Yo, not to be a jackass or anything, but this isn't the first force field out there. Don't believe me? Throw something really heavy into the air directly above your head.
You make a good point, that sophisticated criminals can take advantage of this data and thus avoid the police coverage. On the other hand, this only applies to certain types of crimes and certain types of criminals.
I imagine that very professional criminals can do as you've described, but this wouldn't apply to certain types of criminals. For example, "crimes of passion" or "of opportunity" are by their very nature unplanned. These clearly take place in certain areas because of some underlying causes, and the police could exploit this.
Also, I think this data might surprise some people also. I would guess that there are a lot of property crimes in certain neighborhoods, not because of the element which lives there, but just because there's a lot of good stuff to steal. Again, the criminals are tied to the source of the loot, and may not be able to take advantage of this data either.
True. As long as the data they collect doesn't tell you anything, then it is in fact useless. For example, we all know a really bad neighborhood in a city we live in, and it's clear a lot of crimes will happen there.
But, on the other hand, there's got to be some subtlety to it. One thing which might be very useful is their being able to see trends, e.g. a neighborhood is going in a certain direction. It would be hard to tell that from just a sense that a neighborhood was bad.
In analogy, noone would be surprised to find from the results of a climate study that it rains less in the Sahara than in Seattle. But certainly you'd agree that it is useful to collect information on the weather? Because a question like "what's the probably of a given crop failing in a given area?" is hard otherwise.
Ok, of course, the article was quite short on details. But does anyone out there know what the mechanism is in this metal that makes it contract when it heats? This seems to me counterintuitive, and I can't imagine how it works.
I also don't even know where to go for some technical literature, since I'm not a materials scientist.
nuclear weapons take a lot of intelligence and team work to build
Which is exactly what we're evolved to have. Intelligence and society.
Anyway, there are lots of nice, non-violent humans.
Sure there are. I try to be one of them. That being said, the biggest threat to me is, by far, other humans. Sure, I might get taken out by disease. But that's unlikely, and, in fact, a bit invisible. The most visible threat to me on a day-to-day basis is other people, so of course I am evolved to be wary.
All we're seeing here is our planet's self-correction mechanisms at work.
Why would the planet have such a self-correcting mechanism? The earth doesn't care one way or the other whether or not it's hotter or colder. Even most species wouldn't care a whole bunch one way or the other, they'd just migrate.
The problem is, of course, we'd care. Considering how much of a pain in the ass it would be to move NYC 10 miles inland.
There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet. It's design contains a complex system of checks and balances
Are you basing this on intuition? This is some shady stuff. I know that some creationists and like-minded people would claim the earth was "designed", but I'm not sure I should take that so seriously. In fact, there is evidence that we can change climate on a global scale. Not incontrovertible evidence, but some evidence nonetheless. I'm not aware of any evidence which suggests we can't. The most you could argue for, scientifically, is that we haven't. Unless, again, you're basing your arguments on intuition.
Again speaking of temperature, from the earth's "point of view", the temperature is irrelevant, so there's no reason to have a correction mechanism. There's no selection pressure on planets that I'm aware of.
When you're ready to talk science and not new-Age mumbo-jumbo, let us know.
Don't need 'em. We have rocks, spears, and nuclear weapons.
less affection for cute cuddly things
We have a lot of affection for cute and cuddly things, like (say) baby bears. Because they can't mess with us. We don't think full-grown lions are cute. That being said, we rarely think other full-grown humans are cute. Babies, sure. What's a baby going to do?
Our ONLY evolutionary advantage is not big brains or stereoscopic vision or opposable thumbs. It's aggression. It's our unquenchable lust to be the last one standing, dripping with someone else's blood
Dude, lay off the Red Bull.
Actually, all joking aside, there is a good point there. I'm not sure I would go so far, but it is true: humans are evolutionarily designed to be aggressive and violent. That doesn't make it good, however. We're also designed to have a pretty short life expectancy, but we're of course trying to change that.
First of all, I'd like to say that what you wrote was quite well-written and informative, most especially for what one normally sees on Slashdot. You did in fact explain a few things quite a bit better than I did, and also corrected me on some points.
That being said, I disagree with a few points you made in your post, and I disagree with some quite strongly.
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The first point you made was about whether it's correct to view the BB as an explosion. There are two confounded issues here. The first is something like "what size was the universe at the inception", or "letting time go backward, what's the smallest the universe gets?". The second is whether or not the metaphor of explosion is correct to describe it.
