Slashdot Mirror
Is the Universe a Hall of Mirrors?
PhysicsWeb is running an article by one of the researchers who has developed the theory that the universe may be finite, rather small, and soccer-ball shaped. The question is still open; it's one theory that fits cosmic microwave data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). Apparently testing the theory by looking in the indicated way through the WMAP data would so far be computationally prohibitive. From the article: "The Poincaré dodecahedral space can be described as the interior of a 'sphere' made from 12 slightly curved pentagons. However, there is one big difference between this shape and a football [soccer ball] because when one goes out from a pentagonal face, one immediately comes back inside the ball from the opposite face after a 36 degree rotation. Such a multiply connected space can therefore generate multiple images of the same object, such as a planet or a photon. Other such well-proportioned, spherical spaces that fit the WMAP data are the tetrahedron and the octahedron."
Everyone knows the universe is banana shaped.
Personally I subscribe to Professor Hawkings theory of a donut shaped universe.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Bable Fish translation: "You, the reader of this article, are not nearly as smart as you thought you were. Don't feel bad about not being able to grasp anything in this article other than the word "the". Go to bed and do not look up at the sky at night for a very long time."
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
"The enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy." Anyone else think of this quote when they saw the article title
If our universe resembles a video game, could it actually be a video game?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
No, nothing has to be "containing" it. Think of it like walking on the surface of the Earth. If you look in either direction you can see pretty far and you might imagine that the Earth goes on forever. If you start walking, you will walk all the way around the Earth and end up exactly where you started. The Earth simply curves back on itself. You could walk around the Earth forever and never reach a boundary where Earth ends, but the Earth itself is still finite.
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
Or perhaps we're just in a holodeck inside a holodeck?
Q: Does not a soccer ball require a soccer ball-sack?
A: Therefore, God exists.
If the universe has 12 faces what happens to you if you exactly hit a boundary between faces? Do different bits of you come out of different opposing faces? If so, where does the energy come from to break you into components?
Maybe not a big issue for a spacecraft but what happens if a neutron star hits a boundary?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If you can infate a soccer ball and make it grow, certainly I would imagine the Universe can grow.
Maybe there is currently a finite amount of material. Who says that material can't get relatively further apart from itself? Either things can be moving away from each other occupying more space, OR the material itself, the "dots", are getting smaller and smaller making it appear we are gaining space.
Isn't there a multi-big bang theory that states that new material can enter our Universe in this fashion? Perhaps our current Universe had no single beginning, but new stuff is being added to it all the time. How many mutli-player online gamers have an ever-expanding world? New levels are constantly being added.
nah.. i am to lazy.. but mabey we can out source the task to someone..
'...if only "Jumping to a Conclusion" was an event in the Olympics.'
If anyone's looking to understand this, the book you need is "How the Universe Got Its Spots" by Janna Levine. It covers all the apparently valid but actually nonsensical questions that people have when they first hear about this (what's the universe inside then? what happens at a boundary? etc), and it explains it in such a way that you don't need a degree in topology to understand it.
I, for one, welcome our new soccer ball shaped overlords.
The article mentioned is well over a year old. The outstanding analysis of data due in 2004 has been completed. The validity of the information is being questioned Although it would be fun living inside a football.
Nope, ball with 12 slightly curved pentagons => 30 edges + 12 faces => 30 + 12 = 42
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Personally I believe in the Simpsons theory of a recursive universe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNV9FEKi9FQ. The strange thing is, this is totally based on a gut feeling (which I had long before the episode), but funnily enough, when you talk about this with other people, lots of folk seem to share this feeling... from your brother in law to, well, the Simpsons. Maybe we do have some sort of common knowledge sitting somewhere that is guiding us to find out these things... As another gut conclusion, in my opinion, if there is such a thing as a unified theory as proposed by Hawkins, this recursive thing is probably the only way to make it stick at all ends. Moreover, we probably are inside something a lot smaller than we think: ourselves! Wooooooooow!
soccer-ball shaped
I think these cosmic topologists are going to have to kick this theory around for a while before they achieve their goals.
And the brethren went away edified.
This article is about 15 months old and discusses this in the context of 1 year of WMAP data. Since then, the WMAP 3-year data has been released. I would be curious to see how this affects the theory. I believe that the WMAP 3-year data gave something like Omega = 1.010 +/- 0.001. Thus this theory seems to balanced on the knife edge. It's an interesting idea, but I have my doubts.
Err... the edges are shared, so there are less than 30. I'm trying to figure out the exact number but my maths is too stale.
Software patents delenda est.
God doesn't play dice, he plays soccer...
Soccor Balls are not dodecahedra. They're truncated icosahedra.
Actually, it's a spheroid, 705 meters in diameter.
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, doooooonnuutsss. :-P~~~~~~~~~~~
It's actually just a series of tubes, and it's definitely not a dump truck.
Hmm.. just counted the edges on a d12. Maybe there are 30 after all.
Software patents delenda est.
The shape of the universe is... (rolls dice) dice shaped! It's all one big boring D&D game
If you leave one face and return via the opposite face, that ain't a mirror. It's transmission from the opposite "side" of the cosmos, not reflection back.
I do not know the details of this, but I strongly suspect that the universe is still continuous in this model. In that case things are set up so that if you hit a boundary between two faces, then the two corresponding faces that you come out of are also adjacent, meaning that you would not notice that you have hit a boundary. Possibly the faces are just a way to explain what is going on, and there would not need to be any actual boundaries that could be detected.
Bjarke Roune
Err... the edges are shared, so there are less than 30. I'm trying to figure out the exact number but my maths is too stale.
No, the exact number would in fact be 30. The edges are indeed shared, which is why there are less than 60 (5 * 12) edges.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
... what's the upper limit of my harem size?
The mistake is thinking of there being an actual boundary. You need to think of it more like the crotch on a pair of pants - imagine that each pentagon has a tube connected to it, and you run it to the other side and connect it up with the appropriate twist. Then imagine that you turned the whole thing into rubber. There is no longer a sharp edge, just a blobby series of tubes joined by a bunch of U-shaped pant crotch things. The fact that two particles that were very close to each other before they entered separate tubes has no bearing at all on how far they will be after they enter the tubes. It may have great bearing on the details of the force laws that they interact under (basically, every "mirror" particle has to be accounted for, including the infinite copies of the particle itself; this is an incredibly delicate self-action problem even for the simplest multiply connected spacetimes).
You trip because those bastards as OSHA didn't get a warning sign put up. Time to sue the universe, sight cases of previous soccer ball injuries as proof of negligent design by the creator/creator(s)/thing/fuji heavy industries/spagetti monster/who ever made this thing.
