The Universe is not an accident

[ving (David)]

oh, and if the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into? some say nothingness... i have problems coming to grips with nothing too... if say it was a vacuum then even a vacuum is something. I'd call the area outside our universe empty space rather than nothing

[Dennis]

Hi Ving,

Like you (and no doubt many others) I am having some difficulties with the “meaning” of an infinite universe. Not the mathematical concept, but the analogies and explanations used to help me peel away my layers of ignorance.

If infinite is taken to mean timeless and unbounded, that is, without a beginning and without an end, as well as not having any edges, then there can not be any differentiation within infinity. There can be no inside or outside, before or after, here or there, past or future. There can be no “thing” as all things have edges, colours, shapes, energy, characteristics, attributes etc which are bounded or finite, so we can recognize them, measure them, investigate them, describe how they operate, etc.

As far as I understand it, there can only be “one” infinity, not two or more. If there were two or more, then there must be an interface where one “ends” and the second one “begins”. If infinity is unbounded, it cannot begin or end; it can not have any edges; “it” must have always just “been”, everywhere and "outside" of time.

What seems to satisfy my (albeit limited) understanding of infinite, is as follows:

“it” can be the only “thing"; there cannot be two or more.
"it" must be unbounded or everywhere
“it” must have always been everywhere, as it cannot have arrived from somewhere else or arisen from some other event, or been made from other ingredients.
“it” must never have changed otherwise it has attributes and is therefore finite
“it” cannot be grasped in a formula, thought, theory, etc because “it” has no edges or handles with which we can hold it.

We cannot “think” for ever. Our minds are limited. Through the sciences, studies of the mind, exploration etc we will continue to stumble upon and reveal what has always been there, just waiting to be discovered. But as our faculties and tools are but a sub-system of a larger system, of an even larger system ad infinitum, can we ever understand or “know” that “ultimate” system?

Cheers

Dennis

[Argonavis (William)]

Originally Posted by janoskiss

Just briefly... sort-of
Argo, there are plenty of "holes" in the "Big Bang" model. The most relevant one for this discussion is that it does not go back as far as the "Bang" itself.

You still haven't advised what these "holes" are. I don't know of any. It's a well tested and accepted theory.

The sequence of events back to a very small fraction of a second before the big bang have been identified. As particle acceletators get better (ie more and more powerful) it is possible to go back to what happened to to the particles at the big bang, and who knows, possibly before. I would not say that it is not possible.

[avandonk]

We can now know everything that happened essentially to a fraction of a second after the event we call the big bang. Before that we have no information as time and space did not exist in our Universe prior to this event.
It is analogous to the event horizon of a black hole past which we cannot retrieve information. Beyond this event horizon our physics no longer hold.
So extrapolation fails.
It is a matter of conjecture that all the four known forces become indistinguishable from each other.
A vacuum even when perfect is seething with particles that spontaneously come into existance and then dissapear again. This can be measured see Casimir Effect. Dielectric of a vacuum. How can a perfect vacuum have a dielectric effect when there are no charged particles present?
Space and time have a texture related to the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle it is not continuously smooth.
Gravity's origins is the major unknown and it is hoped that finding the Higgs Boson with particle accelerators now under construction will solve this problem. If it is not found at the energy predicted then our current model is wrong and would have to be modified or totally rethought.

All that matters is more structures more experiments....

Bert

[sheeny (Al)]

Originally Posted by avandonk

Of course there is no ultimate correct answer (like 42) the reason is the question is still indeterminate.
We still don't know what the question is! We have to work that out slowly and carefully. Look at all the past disasters!


Bert

You are a cruel man, Bert. First it was the tooth fairy... then the easter bunny... then Santa... and now your telling me 42!!!??? I can't accept it... 42 has to be... it's just that the question and the answer are mutually exclusive... if they are known in the same universe at the same time, the universe is instantly replaced with something even more bazaar and unintelligible (and it's been argued this may have already happened!)...

FTWDK - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Al.

[mickoking]

Originally Posted by ving

oh, and if the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into? some say nothingness... i have problems coming to grips with nothing too... if say it was a vacuum then even a vacuum is something. I'd call the area outside our universe empty space rather than nothing

Space was created with our Universe so it is meaningless to ask what is beyond the 'edge' of space. It is my understanding that the universe and with it space are expanding. Not into a pre existing void or into some other type of space but just 'expanding'. But, there maybe other dimensions and that may make it easier to understand (maybe).

[ving (David)]

surely it would have to expand into something micko, it doesnt make sense for a nothing to exist.... try explaining a nothing...

time: they say that before the big bang time didnt exist.... nor does that make sense. its kinda like saying "if a tree falls in a forrest and no ones around to hear it, does it make a sound". time would exist regardless of life or matter, it's just hard for us to measure so we deny its existence

[mickoking]

Yeah, the universe is hard to fathom but so is quantum physics and that is scientifically valid. To make the universe even more interesting you can also throw in Consciousness into the fray

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

Originally Posted by Argonavis

You still haven't advised what these "holes" are. I don't know of any. It's a well tested and accepted theory.

Like I said before, it does not go as far back as the Bang itself. It might go back as far as a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the bang, but before that our current understanding of physics breaks down completely. That first zillionth of a second may sound insignificant, but as far as the Big Bang model is concerned it is an eternity. To put it in a different context, a lot more happened in the first second than in the rest of the time since the passage of the first second, and we have no clue about that crucial first tiny fraction of a second which would contain an eternity. I prefer to switch coordinates, time -> log(time), and then negative infinity is at the Big Bang. That's the way I think about it (same as absolute temperature: 0 kelvin is minus infinity in my mind).