The first issue was about "the size of the universe at inception", whatever that may mean. I don't think it really makes sense to differentiate between finite and zero size. I mean, look, at some timescale, and some temperature, all physical law will break down. Then what can we say? Let time run backward. Why should it continue to shrink to a 0-D point? Why not stop at 10^{whatever} m?
To the second issue, I think we must both agree that the question of a metaphor being "right" or "wrong" is tricky, and I may even go so far as to say the question is ill-posed. For example, you say
The point is that the idea of some sort of really tiny pellet of supercompressed matter exploding outward implies that space already exists
Here I disagree. As I said in my original post, "the universe started expanding", not "the stuff in the universe started moving outward". In fact, I think if I actually say that spacetime exploded, I really think that this is an accurate metaphor for what happened. Again, as I said, we can argue for infinite time whether or not this metaphor is good pedagogically, with no real end in sight. But, in my mind, when I think of nothing moving, then all of the sudden a bunch of shit moving, I'd call that an explosion. Never mind whether or not it's some matter, or spacetime itself.
You say that "explosion" implies space already existing, but you read too much into it. I mean, look, the theory is called the "Big Bang". Is that because we're supposed to think that there was a really loud noise when it happened?
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The second major point you raised with which I disagree is that there is no debate on the validity of the BB model. I could not disagree more. As you said:
If you can show me some evidence for such a serious debate within the community (journal cites, for instance), I'd like to see it.
That's not to say that the cosmological community believes that there's nothing left to figure out; there's a lot to figure out. And that's not to say that the cosmological community believes, as a whole, that the Big Bang model will survive as it is without modification or supplement. But the consensus of the community is that whatever the correct description of the evolution of the Universe is, its evolution from a time when the age of the universe was about 10^-24 of what it is now and the average temperature of stuff in the univese was about a trillion degrees Kelvin, up to the present day, will look a lot like the Relativistic Hot Big Bang model.
There actually are quite a few references on this, but a good survey of an alternate theory is here. If you don't have access to the AMS site, the reference is
Daignault and Sangalli, "Einstein's Static Universe: An Idea whose Time has Come?", Notices of the American Mathematical Socity, (48), no. 1, pp. 1--16.
I grant you that this is a mathematics journal as opposed to a physics one, but this is as legitimate a journal as there is in the mathematics community. Notice the references in the paper to other papers on the topic in Astro. J. and Proceedings of the Nat'l Academy of Sciences. These are big-league journals that are publishing this stuff, and this is clearly a respected alternate theory.
Now, to be fair, I don't necessarily buy the alternate arguments and I am somewhat partial to Big Bang-like theories myself. But that being said, there most certainly is a debate going on in the community, as the above article shows.
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On the third point, you did in fact correct a mistake I made, but I would like to comment upon this further. I did say that "most cosmologists would say that the universe is closed", which I think, upon further reflection, is not quite accurate. The topic is quite debatable.
On the other hand, I would not go so far as you:
This would be correct if the data suggested that the topology/geometry of the Universe were that it were closed. That's not what the data say, and so that's not what the community believes.
Where I was too strong in my statement in one direction, I believe that you have overstated in the other direction. This is another topic which is even more debated than the validity of the BB itself. In fact, although I have heard arguments for an open topology, I've never heard a physicist express what you did with that much confidence. For example, I saw a talk by Frank Tipler a few years back in which he argued both sides of the coin. Also, I believe the cover story of the New Scientist (for whatever that's worth) was about this very issue. I do not think that there is a real concensus on this issue either. Sorry about the lack of explicit references here, but there's a lot of it out there, you should be able to find it.
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Anyway, like I said before: even though I don't agree with everything you said, you put some good stuff out there, and definitely made me think some shit through as I was writing this. It was quite enjoyable.
If by "tons", you mean a "few" that are still widely disputed. Then yes, you are right.
Ok, I'll be more specific. Say 40-50.
I'll grant you, that's not a whole lot of data to span 3.5x10^6 years. And of course the data is widely disputed. That's how science works. Many different people have many different ideas about how these all fit together, and who knows who is right? There are some fundamental questions which do not have satisfying answers.
In summary, I'll grant you that there is perhaps too little evidence, and that much of it is ambiguous and controversial. But there original poster said something quite different, which is that there is no evidence. And that is bullshit which arose from the original poster's ignorance of the subject.
let's not start throwing around figures of "tons" of transitional fossils
Ok, I admit I was speaking a bit figuratively. By "tons" I mean "a bunch of". Good enough?
producing only assertions, and telling the other side they are ignorant of the evidence. All you have made are assertions and no evidence.