If you have noisy data and you keep analyzing it enough, you'll eventually find some bizarre model that fits it better than a more plausible model.
It's probably best not to have a firm opinion on the shape of the universe until a lot more data is in.
Afte all the orther misconceptions about the shape of the universe, the ''infinite'' model could well be wrong again...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
...we all know the universe is shaped like a small fart.
Like the old game "Hemmoroids"... When you went off the edge of the map you came back on the opposite side...
The freaky thing is that the dodecahedron has been associated since ancient times as representing "the Universe".
l
http://www.kheper.net/topics/cosmology/solids.htm
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Back in school, we did mathematical transforms on equations to make them easier to deal with. Z-transforms, S-transforms, imaginary numbers, etc. But the thing about mathematical transforms is that although they may make your engineering calculations (or in this case, physics equations) easier to deal with, that doesn't mean they represent an idea that means much physically, they're just convenient for the task at hand.
Any insight from the physics nerds? Is this just a way of dealing with all the (so far unproven) dimensions of string theory? What's the real deal here?
I had read about this quite some time ago. Apparently when you go through one of the faces you enter from the opposite side. This is why it is not immediately observable that the universe has this shape: the light escaping from stars, to reach us, goes through several paths, either directly or through one or several faces. And of course, with the times it takes for the longer trips, the light indicates a far younger star that the direct path: hence our ignorance that the light comes from the same star. I just love that theory.
~~~ Paf. Le chien.
#1) Respect the privacy of others. #2) Think before you type.
I've always wondered if you raised a kid the right way if he would be able to have a quantum intuition. I mean, despite not being known directly to me, having been taught very early in my life about (the classical model of) atoms makes them seem intuitive, even though I would imagine they would not be to someone 500 years ago.
Of course, it might all be wasted if our final Theory of Everything has a new way of looking at quantum effects. Which I, personally, think it will. My personal candidates include Bohm's interpretation (which goes a lot deeper than Wikipedia will tell you; see Wholeness and the Implicate Order's later chapters for details), Heim theory, loop quantum gravity, and string theory. But I am fairly confident that at least the last of these, and probably all of them, will not survive in their current forms; they will have to merge and evolve first. (IANAP, but IAA Caltech undergrad planning on majoring in/doing research in physics for what that's worth.)
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
Hey.
What was the name of that short story about a guy that was driving his car round a particular mountain bend and accidentally finds a tiny pocket universe?
Anyone remember?
I've been reminded of it by this story and now I NEED TO KNOW, dammit.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
"Who's Moriarty?"
:P
That's probably what the person who modded my parent post down was asking themselves, too, I'd guess. Shame on those of you who missed the ST:TNG reference!
Please see the Wikipedia page for Professor Moriarty and on that page, scroll down to where it says "Moriarty in pop culture" where it includes the bit about the ST:TNG episode where "the three trapped crewmembers programmed the holodeck inside the holodeck to create a holographic simulation of the outside world, leaving Moriarty and the Countess safely stored in a databank aboard the Enterprise." At the end of the episode, Picard mentions something about how we all may simply be inside such a device sitting on someone's desk somewhere.
It is no more held than Pacman is held when you go out the right side of the screen and return on the left.
In fact it might be a good time to ask whether our universe is just a big simulation for a Pacman like game.
I knew it! The universe is shaped like a game of Pacman. I didn't waste the 80s on nonsense time-wasting after all.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Strangely the boundary between 2 faces is actually shared by 3 faces. Here's a figure of it. See for example how the edge "g" is a boundary between faces IV and V, faces V and VI, and faces VI and IV.
...put up by aliens to prevent humans from getting too far ahead of themselves.
It's a good idea not to rely on D&D for your mathematics education.
... and then they built the supercollider.
There is nothing wrong with using a physical object that shares the same shape as the universe theoretically does in order to detect something that is common in both.
Multiple images of a planet I can understand, but multiple images of a photon??? IIRC they only exist in one place and you can't "image" them until they interact with your eye/a sensor. Hmmm.
"I call it a Hawking hole"
So, could this hypothesis be proved by looking in one direction, observing an arrangment of galaxies, then looking in the opposite direction and observing the same arrangment rotated 36 degrees?
Obviously someone has though of that already, so is it impractical because the universe is too young for the light to have wrapped around and reached us, or because the universe is just too big to see things that far away?
Well that's about right, if you were using a spherical monitor (I know it said "soccer ball shaped" but a sphere is an easy-to-understand concept of something finite with no boundaries, eg, earth)
Commodore64_love: I don't comprehend people who're so frightened of death that they'll bankrupt themselves to stay alive
Mod parent up. There's greater explanation in the article linked than in any comment heretofore. Thank you, product byproduct.
So you can laugh all you want to...
The atom is a bunch of bubbles floating around another bubble...
We live on a bubble, that goes around another bubble...
What if the universe is actually a HUGE bubble, floating around other bubbles??
That means BEER IS A UNIVERSE IN ITSELF!!! COOL!!!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong."
H. L. Mencken
The answer is always 42, you can't argue with Douglas Adams.
BTW: Put down the slide rule, you just need to realise every edge has exactly two adjacent faces.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"--Beverly Crusher
Damn it, Wesley! Stop playing with static warp bubbles.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
I have a +8 turd of bullshit artistry. If I win a battle against a coprophiliac, how much bullshit do I have left?
... and then they built the supercollider.
But what, pray tell, are the elephants standing on?
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
The human mind is the product of millions of years of evolution designed to think in a Newtonian way. You are hardwired to think Newtonian. This hardware does very deep and is a fundamental piece of your core persona. Consider for a moment that if you toss a ball, a dog can jump up in the air and snatch it. This gives you an idea of how hardwired we are to think in Newtonian terms. This is an an ancient way of thinking that goes back well before we were primates, much less full blown humans.
Anyone can tell you what happens when you hit one object against another or toss one object against gravity at a certain angle. Even small children know roughly where a baseball is going to end up the second you release it from a throw despite the fact that the real calculation would take someone a few minutes to make. With quantum mechanics, you are never going to have that child like grasp of what happens when two atoms start interacting.
While we do make visual models to understand quantum mechanics, they really are only a crude ways to give our poor mammalian brain some straws to grasp at. We can visualize orbitals to some extent, but anything deeper then that kicks human intuition which has been developed to deal with a Newtonian world in the balls. You really can only truly 'understand' quantum mechanics and general relativity with math. And not just simple math, but ugly math that kids go to college for years to understand.
Without the hardwired machinery to give us answers like what we have for Newtonian physics, there is no ability to develop and "intuition" for quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is ugly math combined with concepts that have no Newtonian world analogy. Let the kids know that this stuff exists, but keep them in their happy Newtonian world where their hardwired physics engines can pick up the slack. Save quantum mechanics for after they know calculus.
