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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."
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/
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.
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.
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.
If our universe resembles a video game, could it actually be a video game?
:D
That logic is fallacious, even if the observable universe is a "simulation", then this simulation runs inside a real universe, and we're at the start again figuring out what the universe is.
Plus I subscribe to another logic: if the universe is similar to a video game, then it's because as video games increase in complexity they start to approach the model of a little universe
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.
God doesn't play dice, he plays soccer...
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
http://www.simulation-argument.com/
it's in my head
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.
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
Like these?
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.
Isn't there a multi-big bang theory
Ahh, you are referring to the Gang Bang theory?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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.
Hm. That's an interesting idea. One of the articles at that site includes the observation that such a simulation wouldn't have to simulate everything down to the greatest level of detail at all times, but could conserve computing power by just simulating things that are under direct observation.
Isn't that what actually happens in quantum-level experiments? If we are observing the double slits, the photons do one thing, but if we're not watching the slits, they do something else?
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.
'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?
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
"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.