Of course I haven't produced the evidence, because this is Slashdot. What, you expect we to spend 5 hours looking at the web and books to find references that the parent poster may or may not look at anyway?
Open up any university-level biology or anthropology text, read that, go to the references, and find it yourself. I'm certainly not going to do all that for you. But the bottom line is that the evidence is all out there, and if one says it isn't, one is choosing to not educate oneself about it. Unless I'm your professor in a class, and getting paid to teach the person, that is so not my problem.
Then, for some reason or another, the universe just started expanding, and is pretty big now.
I nominate you for "understatement of the year".
Thanks. But, hey, I'm a mathematician, so I'm used to dealing with things a lot bigger then just one measly universe. I mean, anything finite is just trivial...;-)
How would this be possible? Isn't all the light from the BB traveling AWAY from us? Assuming that the big bang comprised all the matter in the universe, there would be nothing for the light to bounce off so it should still be unhindered on its initial vector.
That's a good question. One way to get around your objection is to say that the universe could have expanded at more than the speed of light for a big portion of its existence, so the light hasn't been catching up with the expansion. Ok, that might be a little crazy, but doesn't really violate relativity as far as I can see.
But let's say it was expanding slower. Your intuition is good that you would have expected the light to pass us already. But if you buy the dominant theories in cosmology right now, then there is an explantion. (Let me stress that just about anything cosmologists say can be, and in many cases is, complete bullshit. It's a new science which is on shaky ground, so give it some time.) Anyway, the current mode of thinking is that the universe is finite, but it has "a nontrivial topology". Long story short, what we mean by that is that it has curved on itself. For example, consider a 2-D sphere in 3-space. For a person on the surface of the sphere, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you're on a plane. Yet, if you travel in one direction forever, you'll never hit an "edge". So, if light rays travelled around the surface of the earth, you could conceivably just look further and further around the world. Of course, eventually you would see the back of your own head.
A sphere is a good example, but there are more interesting ones. For example, imagine that you live on the surface of a "torus", or, essentially, the surface of a doughnut. And, imagine light rays travel along the surface also. In this case, you could also travel, or look, forever. This is more interesting than the sphere, because if you choose the right angle, there are lines which travel around the torus and never come back to meet themselves (unlike great circles on a sphere). So, if you were to pick the right angle, you could sent a laser which would go infinitely far, yet never hit yourself in the ass. Conversely, you could see "infinitly far" but not see the back of your head.
Ok, now imagine that what we see as 3-space is really the surface of some crazy object in 4-D space. Why not? If you think about it long enough, you could convince yourself that it may be possible to send out a laser which could go an infinite distance without hitting itself, or, conversely, you could see an "infinite distance" without seeing your own ass.
Now, how does the BB work with this? Well, again imagine that the universe is a 2-sphere in 3-space. It starts off really small, and grows at some rate. Ok, fine, the light rays which were created at the inception of the sphere are moving faster than the sphere is growing, so they blow by you. But every light ray just keeps on travelling around the sphere, and will eventually come back. Thus, from any point, it could be possible to see infinitely far back into the past. So that is how one could see the light from the BB, it's just taken some complicated path (as perceived by a 4-D being) to get here.
Again, let me stress that all of the above, like all cosmology, is based on some shaky stuff. The mathematics of it are pretty solid, but the claim that the math models the real world is not satisfied to many people's satisfaction. Let me stress that it could all easily be bullshit, and we'll probably figure out in 30 years that it mostly was. But, that being said, it's the best theory we have right now, so you gotta go with what you got.
Yeah, well I think it is difficult for anyone to understand intuitively.
Actually, in answer to your questions, I would say that they don't really have an answer. First of all, as I said in an earlier post (which is perhaps in this thread), the BB theory is even being called into question pretty seriously. But even given that one accepts the theory absolutely, then who knows the answers to those questions?
Certainly, the answer to "what triggered the bang?" is "Who the fuck knows?" The only philosophically satisfying answer I could come up with is that the universe just had an explosion "built-in". Which of course explans nothing.
The question about what was outside the particle is also not really well defined. I can't think of a way we would ever observe "outside the universe" (and we certainly can't now). Therefore, a scientist can't answer the question. Maybe it's a big-ass stack of turtles, who knows? If you can't observe a phenomenon, what can you say about it?
Could be. But I've never had any troubles with battle.net, whether I'm planning to play with a group of people, or just trolling for random matches.