I've always wondered if you raised a kid the right way if he would be able to have a quantum intuition.
What, you mean let your kid get stoned every day?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
WOW,only minutes ago I awoke from a dream of a universe like that and full of recursion in our own human commerce .
perhaps what we view from a telescope is ourselves time warped and 36 degrees away.
Hopefully our sun isn't any of the spectacular novae we're seeing.If it is,however,hopefully the timespace math will put it far in the future or far in the past.I've sort of wondered if the big bang doesn't expand and contract from a singularity like one of those geodesic toys that folds out to large proportions and back only to repeat.No,kidding just minutes ago I was dreaming this.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
damn it I can't remember where that's from
I like muppets.
If something has an interior, that to me at least would logically mean there is an exterior. What's on the exterior?
It is something to ponder about. If there is an exterior, and its all mirrored on the interior, then there's no way to look beyond those mirrors. The only way to see the exterior and what may lie beyond it is if what is on the exterior comes into the interior. If the universe has a boundary, then it lies beyond time, space, beyond dark matter, beyond void. It is then, really, infinite of time and space. Without time or space, with no relational "size" or "limit", it is effectively the omnipresent of the exterior. Are we a "soccer ball" in its view, and if so, can it kick us around at will, if it has a will?
And if you think all that is very possible, the only question to ask is, can it penetrate the interior of the universe? What stops it? Could it be the exterior itself, the being its own boundary? Unless there are multiple universes, are we the sole object of its attention, its only interest?
If all that is true, then while we cannot measure or weigh what is outside of us, it can surely measure and weigh what it encompasses. It knows our sum total, and we have no comprehension of its nature. Our science for all its complexity falls short of understanding the universe compared to a single comprehending glance from the outside. A man can't pick himself off the ground using only his own hands anymore than we can comprehend the full view of the universe, interior and exterior using only the things within the universe.
But, nothing exists on the exterior, right. The universe is just a ball floating in void, the void of which we can't even mentally comprehend, because it has no space or time. Then again, I once heard of a theory on the subject...
I8-D
The issue of "what is the soocer ball contained in?" is answered by the fact that the soocer ball is the universe, ie. All of space and time. Space doesn't exist outside the universe, therefore there is no need for the universe to be contained in anything.
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
History of Time. --The guy in the wheelchair with that creepy voice.. but pretty smart
Yes, they can, but that does not make them "hardwired" to do Newtonian physics; physics is the mathematical description of the real world, and so someone who lives in the real world and experiences it will have intuition into how physics works. If we lived and experienced in the quantum or the relativistic, we would have intuition into how that works as well. However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection. I don't think that a dog, or a child, or anyone who hasn't taken a physics course or read about fiber optic cables would know about this. There is no intuition about it, but it is Newtonian physics. Physics is not hardwired into anybody's or anthing's brain. Our seemingly innate grasp is the ability to find patterns in the behavior of things, which is why the dog will know when to jump to catch a ball, or why the child knows where the ball will land (approximately). If we have no experience to find patterns in, we won't know our heads from our asses, metaphorically speaking.
As a consequence, you can grow intuition as you work with something. Which is why if you do enough quantum mechanical calculations, you will begin to have a sense of "what looks right," to have intuition about how quantum mechanics works. True, because we can only express quantum mechanics, our intuition in mathematical, but just like the physics student can translate the mathematical expressions of Newtonian physics into consequences in the real world (i.e. if the momentum of A is bigger than B, then they will both move mostly in the direction of A if they have an inelastic collision), the student of quantum mechanics can say "This Hamiltonian of an electron doesn't have any nodes. Then it must be in an s-orbital." Just because we are not as intimately familiar with quantum mechanics as we are with Newtonian physics because we live in the latter, not former, doesn't mean we can develop an intuition into how the former works.
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
There is a problem with Physics these days, in that theory seems to be prior to observation. I would be much more interested in this pretty-picture geometry of the universe if we did in fact see multiple similar observations of galaxies and other objects which were at 36 degrees offset from each other.
Witness the contrast with Biology. The structure of DNA was proposed based upon exhaustive analysis of actual molecular images, as well as the interatomic forces involved.
Thomas
But what if the faces are beveled at the edges?
Such a theory results in you being able to get pictures of the same star environments at different places but at different ages (because of the speed of light) so in fact you may not be able to recognize this.
Indeed you could recognize it when observing the stars around a "window" frame, because in this area, you'll indeed get images of the same "frame" at two different places in the sky, with stars of the same age.
If you manage to match two such "frame" zones in the sky, then you have proven the theory. This is, in a simplified way, how the supporters of these theories proceed.
The problem is, to detect the frames one must (a) be sure of their shape (why regular ones, why not circular windows, etc.) and (b) having selected one shape and size, scan the entire deep sky with it trying to match two zones -this activity requires more precise deep sky catalogs that we have (necessitating e. g. results from ESA's future Herschel/Planck satellites) and a computing time now evaluated in centuries IIRC.
In other words: nice unverifyable theory.
Herve S.
I think the word I'm looking for is hypercube, but I mean to apply it to the number of sides a dodecahedron has.
Going through one side will result ending up coming through another side. (Anyone ever have dreams of being stuck in a room, you go through the door, only to end up in the same room as before?)
Picture yourself in an empty room like this. You can see through the sides, and you see yourself like in a hall of mirrors. You pass through the walls only to end up in the same room.
Imagine release millions of tiny superballs, which we will call photons, in the room. Now, imagine there is another object, a big round object in the room, that isn't moving to start with.
All these superballs going in every single direction start bouncing off you, pushing you around. However, since there were few, if any, superballs between you and the big round object to begin with, there is less "pressure" inbetween you and the object, so the superballs on the outside push you towards it.
The big round object is moving slower as the superballs bounce off of it because it has more mass, however, you are pushed towards it ever quicker. More and more, you fall faster and faster towards it.
What is being described as a soccerball with opposite ends connected is essentially a dodeca-donut.
I heard it from a comedian, I've never seen a film of that name... so maybe it's well known
I like muppets.
I think the article said that the edges might have three adjacent faces. That makes my brain hurt. I think I'll go be a bridge support somewhere.
I drank what? -- Socrates
It could be a discworld reference... Under the disk is the elephants, then a turtle. And under that? Then it's turtles all the way down.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
If a black hole curves space a lot, could the whole universe be curved a little? Resulting in a similar kind of event horizon?
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I don't understand the concept of a "shaped universe", because the word's meant to describe absolutely everything in existence, as far as I know. Maybe the definition's been altered. If it were to have a shape, then it would have boundaries, meaning there would be scope for something outside these boundaries. Nothing has edges without something else pushing against them to define those edges. If there were something outside of these boundaries, then the universe is not composed of everything in existence, meaning it's not the universe.
