if we can not define the shape by placing it within a totally viewable package, it because useless to define it by something that we are unable to classify. Funnel? We see the outside of the funnel so that we can define the shape, but from the interior, it is just a curved or flat plane that we can only recognize by viewing from an all emcompassing view external.
:-P
Since we have no proof of anything beyond the Universe, this is just a chasing of a simple definition. Without the Universe in a 3D viewable environment and being just IT, then we can't define the shape meaningfully.
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. Think being about 4 miles deep in the Earth and attempting to define the shape of the Earth.
Anyway, I shall crawl back in my hole and wait for those much smarter than me to put me in my place.
Sorry - I just have to cut in here.
It's actually our universe. The rest of you will need to pay $699 to live in it.
- Darl McBride
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
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.
Slashdot loves these guessing games, doesn't it?
/. Prove me wrong.
Slashdot says; the universe is shaped like a doughnut
Slashdot says; universe is shaped like a soccer ball
I say; the universe is shaped like a
STUDENT: Professor, what is the Universe shaped like?
PROF: Ummm, a big horn. Next question.
STUDENT: Professor, what causes cancer?
PROF: Umm, breadsticks.
STUDENT: Professor, is Linux going to take over the desktop this year?
PROF: Umm, yeah sure.
DONT YOU BELIEVE IT!
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
In the model, technically called a Picard topology, the Universe curves in a strange way.
In the begining was the words, and they were "Make it so"...
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"I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be."
I've ranted here before about the shoddy reporting that the New Scientist does. It's very curious to me that the only matches on Google for "Picard topology" are from this article. Can anyone shed some light on this situation? Picard groups are certainly well-known enough. If nothing else, it's something to be skeptical about. Is this really so new that nobody has ever mentioned in on the web, or is it just poor terminology? (Note that one of the scientists is quoted as using that term, but it's phrased in a way that makes it sound like the reporter put words in his mouth.)
Steven N. Severinghaus
A banjo is better tuned with a hammer. (Sorry... my wife plays banjo)
Well, it's quite easy. Let's go one dimension lower, and think about an in one direction infinitely long strip of paper (like an toilet paper strip that begins somewhere but never ends), which is getting narrower fast enough.
:-)). But since it's getting narrower, on the next meter, it just has an area of 1/2 square meter. On the next meter, it's area is just 1/4 square meter, and so on, on each meter half the area of the previous meter.
... ...
On the first meter, it has, say, an area of one square meter (yes, that's quite large for toilet paper
Now, how large is the total area? Well, let's look at it (I'm ommiting the square meter unit for brevity):
The first meter has, as I said, an area of 1.
The first 2 meters have an area of 1+1/2 = 1.5.
The first 3 meters have an area of 1+1/2+1/4 = 1.75.
The first 10 meters have an area of 1+1/2+...+1/512 = 0.998046875.
As you see, as you add up the area meter by meter, the total area gets arbitrary close to 2, without ever reaching it. Therefore the total area is just 2 square meters.
Or to see it differently: When cutting the first meter off, the resulting strip looks exactly the same, just half as narrow. Therefore it has half the area of the original strip, the other half being the cut off first meter, which, as we know, has one square meter. Therefore the whole area is 2 square meters, which clearly is finite.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Then your banjo was out of tune. 60Hz is actually closer to B-natural, the B-flat in that octave is actually 58.27 Hz (assuming a tempered A 440 tuning), while B-naturral is 61.74 Hz.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
A banjo is better tuned with a hammer.
Are you referring to a tuning hammer or to one you might find in, say, a hardware store? I guess it depends on how good a banjo player your wife is!
(Sorry... my wife plays banjo)
Ooooh, so much for that.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
What do we mean by the topology of the Universe?
We sort of mean the 'shape'. It is easy to talk about 2 dimensional surfaces in a three dimensional universe - planes, spheres, funnels, etc. But the Universe has 3 (large) dimensions, not 2, so it is much harder. Normally, we think of the universe as a 3 dimensional equivalent to a plane - that is, in space, straight lines are straight, never curve back on themselves, and go on forever. Another common topologies which arise naturally from gravity theory are 'spherical' - where parallel lines eventually cross, and you can see the back of your head. The group in questions is proposing that the Universe is a 3d analog to the surface of a horn. Others have proposed 3d analogs to the surface of a doughnut....
How can one possibly determine what this shape is?
If the Universe is actually curved in some way, then light coming from distant objects will be bent on its way to us, distorting the images. For the global topology of the Universe, one wants to use the largest, most distant thing you can look at. The Universe is expanding and cooling. Light takes time to travel, so if you look far enought away, you can look far enough back in time to when the whole Universe was filled with a hot H-He plasma. This is called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). Most recent topology studies have looked at the statistics of the fluctuations of this distant plasma for distortion in the image from what is predicted.
So, is this true?
Could be.... but the evidence is not compelling. The anomalies they are looking at are of rather low statistical significance, and the idea that the universe is just 'straight/flat' and boring still fits pretty well. And unfortunately, for the large scale stuff, the data isn't going to get any better. The problem is, we only have one Universe, and COBE and WMAP have measured the large scales as well as can be measured. The small scale distortions have more potential given upcoming experiments like Planck, and the WMAP year2 data.
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?
actually, (61.74/60) is less than (60/58.27), not the other way round, but you are right to say that this makes 1.74 a smaller percentage of 60 than 1.73 is of 58.27.</nitpick>
frequency is a continuous property of a wave... whether you choose to select linearly or logaritmically spaced points is up to you. over large scales (i.e. multiple octaves or decades), it is generally more useful to choose logarithmically spaced points, because you want to treat low octaves with the same number of points as high octaves. over small ranges (here only 3.47 Hz or about 5.78% of the nominal 60 Hz), it makes sense to deal with linearly spaced points, because the imbalance between octaves cannot come into play. in this case, if you played the B-natural against 60 Hz and then played the B-flat against 60 Hz, the resulting beat frequency signals would sound essentially the same, as the difference between them would be only 0.01 Hz.
I've read one to many Hawking books.....
The darkness... controls the music. The music... controls the soul.