Is it that people have some problem with non-Windows platforms? The reason I ask is that I have used battle.net on and off for several years. I've never had any troubles except lag, which was fixed when I got cable. I've used it on a variety of computers with different processors. So what's wrong with the good old B.n then?
Not trying to flamebait, I meanthe question honestly.
Slashdot Mirror
After all, he pointed out, it's arisen independently three times on this planet.
Eh?
Then you'll believe me.
I imagine that very professional criminals can do as you've described, but this wouldn't apply to certain types of criminals. For example, "crimes of passion" or "of opportunity" are by their very nature unplanned. These clearly take place in certain areas because of some underlying causes, and the police could exploit this.
Also, I think this data might surprise some people also. I would guess that there are a lot of property crimes in certain neighborhoods, not because of the element which lives there, but just because there's a lot of good stuff to steal. Again, the criminals are tied to the source of the loot, and may not be able to take advantage of this data either.
But, on the other hand, there's got to be some subtlety to it. One thing which might be very useful is their being able to see trends, e.g. a neighborhood is going in a certain direction. It would be hard to tell that from just a sense that a neighborhood was bad.
In analogy, noone would be surprised to find from the results of a climate study that it rains less in the Sahara than in Seattle. But certainly you'd agree that it is useful to collect information on the weather? Because a question like "what's the probably of a given crop failing in a given area?" is hard otherwise.
Yo, Sparky, you just did a little racial profiling yourself...
Hear, here!
Actually, that proof is correct. What's your beef?
Q: What's purple, commutes, and has $N$ worshippers?
A: A finitely-venerated abelian grape.
Moooooooooooahahahahah
Well, to be honest: if there's anything in the U.S. which is comparable to torture, illegitimate imprisonment, and genocide, it's the Green Line.
You ever been on that fucking thing?
Just centuries, you say?
I also don't even know where to go for some technical literature, since I'm not a materials scientist.
Which is exactly what we're evolved to have. Intelligence and society.
Anyway, there are lots of nice, non-violent humans.
Sure there are. I try to be one of them. That being said, the biggest threat to me is, by far, other humans. Sure, I might get taken out by disease. But that's unlikely, and, in fact, a bit invisible. The most visible threat to me on a day-to-day basis is other people, so of course I am evolved to be wary.
Why would the planet have such a self-correcting mechanism? The earth doesn't care one way or the other whether or not it's hotter or colder. Even most species wouldn't care a whole bunch one way or the other, they'd just migrate.
The problem is, of course, we'd care. Considering how much of a pain in the ass it would be to move NYC 10 miles inland.
There is likely nothing that we mere humans can do to permanently change the planet. It's design contains a complex system of checks and balances
Are you basing this on intuition? This is some shady stuff. I know that some creationists and like-minded people would claim the earth was "designed", but I'm not sure I should take that so seriously. In fact, there is evidence that we can change climate on a global scale. Not incontrovertible evidence, but some evidence nonetheless. I'm not aware of any evidence which suggests we can't. The most you could argue for, scientifically, is that we haven't. Unless, again, you're basing your arguments on intuition.
Again speaking of temperature, from the earth's "point of view", the temperature is irrelevant, so there's no reason to have a correction mechanism. There's no selection pressure on planets that I'm aware of.
When you're ready to talk science and not new-Age mumbo-jumbo, let us know.
Don't need 'em. We have rocks, spears, and nuclear weapons.
less affection for cute cuddly things
We have a lot of affection for cute and cuddly things, like (say) baby bears. Because they can't mess with us. We don't think full-grown lions are cute. That being said, we rarely think other full-grown humans are cute. Babies, sure. What's a baby going to do?
Am I the only person who finds this statement a bit incongruous coming from someone with the nick "Zen Mastuh"? ;-)
Dude, lay off the Red Bull.
Actually, all joking aside, there is a good point there. I'm not sure I would go so far, but it is true: humans are evolutionarily designed to be aggressive and violent. That doesn't make it good, however. We're also designed to have a pretty short life expectancy, but we're of course trying to change that.
That's a sweet name, my friend.
Well, yeah.
Any ideas on why they shouldn't care about profits, yet take a principled stand worthy of a 16-year-old, and end up losing money?
That being said, I disagree with a few points you made in your post, and I disagree with some quite strongly.
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The first point you made was about whether it's correct to view the BB as an explosion. There are two confounded issues here. The first is something like "what size was the universe at the inception", or "letting time go backward, what's the smallest the universe gets?". The second is whether or not the metaphor of explosion is correct to describe it.