I'd say it's more like asteroids, since it doesn't matter which side you leave from...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
So you are saying the Universe is nothing more than a series of tubes? Are you a senator? Alright, come out with it!
Okay, this is off topic, but it must be said. Your "spacetime is a bunch of rubber U-shaped pant crotch things connected by a blobby series of tubes" metaphor really deserves its own page on the uncyclopedia, http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. I'm far too lazy to do it myself, so consider this a challenge.
Dodecahedron? I don't think so. We all know that the universe is a tiny glass sphere that higher beings use in marbles competitions.
There are aliens out there......they are *US*. If we look far enough, we will eventually see ourselves. Only rotated 36 degrees (several times over).
Layne
>Is it possible for a video game character to leave a computer game and enter the real world (or at least what we consider to be the real world)? Only through the intervention of it's creators (i.e. us).
Or through a bug in the system.
FRA: STFU GTFO
They mean to say the universe is really just one big Hall of Mirrors Effect? :-P
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
Read the article. In fact, read the summary.
The whole point is that they found dupes in the cosmic microwave background that at least support the theory. i.e. duplicates that occur at angles consistent with the theory.
They are waiting on a satellite to help tell us whether the planck constant is where it needs to be to support the model.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
How can space have a shape / size? Isn't space technically just.. space? How can something that doesn't exist be measured? Space is just our concept of nothingness.
Ohh, so thats why there are no API-docs available?!?
-H
'The Road to Reality' (Roger Penrose) http://www.amazon.com/Road-Reality-Complete-Guide- Universe/dp/0679454438/
Great discussion about physics laws and math, one of the bests titles of Mr Penrose, and yes, the ' dodecahedral/tetrahedral/octahedral space' possibilities are also explained from the ground up.
What's in a sig?
I believe Shihar is correct, and you, good Citizen GeffDE, are off the mark, as much as I would truly like to agree with your assertion. Our brains are most definitely hardwired to sustain us by seeking food, shelter and most important of all, SEX! All else is fuzzy thinking.
In soviet soccer, ball contains field.
Once you leave the safe world of Newtonian physics you need to develop a superhuman ability to try and NOT visualize the universe on the grand scale of the quantum scale. Human intuition and visualizations is was built for Newtons world. Once you leave that world, it breaks down and fails to be much help.
And this is why QM is and forever will be seen as the quack end of respectable science. Human intuition and ability to visualize are not tied to the Newtonian-level physics. They are tied to the words of language used to describe the concepts, and it's very hard to be a good scientist and be good at naming things, especially things that you don't really understand.
If you want to visualize QM, talk about "subreality", "patterns", and "fabric", not "waves" and "particles."
This should be modded up. Photons are the tools by which things are imaged, not things to be imaged themselves. I really hate pop science articles...
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ah but what happens beyond time is less clear. Repeating time can create paradoxes. Causality itself becomes errend when one either precludes a 'prior' or assumes a reflection/reversal. And as space and time are one, this (as well as many other issues, includeing entropy) discourages my belief in such 'closed' world theories. Not to say its imposible, but less than likely, i'd say.
Because you can - or because you should?
This universe probably came from when one of the multi-dimensional universes collapsed and broke into universes with different number of dimensions (one of them 3D) or developed a 3D "bubble" inside of a 5, 9, or some other n-dimensional universe that keeps expanding (big bang) and collapsing over and over again. I read somewhere not too long ago that the dark matter could be leftovers from the last time big bang occurred. I see our world as a soap bubble that started expanding many billions of years ago because of extreme energy/heat that "inflated" and will continue to inflate this universe until pressure outside of the bubble is greater than the presssure within. Then as the temperature inside begins to decrease (galaxies cooling off) our universe will start shrinking rapidly. Some say it may even shrink to something as small as football or baseball. Of course everything within will be crushed and there will be no molecules or atoms left - just a blob of very dense matter/energy that will most likely explode again and form another universe, most likely another 3D one.
Michio Kaku wrote books on this very topic and while it's all theories it makes a lot of sense to me. Of course we don't know where those other n-dimensional universes begin, end and what else contains them and WHY they are here to begin with.
What shape do turtles have on their shells? It's a hexagon, isn't it, not a pentagon?
..I've said this for ages... the number of distant stars/galaxies is probably smaller htan we think, rather we are seeing "many reflections" of these entities from various points of time bouncing around inside our "soccer ball".
Oh, certainly, sir.
Look, my liege!
[trumpets]
Of course we're living in a simulation.
You're essentially correct, under this model you end up with a continuous space. Perhaps the easier way to see how it works is with a simpler example like a torus: you can make a torus (donut shape) from a flat piece of paper by first rolling it up into a tube (identifying the top edge with the bottom edge) and then looping the tube around (identifying the two ends of the tube with each other). Thus you can think of the flat piece of paper as a torus by imagining that when you pass off the top edge you appear at the bottom edge, and when you pass off of one side you appear on the other. Now, what happens at the corner (the equivalent of an edge of the dodecahedron)? A quick check and you'll see it all works out: in some sense you might be "broken up" with half of yourself on one side of the paper, and half on the other, but remember those sides are connected together, so so are you.
The same trick works with the dodecahedron, you just have to get the identification of faces right. On passing out through a fae you'll appear on the opposite face, rotated. Take a quick look at a dodecahedron (here's an example that is translucent and rotatable so you can look around) and you'll get the idea. Looking through the dodecahedron from one face you can see the opposite face doesn't align: it's at an angle - hence the rotation. Visualsing where you'll come out as you approach an edge (and where the other face of that edge will result in you appearing) you'll see that the whole thing in indeed continuous; the edges present no problems.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
That is not quite true. Quantum mechanics technically still holds at the macroscopic level. However, Newtonian physics is an "approximation" that is incredibly good in intermediate scales (i.e. not relativistic or quantum).
Of course the universe isn't truly Newtonian. That said, Newtonian is how we perceive it in our day to day lives. Sure, there are electrons and atoms bouncing all around me, but the only thing I see is a flat desk with gravity pointed straight down.
I can guarantee you that the dog is not doing newtonian physics in his head; neither is he hardwired to do it that way. If you throw a ball at a puppy, he will not be able to catch it right away. Just like a little kid can't. We aren't hardwired to "think Newtonian." As it is, Newtonian physics are a representation of the world we live in, not the world itself.
Do you truly and honestly believe that in the millions of years of evolution in a world that looks like a teenagers physic books opening lessons that nothing has been hardwired to deal with a Newtonian outlook on the world?
Take a gazelle. Drop it out of its mothers womb, and watch as within an hour it is performing a balancing act in modern robots struggle to mimic. This stuff is hardwired in.
