Quote:
Originally Posted by xelasnave
I liked all of your post and agree with your approach to talking to and informing children.
There are two universes....the observable universe and by its definition one can correctly claim to be at its center.
However there is the "whole" universe which includes that which is beyond our observable universe sadly one can not then claim to be at the center.
I think a child could be told this way.
We can see a certain part of the universe but some stuff is so far away we can't see it even with our most powerful scopes and never will.
|
I suppose I should have qualified my statement with my understanding of the "universe". To me its always meant "everything" and you could physically travel to it all though practicalities mean it probably couldn't be done. Just like its possible to walk from Sydney to the North Pole. In practice you need to account for the distance, temperature changes, weather, breathing underwater, etc so in practice nobodoy would bother to try it because of cost and practicality but its NOT impossible. Likewise you could jump in a space shuttle point it to the third star on the left and fly towards it, eventually you'll start to see new stars that couldn't be seen from earth, these are still in "this universe" not a neighbouring or parallel one. As for size I think the "empty vaccum" is probably infinite in all directions and I used to think no matter how far you travelled it would always look pretty much the same, ie black with points of light everywhere, with smaller interesting patches of nebula and solar systems and galaxies. Now I'm unsure about that I could see it as being infinite vacuum with regions of points of light where matter has been created "so the "observable universe" might be a finite region but the use of the word universe there is inappropriate. In practice travelling to the edge of the finite region where matter exists may be impractical to ever achieve
unless maybe those Von Neumann probes (sp?) but I dont see infinite travel along a straight line in space as a physical impossibility. So none of the above needs exotic theories or technologies for a species to achieve, during individual lifetimes of our species no we need something more in terms of technology and committment.
I also feel that the laws of physics (matter and energy) have to be identical everywhere in our infinite universe.
Maybe we need (or do we have) more precise terms ? eg Universe = the vacuum region we call space; matterverse = a region inside the universe where matter exists. So in my view we live inside a matterverse within the universe and there could be other matterverses too which could be reached and may have formed in isolation from ours by a similar or different mechanism. Thinking wider in these terms. Energy within the universe exists and cant be uniform, so energy densities differs, from those we eventually get matter condensing out and eventually as the matter cools we have heat death where the energy is just dissolved back to the universe where it may re-condense as matter, Rinse and repeat.
I may have gone off topic.
Maybe "it was god" is the easiest answer after all, though I did come up with a theory that showed time travel existed because the bible existed. Annoyed me because I can't disprove it either.
Wandring again. Back on topic: "yay education", "yay kids"