The first issue was about "the size of the universe at inception", whatever that may mean. I don't think it really makes sense to differentiate between finite and zero size. I mean, look, at some timescale, and some temperature, all physical law will break down. Then what can we say? Let time run backward. Why should it continue to shrink to a 0-D point? Why not stop at 10^{whatever} m?
To the second issue, I think we must both agree that the question of a metaphor being "right" or "wrong" is tricky, and I may even go so far as to say the question is ill-posed. For example, you say
The point is that the idea of some sort of really tiny pellet of supercompressed matter exploding outward implies that space already exists
Here I disagree. As I said in my original post, "the universe started expanding", not "the stuff in the universe started moving outward". In fact, I think if I actually say that spacetime exploded, I really think that this is an accurate metaphor for what happened. Again, as I said, we can argue for infinite time whether or not this metaphor is good pedagogically, with no real end in sight. But, in my mind, when I think of nothing moving, then all of the sudden a bunch of shit moving, I'd call that an explosion. Never mind whether or not it's some matter, or spacetime itself.
You say that "explosion" implies space already existing, but you read too much into it. I mean, look, the theory is called the "Big Bang". Is that because we're supposed to think that there was a really loud noise when it happened?
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The second major point you raised with which I disagree is that there is no debate on the validity of the BB model. I could not disagree more. As you said:
If you can show me some evidence for such a serious debate within the community (journal cites, for instance), I'd like to see it. That's not to say that the cosmological community believes that there's nothing left to figure out; there's a lot to figure out. And that's not to say that the cosmological community believes, as a whole, that the Big Bang model will survive as it is without modification or supplement. But the consensus of the community is that whatever the correct description of the evolution of the Universe is, its evolution from a time when the age of the universe was about 10^-24 of what it is now and the average temperature of stuff in the univese was about a trillion degrees Kelvin, up to the present day, will look a lot like the Relativistic Hot Big Bang model.
There actually are quite a few references on this, but a good survey of an alternate theory is here. If you don't have access to the AMS site, the reference is
Daignault and Sangalli, "Einstein's Static Universe: An Idea whose Time has Come?", Notices of the American Mathematical Socity, (48), no. 1, pp. 1--16.
I grant you that this is a mathematics journal as opposed to a physics one, but this is as legitimate a journal as there is in the mathematics community. Notice the references in the paper to other papers on the topic in Astro. J. and Proceedings of the Nat'l Academy of Sciences. These are big-league journals that are publishing this stuff, and this is clearly a respected alternate theory.
Now, to be fair, I don't necessarily buy the alternate arguments and I am somewhat partial to Big Bang-like theories myself. But that being said, there most certainly is a debate going on in the community, as the above article shows.
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On the third point, you did in fact correct a mistake I made, but I would like to comment upon this further. I did say that "most cosmologists would say that the universe is closed", which I think, upon further reflection, is not quite accurate. The topic is quite debatable.
On the other hand, I would not go so far as you:
This would be correct if the data suggested that the topology/geometry of the Universe were that it were closed. That's not what the data say, and so that's not what the community believes.
Where I was too strong in my statement in one direction, I believe that you have overstated in the other direction. This is another topic which is even more debated than the validity of the BB itself. In fact, although I have heard arguments for an open topology, I've never heard a physicist express what you did with that much confidence. For example, I saw a talk by Frank Tipler a few years back in which he argued both sides of the coin. Also, I believe the cover story of the New Scientist (for whatever that's worth) was about this very issue. I do not think that there is a real concensus on this issue either. Sorry about the lack of explicit references here, but there's a lot of it out there, you should be able to find it.
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Anyway, like I said before: even though I don't agree with everything you said, you put some good stuff out there, and definitely made me think some shit through as I was writing this. It was quite enjoyable.
Ok, I'll be more specific. Say 40-50.
I'll grant you, that's not a whole lot of data to span 3.5x10^6 years. And of course the data is widely disputed. That's how science works. Many different people have many different ideas about how these all fit together, and who knows who is right? There are some fundamental questions which do not have satisfying answers.
In summary, I'll grant you that there is perhaps too little evidence, and that much of it is ambiguous and controversial. But there original poster said something quite different, which is that there is no evidence. And that is bullshit which arose from the original poster's ignorance of the subject.
Ok, I admit I was speaking a bit figuratively. By "tons" I mean "a bunch of". Good enough?
producing only assertions, and telling the other side they are ignorant of the evidence. All you have made are assertions and no evidence.