Take a baby. Try and teach it calculus. Spend every single day trying to teach it calculus, and see how successful you are. The baby is going to find this utterly impossible because calculus is something we have absolutely zero evolutionary adaptation for. When we learn calculus, we learn it through blood, sweat, and tears. Now take a baby and try and teach it English. Spend every single day talking to the baby and trying to teach it English. You will probably take the better part of year before you start to see any success. It will probably take the child until he is in high school before the child has mastered the language. Language comes quicker then math because we have entire centers of the brain that have been devoted to learning it. It is still a new evolutionary adaptation on the grand scheme of things, but there has been some time for it to get a foothold in our brains.
Now, try and teach a baby how a Newtonian world works. The baby is going to understand that something coming towards its face is going to hit, that objects are solid, and that things fall in parabolas long before it even has the beginnings of muscle control do anything about it. A baby will start making sense out of the photons bouncing around in a deeply intuitive way almost instantly.
A young child is significantly faster and more accurate then Ph.D. in physics can ever be without the aid of a computer when trying to predict a trajectory or what happens when an object is struck. This stuff is so hardwired into us that we don't even think about it. Hell, we CAN'T think about it because it is so hardwired into us. Acting in a Newtonian world comes easier then breathing.
However, if you have never experienced something (even Newtonian physics), then you have no intuition about it because it is not something hardwired. Examples: on this very site a while back, there was a heated discussion about what would happen if there were a a tunnel bored completely through the Earth and you fell it in. What would happen? People disagreed. Also, Total Internal Reflection.
Of course we don't have an intuitive understanding of what happens when gravity is doing anything other then pulling us down or any we are bouncing things through a fiber optic cable. Why in the hell would any species evolve to understand such things? When I say that we understand Newtonian physics, I don't mean every single rule and law that falls under "Newtonian physics". I mean that we perceive the world like the first few chapters of a high school physics book.
Further, the intuitive jump for understanding complex but still Newtonian things is a small jump compared to trying understand quantum mechanics or general relativity. After a
I agree. I was watching a six year old chase a super ball the other day. She had very little clue which way the ball was going next. It would take her about six bounces before she could catch it (after it "settled down"). I, however, could catch it on the first bounce. I think that Newtonian thought is learned quickest because there are more observable occurances. It's like learning a (second?) language, the more exposure you have to it, the faster you learn it.
Layne
P.S. Did anyone else think of a Tesseract after actually reading the article? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract) I first came across the concept in the Wrinkle In Time books. Also, the article said that the soccerball shape wasn't the only possible explaination -- maybe the stereographic projection is how it looks.
I'm not an astrophysist (though I wanted to be one in high school), but I rather like the simpiler concept of the universe being finite, though rather large by this point, in that if you look in one direction far enough your line of sight will loop back to see your current location (though of course several billion years ago). Sort of like in Asteroids where if you fly past the left edge of the screen, your ship shows up on the right side. Which makes me wonder weather or not some of the galaxies in the hubble deep field is ours.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
I think you're onto something there. Could the basic unit of matter in the universe be the triangle? Still, I think we need to leave some room for old Pacman. Black Holes are made when Pacman swallows a Power Pill and goes around eating stars.
... and then they built the supercollider.
"Paging Mr. Dick, Paging Mr. Phillip K. Dick, you have a visitor at the front desk."
An individual with a quantum-intuitive understanding of the world might be very difficult for the rest of us to recognize. Such a person would have a lot of trouble perceiving cause and effect in the way we do, and would probably have no concept of determinism or even certainty. They would be able to see more dimensions than us (if such theories are physical), and would be unable to correlate these dimensional relations to objects within our understanding: if you are a sphere, you can describe yourself to a plane by saying "I'm a bunch of circles," but this really is incomplete and the plane really would be hopeless to have a complete understanding of you. Such a person may appear at times clairvoyant or at least extremely intelligent, but much of the time incoherent and simply apart from the human race.
In short, such a person would either be autistic or the Mua'Dhib. Read PKD's "Martian Time-Slip" or "Dune" for examples of people with quantum knoweldge or understanding, and how is basically makes them appear mad much of the time.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
D&D should switch from a d20 system to a d12?
Yes, THAT was my first thought in hearing the universe might be 12 sided...
Didn't D&D use d6? Or I must go back to Gurps?
Rethinking email
Its definitely 30 vertices, as I just made a stellated dodecahedron out of bamboo BBQ skewers to put on top of our christmas tree. The shape took exactly 30 kebab sticks, and you can see the 12 pentagon faced solid in the middle of the Christmas Star.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
For all we know, our universe could be a tiny little "cell" or "atom" within another universe. It could be within a monstrous living being. The big bang could have been the initial creation of this "cell" within this life form. Unlikely, but who knows.
Our universe could be so huge that there are millions+ of big bangs all so far apart that we would never know they existed. They may also happen so uncommonly, that any light, etc that would have reached us from another has long died out since the last big bang happened and there is no way to detect anything else ever existed.
The electron goes around the atom, the moon goes around the earth, the earth goes around the sun, and the sun goes around a black hole. I doubt it stops there. Things just move so slow when they get to a larger scale (relatively, it actually goes quite fast) that it might be hard to determine if our blackhole at the center of our galaxy (and the other galaxies) actually goes around something else like the big bang. Maybe the galaxies are still moving away from it because of the initial velocity of it's explosion, but will eventually fall into orbit around it? If this turned out to be true, than for all we know, the big bang could be orbiting around something else, so far away that we may never know if it exists. And so on, and so on.
Just a couple of crazy ideas. I'd love to hear reasons why this could or could not be true. Is there any reason to think that what we can "see" is all there is? We've been wrong so many times before.
