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Shape of the Universe Determined To Be Really, Really Flat
StartsWithABang writes: You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid. Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result? A Universe that's so incredibly flat, it's indistinguishable from perfection. Which means it's probably even flatter than Kansas.
Kansas by all accounts defies spherical topology to achieve the Platonic Ideal of flat. The universe is just a shadow of Kansas seen on a cave wall.
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When you combine time cube theory with electric universe theory you get a cubic universe plus an electric clock. The cubic universe is flat (in the cosmological sense), so if the two underlying theories are correct then the universe diverges from flatness by the amount of one electric clock.
However, pedantically speaking, that's "plus one electric clock per universe". So in the case of a multiverse, the theorem only indicates the average. But with judicious application of the Central Limit Theorem, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and a line of reasoning left as an exercise for the reader, we can confidently conclude the universe is probably approximately flat, for definitions of "confidently", "conclude", "the universe", "is", "probably", "approximately", "flat", and "definitions" which remain to be derived from first principles.
Read more about it on my blog, Starts with a Bump on the Head, which, as you may have guessed from the title, is written in atrophic dactylic tetrameter, like all good cosmological monographs and comic books.
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The real mystery though is how the universe could be very nearly flat (without being exactly flat). Such "fine tuning" is clear evidence we're missing something quite fundamental. But then, dark energy already tells us that.
I agree. An observably flat universe is a huge coincidence if there is some force that composes half the mass-energy in the universe that is trying to rip the entire thing apart. Either that is an illusion, or some mechanism forces it to be perfectly balanced out by the other half of the mass-energy of the universe which we think exists but haven't been able to observe. Or, we just happen to be living in the one moment in time where dominance is switching from one to the other, but that seems like quite a coincidence as well.
The universe is all of space and time. We have not observed/measured/etc. most of the universe yet to determine its shape. The parts of the universe we have observed are flat. Until we observe more of the universe, we will not know if the universe is flat or not.
Unless they say otherwise, if you hear physicists talking about the "Universe" they're probably talking about the observable universe.
Who cares about the real Kansas. Stereotypical Kansas is very flat, and that is what really matters.
complete logic fail. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_undistributed_middle
you argue every area on the surface of a sphere has constant curvature
kansas is on the surface of a sphere
therefore kansas has constant curvature, and
therefore kansas is not flat.
here are the three ways this fails
(1) you did not demonstrate that the earth is a sphere, therefore it could have flat spots, and
(2) you assumed the euclidian definition of "flat"; there are other geometries
(3) setting aside (2) you do not demonstrate that kansas is less flat than a pancake