Of course I haven't produced the evidence, because this is Slashdot. What, you expect we to spend 5 hours looking at the web and books to find references that the parent poster may or may not look at anyway?
Open up any university-level biology or anthropology text, read that, go to the references, and find it yourself. I'm certainly not going to do all that for you. But the bottom line is that the evidence is all out there, and if one says it isn't, one is choosing to not educate oneself about it. Unless I'm your professor in a class, and getting paid to teach the person, that is so not my problem.
I nominate you for "understatement of the year".
Thanks. But, hey, I'm a mathematician, so I'm used to dealing with things a lot bigger then just one measly universe. I mean, anything finite is just trivial...;-)
How would this be possible? Isn't all the light from the BB traveling AWAY from us? Assuming that the big bang comprised all the matter in the universe, there would be nothing for the light to bounce off so it should still be unhindered on its initial vector.
That's a good question. One way to get around your objection is to say that the universe could have expanded at more than the speed of light for a big portion of its existence, so the light hasn't been catching up with the expansion. Ok, that might be a little crazy, but doesn't really violate relativity as far as I can see.
But let's say it was expanding slower. Your intuition is good that you would have expected the light to pass us already. But if you buy the dominant theories in cosmology right now, then there is an explantion. (Let me stress that just about anything cosmologists say can be, and in many cases is, complete bullshit. It's a new science which is on shaky ground, so give it some time.) Anyway, the current mode of thinking is that the universe is finite, but it has "a nontrivial topology". Long story short, what we mean by that is that it has curved on itself. For example, consider a 2-D sphere in 3-space. For a person on the surface of the sphere, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that you're on a plane. Yet, if you travel in one direction forever, you'll never hit an "edge". So, if light rays travelled around the surface of the earth, you could conceivably just look further and further around the world. Of course, eventually you would see the back of your own head.
A sphere is a good example, but there are more interesting ones. For example, imagine that you live on the surface of a "torus", or, essentially, the surface of a doughnut. And, imagine light rays travel along the surface also. In this case, you could also travel, or look, forever. This is more interesting than the sphere, because if you choose the right angle, there are lines which travel around the torus and never come back to meet themselves (unlike great circles on a sphere). So, if you were to pick the right angle, you could sent a laser which would go infinitely far, yet never hit yourself in the ass. Conversely, you could see "infinitly far" but not see the back of your head.
Ok, now imagine that what we see as 3-space is really the surface of some crazy object in 4-D space. Why not? If you think about it long enough, you could convince yourself that it may be possible to send out a laser which could go an infinite distance without hitting itself, or, conversely, you could see an "infinite distance" without seeing your own ass.
Now, how does the BB work with this? Well, again imagine that the universe is a 2-sphere in 3-space. It starts off really small, and grows at some rate. Ok, fine, the light rays which were created at the inception of the sphere are moving faster than the sphere is growing, so they blow by you. But every light ray just keeps on travelling around the sphere, and will eventually come back. Thus, from any point, it could be possible to see infinitely far back into the past. So that is how one could see the light from the BB, it's just taken some complicated path (as perceived by a 4-D being) to get here.
Again, let me stress that all of the above, like all cosmology, is based on some shaky stuff. The mathematics of it are pretty solid, but the claim that the math models the real world is not satisfied to many people's satisfaction. Let me stress that it could all easily be bullshit, and we'll probably figure out in 30 years that it mostly was. But, that being said, it's the best theory we have right now, so you gotta go with what you got.
Actually, in answer to your questions, I would say that they don't really have an answer. First of all, as I said in an earlier post (which is perhaps in this thread), the BB theory is even being called into question pretty seriously. But even given that one accepts the theory absolutely, then who knows the answers to those questions?
Certainly, the answer to "what triggered the bang?" is "Who the fuck knows?" The only philosophically satisfying answer I could come up with is that the universe just had an explosion "built-in". Which of course explans nothing.
The question about what was outside the particle is also not really well defined. I can't think of a way we would ever observe "outside the universe" (and we certainly can't now). Therefore, a scientist can't answer the question. Maybe it's a big-ass stack of turtles, who knows? If you can't observe a phenomenon, what can you say about it?
Is it that people have some problem with non-Windows platforms? The reason I ask is that I have used battle.net on and off for several years. I've never had any troubles except lag, which was fixed when I got cable. I've used it on a variety of computers with different processors. So what's wrong with the good old B.n then?
Not trying to flamebait, I meanthe question honestly.