it is possible for a finite object to have no boundaries, for example, the surface of a sphere is a two dimensional surface but there is no edge to it. i have a model of the universe i dreamed up which sounds dreadfully similar to this concept of the universe starting as a tiny and simple polyhedra, it's following a power of two pattern but somewhere as it divides perturbations form in the pattern and eventually these unfold into what we see here now around us. the key concept is of the process of endless division of a continuous 3 dimensional (and finite) surface that is undergoing an endless second harmonic reverberation that keeps on doubling the number of wave fronts while halving their amplitude. the key concept this model is aimed towards solving is the question of the source of gravitational force. in my model it is basically equalibriation, the reason why water forms spherical droplets is because this allows the most optimal geometry for releasing the pressure of the endless dividing of matter within it without losing the integrity of the matter. it is this equilibriation which causes the centre of gravity and when two objects are close together, if they get closer together and then share surfaces they are at optimal minimisation of resistance from the expanding force that is uniformly distributed throughout all space. i still haven't figured out quite how to exploit it, my current concept for a gravitational manipulation device is developing a semiconductive material, some sandwich of specific kinds of matter that shields gravity flowing in one direction but lets it flow in the other direction. creating such a device, preferably one which is switchable so it is operating only when some other controllable force is applied (eg, magnetism). it should also be possible to create the opposite configuration, where it operates unless it is manipulated, such a configuration would be well suited to creating a 'perpetual motion' machine by nullifying or reversing gravity on one side of a rotational cycle, or even better, mounting the gravitic semiconductors on the arms of a rotating device and tapping the energy of gravity to create electricity. anyways that's a nutshell version of my hypothesis. i have a whole set of concepts for how matter particles (radiative and inert) are formed and what causes them to behave the way they do, and ideas about how to implement teleportation and matter holography (think replicator). i should really get off my butt and do something about it the problem is describing my ideas is all i can do at this point. maybe some /. person will read this post and lightbulbs will magically appear in thought bubbles above their heads and something really interesting happens subsequently.
just don't try to patent it if it's possible to see how my idea was prior art... this idea is licenced under a GPL v2, and when v3 is released, it will be gplv3 licensed. i don't want to be paying through the nose for a device that i helped invent.
Duh, what do you think lightspeed is? Enforced lag ....
This is not my sandwich.
Now don't call me crazy now...but what if the universe really is just an infinate space going on forever and ever and we are all just wasting our time with these fascinating theories? I mean, what if the universe just is "there" and just "is". No expansion or shapes, just infinate in all directions.
Well personally I believe in the infinite expansion of matter. That is, there is one clump of matter that explodes (the explosion being labeled a "star") and bursts forth with a ton of energy, creating orbits of these clumps of energy and mass that themselves do the same thing.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
As to what this soccer ball universe could floating in, well, the question itself is probably the largest issue. We don't know the answer, but the it could very well be that there is no "outside of the soccer ball". The universe could be all that there is. There could be no "beyond" the universe or "outside" of the universe. It is hard concept to visualize, but that is pretty much true of any concept that outside of the traditional Newtonian world.
One of the most confusing aspects of general relativity comes from the discussion of the expansion and curvature of the universe. To almost everyone, a curved surface can only be understood as such by treating it as being embedded in a higher dimensional space. But in reality, we don't have to think of it this way. Curvature is an intrinsic property of a manifold. That means that I can measure the curvature of the earth without ever leaving its surface or even walking all the way around. In fact, according to the gauss bonnet formula, all I need to do to measure the local curvature of the earth is measure (extremely precisely) the area of a triangle I draw on the ground. The field of differential geometry contains all the mathematical tools we need to describe the curvature of the universe, the metric (which lets us measure distances over curved surfaces) and it's evolution in time and space, and any other properties which you might think could only be understood if the universe was contained in something, but which actually make perfect mathematical sense if the universe is all that there is!
I came here for a good argument
when one goes out from a pentagonal face, one immediately comes back inside the ball from the opposite face after a 36 degree rotation.
Ah, so the universe is exactly like New York then.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Oh my god please shut the fuck up.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I seem to remember a speculative fiction novel in which the protagonists are on a ramscoop ship whose drive goes funky and won't shut down. (it's lurking on my shelves somewhere; but I cannot remember the title yet)
Long story short: they keep increasing in speed, ever nearer 'c' (the scoop field strengthening with the increasing speed so they don't collide or get fried), and eventually end-up 'wrapping around' the universe and seeing how things have changed each time they pass certain galaxies/clusters (time dilation helps here). As the wrapping progresses, they also notice all else 'cooling down' and regressing back to Origin where there is eventually another 'big bang', they get their drive fixed and start to slow down, and ultimately (conveniently) find an earth-type planet to land on.
Sound familiar to anyone?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
"Asteroids" the video game takes place on a toroidal surface. You go in any one direction and eventually come back from the direction you were heading away from. The "torus", if considered as a 2D surface embedded in 3D space, can have its hole in the yz plane, the xz plane, or any plane really that contains the z axis, perpendicular to the screen. Within the 2D space defined by that donut surface, the orientation of the hole in the higher 3D space has no observable effect. Pac-Man, for its part, can be considered to have taken place on the surface of a cylindrical 2D surface embedded in a 3D space, not necessarily a toroidal one, since there was no magic tunnel connecting the top and bottom of the maze.
This is different: "an object that travels away from the Earth in a straight line will eventually return from the other side of the universe, having been rotated by 36 degrees in the process". So, it's just like Asteroids except the ship is pointing in a crooked direction when it reappears, off by some predictable angle. This would be a real problem for a game like Pac-Man, because of the way the controller works. Asteroids could accomodate the situation rather easily since left and right in that game control rotation instead of absolute direction, and applying continual thrust will keep the ship going straight even if it comes back with a cockeyed trajectory. Also, the maze and controller in Pac-Man, entirely based on NSEW directions, would present real headaches. Asteroids has no maze and the ship can point in any arbitrary direction, not just four.
The minimum radius of the soccer ball (according to this group) is 43 billion light years. The Big Bang was 13.7 billion years ago, but the actual horizon is 53 billion light years and not 13.7 billion since the universe wasn't always this big and the first few light years covered by the earliest photons have expanded to have a large contribution to that 53 billion. This little detail would present a challenging user interface problem for Asteroids. Now that I think about it, that might be less lame than the original Asteroids.
From any vantage point the furthest radiation visible is the microwave background. Beyond that, the light would have had to have been emitted earlier, at a time when the universe was more opaque. (Charged particles had yet to combine and emit background-radiation to form neutral, transparent matter less efficient at scattering light.) Past the microwave background, we "see" the early universe along all lines of sight as a completely opaque, black sheet, which emits no light of its own, absorbs all light, and which lines the boundary of what is for us the observable universe. It's like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black. But these guys are saying that since 43 is less than 53, you can see the same patterns of microwave background radiation being emitted from various points in the sky, inside this opaque layer, in a pattern consistent with this dodecahedral symmetry. It's like God really does play dice, except he plays with those geeky 12-sided Dungeons and Dragons dice. Stuff like this has to make you wonder. Why 12? Who ordered that? What would have been wrong with a flat, spherical, tetrahedral, cubic, octahedral, or icosahedral universe? From a video game design perspective, a cubic symmetry would have been so much easier. In my humble opinion, God should have seriously considered creating a six-sided universe instead.
Even if you could reach the "edge", it's not like you would even notice anything, like a lot of these posts seem to be assuming. You wouldn't hit some sort of wall and go "splat". You'd just sort of relocate, rotate, and keep chomping away obliviously like Pac-Man does when he does his thing. We have no evidence that some anisotropy exists in the topology of the universe everywhere but here as if the universe really is centered on us and our galaxy, so that it changes somehow within a sphere that surrounds us. There's most l
Makes Me Roam.
ok, here's my issue with theories that the universe is finite.
