Universe

[Bolter]

Well not wanting to be that wikipedia clicking guy, but because I love this video, Im going to offer it to the thread for your amusement

[youtube]mcBV-cXVWFw[/youtube]

apologies for the nooma nooma guy

 

[Pmr Man]

i gotta say when you think about this kind of stuff it makes you think, it makes you want to know more.. well it does for me, anyone else?

EDIT; on the video some galexies are red, does this mean they are further away than white ones (RED SHIFT?) or are they just a different colour due to the many suns?

 

[Robbo]

Seriously though, could our thoughts be limited by our standard human arrogance? We think 14 billion years is old, maybe on a cosmic scale it's nothing. But because we think it's old, it must be old. In the same way that to a fruitfly a day is comparable to forever.

Again, just random theorising.

There is a phrase that's oft quoted, it goes something like 'Everything is relative' - I have never really liked it because it's usually uttered by guys who have little idea as to what's going on.

This is obviously not the case with you because you have by no means been short-changed in the old grey matter department, far from it in fact.

We can view the cosmos as it is now, in relative terms, the problem being, in that case, it can be a bright flash (when compared to a universe that's a lot more expanded than ours) or indeed, it could be seen as a colossal dispersal (when compared to the bright flash milliseconds after the big bang) either way, it doesn't do us much good when trying to tag our universe in an absolute sense.

The way around this problem is to try to sift through the evidence and attach a time-line to events and thus shift away from the doubts when relative comparisons are in town.

When you mention the intellectual limitations we have and ascribe our arrogance as a ceiling to what we can know, I covered this a few posts back; it is self-evident, we don't know everything but, we have discovered an awful lot.
Apart from the facts we have unearthed, we have also discovered one of the, if not the, greatest tool of all - science, and scientific thinking.

The scientific process tells us, we can, if we follow certain intellectual pathways, discover certain truths and rules about out cosmos.
These rules are transferable inasmuch as they are followed in every corner of our universe, they are universal truths!
The only time these rules break down is when we approach the singularity of a big crunch or we look at the conditions of the big bang in its very early stages.

We might be arrogant Jay, and it might just be this arrogance has fed into our inherent curiosity and produced an animal that has the capacity to understand the universe it lives in, and even understand and theorise about conditions outside of this universe.....arrogant maybe mate, but fackin hell, we are one helluva species.

 

[Robbo]

i gotta say when you think about this kind of stuff it makes you think, it makes you want to know more.. well it does for me, anyone else?

EDIT; on the video some galexies are red, does this mean they are further away than white ones (RED SHIFT?) or are they just a different colour due to the many suns?

Anything red-shifted is moving away from your position, and white ones are presumably stationary when compared to your position and thus closer.

 

[Robbo]

Mmm, one thing I've always struggled with is the expansion from the 'big bang'. Why can't a point of origin be located? From what little I know, distances in space are usually measured in light (obviously from existing or now non existent stars). They also measure the distances from galaxy to galaxy, to give some sort of scale of the expansion. Why can't they find a pattern of growth from an origin using these methods (like its that simple )?

Then again, if we're in big ball of string, I can see why it could be tricky

Its hard not to think of the universe as flat - I try and think of it like a ball of string so big, you think you're travelling in a straight line but you're not. That lets me and my simple mind kinda get to grips with wormholes and all that jazz.....

I'm not so sure they haven't got an idea as to the location of the big bang but I'm afraid that's pretty much academic mate.
There is not much scientific value in discovering its location but there is in understanding the physics of what was going on in that location.

And this is why astroscience/ cosmology is focused upon the understanding of the matter present, the energy levels and the nature of the big bang rather than its position in space.

It's a bit like, there's a frikkin great punch up on a football field with people getting injured all over the place; for anybody wishing to understand what started it and who did what, there is not much value in determining it was just outside the box at one end, what we wanna know is who did what and why, I hope this explains it.

 

[Robbo]

Interesting shizzle

I think about all of this quite often, has anyone else ever thought that we may just be some kind of experiment? I know it sounds stupid but i don't see why we cant be. Like what was said earlier in the thread, its near impossible that we are the only living things in the universe/whatever it is past the universe. We may just be some HUGE ass race's lil experiment or something, you know, like that episode of The Simpsons where Lisa's tooth falls out and she puts it in that pot, and then those little people evolve and start building a whole new world around her tooth? lol.

Another thing that made me think this was the film Men In Black, you know at the end when 'K' kicks that door open? and all we are is some little things in a locker, with much bigger things outside of it?

Like you said Pete, this forum is to educate, explain etc... So has it ever been proven that this theory is an impossibility?

Rich..

Rich, we can all think of obscure, weird and wonderful things we could be and then stamp that phrase, 'disprove it if you can' as some sort of validation, well in my head, it ain't.