For those who still can't get past the idea of linear Galilean time (and space) and ask "But what happened before the Big Bang?", you would be equally justified to ask "What was God doing before he created the world?".

[acropolite (Phil)]

I can't really buy the big bang theory, there are too many other theories taylored towards furthering the concept that everything began as nothing. Neither can I accept creation, I simply don't believe there is or was a greater entity that created all we are, see and feel. I'm happy to just be and to look at nature in awe, but I do like to contemplate theory and relate it to logic, which unfortunately is why some theories simply aren't plausible to me. That's my theory on it anyway...

[ving (David)]

ok, my brian has shut ddown now

[Lester]

G'day chaps,

Can't explain the big bang. When I was much younger someone said to me that space went on for ever. That posed the question to me what comes after that. The human mind cannot grasp, understand or visualise for ever. So to satisfy my mind I said to my self, after the for ever comes the brick wall. And surprisingly that answered my question for some time; untill the thought came, what comes after the brick wall?

So now I have my beliefs that give me piece of mind, but I don't for one instant expect to understand fully how it all begun, or will end?

Isn't it great that we can all have different thoughts and voice them in a piecefull manner on IIS.

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

Originally Posted by Lester

... When I was much younger someone said to me that space went on for ever. That posed the question to me what comes after that. The human mind cannot grasp, understand or visualise ...

Cars too can go around a race track for ever without end. But that does not mean the race track is infinite.

[acropolite (Phil)]

Originally Posted by janoskiss

Cars too can go around a race track for ever without end. But that does not mean the race track is infinite.

Good point Steve, just as a blood cell circulates endlessly without ever knowing the environment outside our circulatory system.

[stinky]

Don't worry about a 'beginning' point causing problems with infinity. Two points are required in a linear system to creat a finite. A beginning and an end. Secondly as we look back to a 'beginning' we can speculate close to the beginning in time. Now devide that time in half an infinite number of times - and you still don't get to a 'beginning'.

Then it gets really strange - all the time that you cut in half - take the remainder and add them together - result - an infinite amount of time!

Head bent yet?

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

The tortoise and Achilles, stinky?

[Nuri]

One of the issues I can't grasp is the expansion thing. Edwin Hubble proved that galaxies were physically moving away from each other at an increasing speed. Reversing the direction of the galaxies should lead us to the point where they all meet - the Big Bang, right? Well, cosmologists would say "no, the Big Band happenned everywhere simultaneously..." ...ummm, say again?

[avandonk]

Originally Posted by sheeny

You are a cruel man, Bert. First it was the tooth fairy... then the easter bunny... then Santa... and now your telling me 42!!!??? I can't accept it... 42 has to be... it's just that the question and the answer are mutually exclusive... if they are known in the same universe at the same time, the universe is instantly replaced with something even more bazaar and unintelligible (and it's been argued this may have already happened!)...

FTWDK - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Al.

Sorry Sheeny it is 42-5 = 37 see here
http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/s...ead.php?t=7720
This is the proof we need! No it's not it's just an asterism is it not? Or is it a sign writ large (very small from here)?

Bert

[janoskiss (Steve H)]

Originally Posted by Nuri

One of the issues I can't grasp is the expansion thing. Edwin Hubble proved that galaxies were physically moving away from each other at an increasing speed. Reversing the direction of the galaxies should lead us to the point where they all meet - the Big Bang, right? Well, cosmologists would say "no, the Big Band happenned everywhere simultaneously..." ...ummm, say again?

There is no contradiction there, Nuri, if we can just get that false notion of everything happening in an infinite flat three-dimensional Euclidian space out of our heads.

The 4-D space-time of general relativity (in which we live and navigate spacecrafts and satellites by) can fold back on itself and be finite, and it can be shrunk to an arbitrarily small measure (a point in the limiting case). We cannot visualise this because our senses and brains are tuned to think of objects being embedded in three (flat, i.e., not curved) spatial dimensions. But that is just the naive view dictated by our immediate everyday experience, which breaks down when we carefully examine the heavens, i.e. on cosmological length scales. The flat space picture does not work over astronomical distances any more than a flat Earth does across continents.

[avandonk]

Originally Posted by Nuri

One of the issues I can't grasp is the expansion thing. Edwin Hubble proved that galaxies were physically moving away from each other at an increasing speed. Reversing the direction of the galaxies should lead us to the point where they all meet - the Big Bang, right? Well, cosmologists would say "no, the Big Band happenned everywhere simultaneously..." ...ummm, say again?

What we see now is the result. At the start the Universe was smaller than an elementary particle and the inhomogeneities we see now due to quantum uncertainty. We think. The fact that the microwave background radiation temperature is the same to one part in many thousands means at one time everything was essentially in the same place. There has not been enough time passed for information to get from one side to the other of even the known Universe even at the speed of light.
Of course the big bang happened everywhere at once because there is no 'outside' as time and space only existed once the Universe started.
It is a bit like where your lap goes when you stand up,it no longer exists.

I am sure that in the future our ideas will seem 'quaint' but at the moment it is the best we have .
I still have a very open mind to all of this but only if a premise is testable.

Bert