Basically, it boils down to if the universe is finite, it therefore has shape and bounds right? In this particular case, we are comparing it to a soccer ball. But if it has bounds, then what is beyond those bounds? Is our "universe" inside a larger finite shape? or is what contains our universe infinite?
I assume they mean to imply that it would defy the rules of the "universe" to be able to escape it into said container, but that doesn't eliminate the fact that if the universe is finite, then the question remains, what is outside of our universe? I don't think "nothing" is appropriate either.
Basically, I suppose it is a matter of definition, to me universe means "all that exists", but if what we know as the universe has bounds and therefore exists inside some other possibly impossible to define region, then we aren't really talking about a universe anymore, we are talking about a limited subset of what I would call the universe.
Also, what if what we call a universe is one of many soccer balls (Imagine a ball bin in a store)? Are we still talking about each ball being the universe, I would think the bin is the universe then right? And if so, is it possible to break from one ball into another without doing damage to either ball?
I'm no theoretical astrophysicist, but I believe we need some better definitions about what we are actually talking about, cause really once you give way to possibility of a multiverse, you by definition no longer have a universe, since it means "everything" and therefore can only be one.
Just some thoughts.
proxy
The book is Tau Zero, written by Poul Anderson if I recall correctly.
Mathematically, then, we are "inside" every Klein bottle in the world. Of the principle, most people don't go around considering themselves inside thousands of bottles. This would be an incorrect assumption of faulty logic.
Just became you can turn your shirt inside out (or twist it into a single curved plane), doesn't mean you have put the world inside your shirt. It means you have a twisted shirt.
A Klein bottle has no interior or exterior, actually. So, no, I'm 100% correct. If you have an interior, you must have an exterior. If you have no exterior, you have no interior.
So, if we are on the interior, there must be an exterior. If not, then the universe is simply infinite as there are no spacial boundaries, but only defined pathways, like a cubical maze. Cubicles don't technically have an interior or exterior. An office, on the other hand, has an interior once the door is close. As soon as the interior is defined, the exterior is defined. They define each other, in fact. They can never be mutually exclusive.
I8-D
Not sure if it's actually gravity or "dark energy" behind it, but the Hubble sphere defines the area outside of which no light or information can reach us. From what I've read, if the expansion of the universe is accelerating, then the Hubble sphere will contract. First red-shifting the most distant stars into blackness, then moving closer and closer until we can only see the stars in our own galaxy (but by then, the expansion may have become strong enough to adversely affect life on Earth...)
certainly,certainly ... I live in a foggy neighbourhood and I never left my block; when I look around, I see looming out of the fog, on every side, shadows that resemble the building I live in: it must be that the universe is finite, square, and each side is connected to the opposite side and I need another 2 billion USD grant to continue the study of a problem of such a great importance.
Finding some regularities in background radiation means only one thing: there are some regularities in the background cosmic radiation; the first explanation could be that beyond our field of vision our cosmic neighbourhood is more regular than we think; no need for universes looped upon themselves.
Little wonder the smart kids of today don't want to become physicists and dream about going to law school ... if physicist promise to solve the question about the life, universe and everything during the next budgetary exercise and one can get branded as a heretic for not believing in string theory, Einstein and Big Bang, then even History looks like an exact science.
The "universe" is just a set of restrictions on your perception.
Or, on the other hand, our universe could be a basic particle in another universe...
If the universe is really finite so what has place beyond that limit?
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
Most astronomers think that the universe is infinite
No? I thought they didn't and rather thought that the universe was about 180 billion ly large and that we were somewhere in there, not being able to tell where exactly since we can only see about 13.8 billion ly away. And don't tell me that we/they are supposed to think that there's something (even if it's only vaccum) out of this huge 180 billion ly large ball because we couldn't get there even if we were on the edge of the universe (I wonder what we'd see tho)
And by the way, why do we care about the background microwave radiation to determine the shape of the universe? I mean what does it have to do with it, besides to give information about the early universe? I haven't read the whole article by the way, oh well, if you have, you need to ask yourself questions about the (mis)use of your free time.
You just got troll'd!
that _our_ universe is finite, but this universe is just one of many out there. Like that
turtle over turtles universe
What about zillions of Big Bangs in those zillions universes? What about Matrix? Oh God!!!
We live in Matrix and brrr bzzzzz tzzz
Friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.
The universe really isn't a 13.7b lightyear wide black hole. It's too weird and full of bugs to be real. It's got to be a computer simulation. The question is whether or not the program was written by mickie-soft in the year 2525 and if so, will it function beyond the year 2006 or will it require a complete reboot on dec 31 or will it get stuck in a loop recycling dec 28th until it's deja vue all over again.
Mmmm...Never ending space donut "you can make a torus (donut shape) from a flat piece of paper by first rolling it up into a tube (identifying the top edge with the bottom edge) and then looping the tube around (identifying the two ends of the tube with each other)." --SMD
"Such a person may appear at times clairvoyant or at least extremely intelligent, but much of the time incoherent and simply apart from the human race"
Sounds alot like my wife. Perhaps we should have her disected.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
I would have thought this question to have been asked somewhere within this thread, but it has not.
If then, the universe as we know it looks like a soccer ball, how many other soccer balls are there?
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
HOM pops up in Quake editing but not as often or as bad as in Doom editing.
No, I probably not, but one can ask :) .
The problem is that it is very difficult to come up with a mechanism explaining how the CMBR can have particular geometric regularities without actually postulating that the universe itself is geometrically regular. If you can think up a better explanation, go ahead. In the meantime, evidence of geometric regularity does support the multiply-connected universe scenario.I have not said the universe is regular, only that what lies right beyond what we can observe from our point of view could looks like it is, and this is a much simpler guess than what the authors of the fine article propose.
Physicists don't brand people "heretics". String theory is far from an established theory. Einsteinian relativity and Big Bang cosmology are established theories, but if you think you can do better, you're free to do so. You simply have to be able to explain everything that those theories currently explain — and that's a lot.I have stressed believe: as in "x believes in Zeus". Theories are, well, theories (tools to think with) whether they are established or not. That the universe was born out of a monster slain by a god was also an established theory, and belief was required. The advantage (over the theory that we don't know s***) of the slain monster theory is that it's better than nothing and pretends to be complete. The multiply-connected universe scenario promises to be a complete solution, as in postulating that we don't expect many surprised from the universe, at least not as far as size, composition, age etc. are concerned.