If we remember another phrase that goes something like, 'if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's a frikkin duck' - and then apply this to your proposal, and with no disrespect intended whatsoever, 'if it sounds silly, and it looks silly, it pretty much is silly'.
I'm afraid the life-belt you throw at it of not being able to disprove it, won't wash with me mate, I can't prove it's wrong but I can tell ya one thing mate, I believe it's wrong and so will every cosmologist out there.

 

[Ainsley]

Pete, in my mind you always start with the scene of the crime.....got to be some clues lurking around there somewhere. Location, location, location

That's why I live in Stoke

Then again, if there was a 'bang', whatever went bang would be at the edges of the universe now.....maybe that's where the universe being shaped like a doughnut idea comes from - nothing left in the middle anymore?

 

[Robbo]

Pete, in my mind you always start with the scene of the crime.....got to be some clues lurking around there somewhere. Location, location, location

That's why I live in Stoke

Then again, if there was a 'bang', whatever went bang would be at the edges of the universe now.....maybe that's where the universe being shaped like a doughnut idea comes from - nothing left in the middle anymore?

Hi Ainsley, I think the clues you refer to have long since departed the scene of the crime mate; there was a discovery some years back when a couple of guys quite accidentally picked up some microwave radiation that seemed to be coming from everywhere.
They thought the detector itself was facked and even believed at one stage, a couple of nesting pigeons were to blame for the background hiss.

In fact, what they had inadvertently stumbled upon was the background radiation left over from the big bang, which I think is what you may have been looking for, you were just looking in the wrong place.

This radiation was measured to be nearly 3 degrees above absolute and is sometimes referred to as God's fingerprint because there are irregularities in its formation as you sweep the detector across the sky but these fall inside predicted variations and thus provide another confirmation to the big bang theory.

 

[Buddha 3]

There is a phrase that's oft quoted, it goes something like 'Everything is relative' - I have never really liked it because it's usually uttered by guys who have little idea as to what's going on.

This is obviously not the case with you because you have by no means been short-changed in the old grey matter department, far from it in fact.

We can view the cosmos as it is now, in relative terms, the problem being, in that case, it can be a bright flash (when compared to a universe that's a lot more expanded than ours) or indeed, it could be seen as a colossal dispersal (when compared to the bright flash milliseconds after the big bang) either way, it doesn't do us much good when trying to tag our universe in an absolute sense.

The way around this problem is to try to sift through the evidence and attach a time-line to events and thus shift away from the doubts when relative comparisons are in town.

When you mention the intellectual limitations we have and ascribe our arrogance as a ceiling to what we can know, I covered this a few posts back; it is self-evident, we don't know everything but, we have discovered an awful lot.
Apart from the facts we have unearthed, we have also discovered one of the, if not the, greatest tool of all - science, and scientific thinking.

The scientific process tells us, we can, if we follow certain intellectual pathways, discover certain truths and rules about out cosmos.
These rules are transferable inasmuch as they are followed in every corner of our universe, they are universal truths!
The only time these rules break down is when we approach the singularity of a big crunch or we look at the conditions of the big bang in its very early stages.

We might be arrogant Jay, and it might just be this arrogance has fed into our inherent curiosity and produced an animal that has the capacity to understand the universe it lives in, and even understand and theorise about conditions outside of this universe.....arrogant maybe mate, but fackin hell, we are one helluva species.

We are indeed one helluva species, in both wonderful and terrible ways.

In discussions like these I like to stir the hornet's nest a little. And what I love about this stuff, is that because the universe is so ridiculously large, new stuff keeps on being discovered and things that were taken for granted suddenly seem to be not as straight forward as they once seemed.

You make an excellent point regarding relativity, at the same time that is why I compared the Big Bang, something many have a hard time visualising, to an explosion, something we see daily on TV.

Like I said, I don't know too much about this stuff, history is more my forte, but I like throwing pebbles in the pond. Who knows, one day I might even hit a fish.

I wonder if knowing all would be ultimately liberating, or a terrible curse...

 

[Robbo]

I wonder if knowing all would be ultimately liberating, or a terrible curse...

I'm afraid a guy called Godel and his Incompleteness theorem precludes us from having a theory of everything finally being discovered, it's affectionately acronymed as TOE.

Godel was a smart guy, both a mathematician and a philosopher; and is best known for his incompleteness theorem which in basic terms prevents mathematics from proving certain propositions true or false by using the rules of that particular area itself.
It sounds a bit up its own ass but some people have described Godel's work as one of the most important in mathematics/science.
Its relevance here is that the rules and axioms we use in science to understand and frame the world in which we live, ultimately determine there are things about our world that we cannot ever know using the scientific rules we have available to us.
And so, there will be no 'Road to Damascus' epiphany for science in terms of theories of everything being validated, we'll have to live in ignorance and perhaps that is a preferable place for us ....I qiute like the mystery of not knowing, science thrives on it