If you don't think physicists are in the branding business, try one of the schools that spits out mostly law, marketing and humanities-minded graduates: you'll find scientifically trained people teaching ex-cathedra (pun intended) the dogma of established science.
Seeing that you haven't missed once leaving two spaces after a '.', I infer you either edited or passed through the tedious process of writing and rewriting papers published in peer reviewed journals ... you certainly are aware of the practice of academic ketman (Rorty even recommended it for budding scientists) and how antagonizing your department head by "not believing" can harm your career prospects. Ever since Michelson and Morley blew it by not asking the right question, we deal more and more with belief than with method. I have no idea if the theories of relativity/quantum etc. are right or wrong, but how about this: funny how out of the early church theories, the one that won was the one which joined mutually exclusive concepts: one person in three hypostases , and out of the late physics, the theory that almost won is the one that joins mutually exclusive concepts: same speed no matter what system of reference (it wasn't me the one that noticed this ... some 1930s obscure philosopher).
In short, such a person would either be autistic or the Mua'Dhib. Read PKD's "Martian Time-Slip" or "Dune" for examples of people with quantum knoweldge or understanding, and how is basically makes them appear mad much of the time
Ah, so that's who/what the Cylon Base Ship brain-chick is modeled after.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
ok, let's make it clear: I claim no authority in the higher crafts and I had no intention of insulting you, and if anything was insulting in what I wrote, put it down on my poor English and ... ignorance. Don't need to remind me that, I already know :-) . Still, as long as I don't attempt to publish in peer reviewed journals and I cannot do more damage than annoying other /.-ers, I think have the right to have an oppinion and that is: the task of science is to produce intelectual tools to deal with observed phenomena, not discover "realia". The moment it claims to discover intrinsic laws that govern, the shape of the universe etc. and ask us, the ignoramuses, to believe in them, it stops being science and the only missing connection with religion is asking for human sacrifices. But I am an ignorant, what can be expected fo me ...
... you must be in a hurry. I never claimed that. I claimed that theories that mix unmixable things seem to carry more traction and the logical and debatable theories don't. Maybe because the later leave too much room for debate and dissent, while the former do not so they are more efficient in supporting stable power structures (such as churches and scientific hierarchies). Should I put "seem to" and "maybe" in bold letters to make it even more evident that's just /. talk ?
"Theological theories unify, physical theories unify, therefore physics = theology"
"same observed speed" across "two different frame of reference" looks pretty much exclusive to me. They might not really be exclusive, since M. and M. observed something else, but, as far as my ignorance helps me, it does not work for anything else but electromagnetic radiation.
Just in case J.P. Luminet or somebody more informed than I am is watching: would it have been possible to observe these regularities if Earth was not located somewhere close to the center of the dodecahedron ? Is the background radiation distribution influenced by large masses located between us and the boundaries of the dodecahedron?
Well, I'm talking in notions about this theory, of course.
Think of a 2 diminsional plane. A plane is infinite. If the universe is defined this way, this is an inifinite universe.
However, this theory says it mirrors. So, it is more like a computer monitor that either A) reflects the mouse pointer, turning it 180 degrees and as you keep moving up and hit the edge, you start coming back down, even though you keep moving up, and so on. Things just bounce around forever in perfect Newtonian laws. Or B) you can set your monitor up to "wormhole" the mouse from the top to the bottom. When you hit the top edge, the mouse reappears at the bottom and keeps going up again.
Now, what's outside the screen? From the relative view of the screen, it is inifite. But this isn't true. I'm outside the screen. My Pepsi is sitting outside the screen. There are multiple screens around my room, completely unaware of each other. And yet, I sit on the exterior of them. I comprehend them, but they comprehend me not. In their 2 diminsional universe, they haven't the physical capability to comprehend me. I can observe and affect its world, but it cannot observe or affect mine, unless I give it the means to, with something like a webcam.
Now, applying this to our universe, this theory supposes a 4 diminsional model of the universe with the "edges" mirroring (or could worm hole, and have a similar, but opposite effect).
To us, it is infinite in our observations, or limitted if we come to an understanding about what's going on. We may be able to find an edge to define, just like my screen has a pixel at 0,0, and the computer defines this as an edge, that there is no -1, 0 or 0, -1 or -1, -1.
So you are perfectly correct. Outside the universe is undefined. However, if this theory is correct, it still must exist. Otherwise, we come to this conclusion:
We find in the future that the distance between the "mirrors" is X lightyears. Why that size and not another? If it fluxuates at all, it is expanding "into" something or contracting "from" something.
Now, some said that I call the exterior unimaginable. This is not so. I say it is unobservable. We'd have to break through an edge into a place without our laws of time and space. I am, in this case, defining an edge as the limit of time and space, and beyond it either no time and space, or at least, seperate time and space, but the two never meet. But one may affect the other in some way we can't comprehend. Just like the screen I'm typing on cannot comprehend the keyboard that is affecting it as I type.
And so, I'm agreeing with you. There is defined (interior) and undefined (exterior). It is beyond our reality to have the ability to define it. However, I would hold to an infinite "superverse" theory. Our reality, our galaxies, our universe as we know it in 4D time and space (and other possible dimisions we can observe or define) exists as a bubble of some shape, size, and configuration. But it has an exterior that is undefined, which has such a difference from us as to be forever undefined, as we cannot observe it.
I see it this way, and this is just my personal observation on this theory. It's either we are interior/exterior, or we are infinite. If there are bounds, something set those bounds by some law. Either the bounds are inifinite in time for a reason we'll never be able to comprehend, or they are moving to some law.
One might say that the universe, being a giant computer, is expanding those bounds of "undefined" by "solving" and making more of it "defined". But, that still says there is an exterior of undefined.
So, I agree with you. I'm just calling the undefined the exterior. There exists "pixels" we can't define because they exist outside our comprehension, like i.
My entire question, which is more philosophy than science theory is, what exists in the i area. Does it have its own reality? Does it infinitely encompass us. Does it observe and/or affect us
I8-D
An electron based 'imager' of photons would be a cool thing to see though :-) And don't forget that when you start including loop terms from QED you find that photons do scatter off photons. But that's getting silly.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Thanks for that link. I love this subject.
After reading the website, I went to wikipedia and checked the relevant entry. The 'rational arguments' section contains a decent condensed version of that website. Meanwhile, I fleshed out the section on 'empirical arguments', perhaps it will amuse you.
FATMOUSE + YOU = FATMOUSE
I really don't like the idea of scientists using the term soccer shaped. Back in the UK where football (or soccer as it is referred to in the US) is something of an obsession on the whole "eat football, sleep football". Once they get word of this, there'll be no stopping them....
>> The book is Tau Zero, written by Poul Anderson if I recall correctly.
yup! That's it - I found it this morning.
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)