Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: DoctorBeaver on 11/04/2005 13:41:18
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There's something I've been confused about for years but as yet I've had no satisfactory answer to. Cosmologists say we can now see objects 12 billion lightyears away. Now, if that light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, the objects concerned must have been almost that far away (minus the expansion of the universe)when the light started its journey. But surely, 12 billion years ago the universe wasn't anywhere near large enough for any object to have been that far from any other object: so how come we see them now? Wouldn't the light have gone way beyond us by now? Can anyone help me understand this?
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This link might help...
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=70
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Isnt the expansion increasing? So wouldn't this at some point in the future cause a cut off point where light will never reach us from a certain distance away?
wOw the world spins?
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There's an article in the March '05 issue of Scientific American that mentions this.
See "Misconceptions about the Big Bang" at:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147&sc=I100322
Skip to page 5 to read the part about the cosmic event horizon.
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In a nut shell:
At the time of the big bang universe was small, the big bang was not 1 point with space all around it, the big bang took place at all points in space at once. This caused the space to expand. The light travelling across that space is more or less fighting against the tide of the exspanding universe, if it goes 3 feet the universe exspands 1 foot (idk what it is really just an example), a process like that keeps the speed of light the same, but the actuall movement of light through the universe slows down
I think thats waht it is...
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I've read those links & i'm just as confused as ever. So, answer me this... if photons travel at the speed of light there must come (or have been) a time when some reach the edge of the universe. What happens then? Do they just go phut? Or do they cause the universe to start expanding at the speed of light with the photons forming the edge?
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>> Re: photons... reach the edge of the universe.
As counterintuitive as it may seem, the universe has no edge, and it has no center.
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quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver
I've read those links & i'm just as confused as ever. So, answer me this... if photons travel at the speed of light there must come (or have been) a time when some reach the edge of the universe. What happens then? Do they just go phut? Or do they cause the universe to start expanding at the speed of light with the photons forming the edge?
Actually, you are right. There was a time when the photons reached the end of the universe, about 10^-30 seconds after the beginning, give or take a few "-xx". We know this, because we see it in the cosmic background radiation. The CBR is in thermal equilibrium, so the photons must have been able to interact long enough to reach thermal equilibrium at that time.
Then the expanding universe entered its inflationary phase, expanding outwards by a negative pressure. It expanded by a factor of 10^50 or more. It cooled during this expansion, then transitioned back to the normal gravitational mode we now see. The universe then re-heated from the release of phase-transition energy, but now the "ends" of the universe were vary far apart, and moving away from each other at a high rate.
The universe was still opaque to radiation at this time, due to the high temperature. About 300,000 years of age, the universe cooled enough to allow electrons and protons to combine into neutral hydrogen. The cooled remains of this is what we see today as the CBR. Since any observer can only see light that was emitted after this time, we can see only that far. The whole universe can be much larger than the observable universe. There are always new things coming into view, as light arrives here from further away. However, we will probably not ever be able to see the total universe, since inflation expanded it so far beyond any light-cone's reach.
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The cosmological model does not permit the universe to have an edge. In big bang cosmology, there is no center and no edge; every point in the universe equivalent to every other.
The big bang was not an explosion that occurred at some point in a preexisting space. It occupied the whole of space. It created space. There is no 'empty space' that the universe is expanding into.
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well the universe must have an edge, but, if the universe was 4 dimensional(which it might be) it would appear infinitly massive to 3 dimensional observers.
It would be like a person who lived in a flat world trying to look up (sorta, its more difficult for a 3 dimensional creature to comprehend 4 dimensions since we have never experianced interaction with what ever added depth the 4th dimension is).
The theroy that there are mutiple "bubble" universes relys on the fact that the universe are 4 dimensional, so although they seem 3 dim. and infinite, they arent and have more universes next to each other in that 4 dimensional space...
i think...
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DrPhil - I'm aware of the fact that the universe isn't expanding into anything as there's nothing for it to expand into. But when it's said that at a given time after the big bang the universe was whatever size, there must have been an edge or it would always have been of infinite size. That clearly cannot be the case.
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There is no problem with an expanding infinite universe. Big bang cosmology works even with an infinite universe. The universe simply needs to have infinite size at its creation. The big-bang beginning of our universe occurred everywhere throughout all of infinite space. A singularity of infinite size and infinite density.
The real answer is ... we just don't know. And this may be the best answer we ever get.
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DrPhil, philosophically that argument does not hold water. Infinite implies it's as big as possible & as such it cannot expand. If it expands it cannot have been infinite to start with. It's like the equation infinty+1=infinity.
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Aaaah a poor innocent who has never been cornered by a Mathematician at a party. I am not a mathematician, but I will do my best.
Just because something is infinite doesn't mean that something else can't be bigger. Consider this:
How many multiples of two (N2)are there?
an infinite number obviously
How many integers are there (N1)?
a infinite number
There are twice as many numbers as multiples of 2 so
N2/N1 =2
so although both N1 and N2 are infinite N2>N1, kind of wierd isn't it.
believe me it can get a lot worse!
Now imagine a universe consisting of an infinite number of stars all 1 light year apart, now you can expand the distance between all the stars to 2 light years, now whether the whole thing is bigger or not is a bit philisopical, but to all intents and purposes the universe has expanded.
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showing the fact that I am not a mathematitian, where I said:
quote:
There are twice as many numbers as multiples of 2 so
I meant:
There are twice as many integers as multiples of 2 so
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DoctorBeaver,
So, maybe you would accept a finite, expanding, closed, universe model that appears infinite because it wraps around and closes in on itself. You (or a photon) can travel as far as you like and you will never find a boundary. You simply follow the curved space and come back to where you started.
That's a valid model. There are a whole bunch of theories about this topic, and we are only now just beginning to figure out ways to test them.
Nevertheless, the Big Bang did not occur at a single point in space. It is better thought of as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. If space is infinite now, it was born infinite. If it is closed and finite, then it was born with zero volume and grew from that. In either the open or closed universe, the only "edge" to space-time occurs at the very moment of the Big Bang itself.
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AS a matter of fact I have been cornered by a mathematician at a party! Fortunately I was too blathered to take much notice of what he was wittering about
DrPhil I accept Riemanian (excuse my spelling) geometry & can understand that given a certain geometry the universe curves back on itself (saddles & spheres, I believe, have something to do with it). However, I also remember something about a theoretical puzzle about an hotel with an infinite number of rooms and then another room is added. Does that ring a bell with you? I can't remember the exact details.
You'll have to pardon my ignorance on this subject, I am but a lowly doctor of psychology so hence not au fait with anything more complicated than 2+2.
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This discussion is becomming metaphysical, since it talks about things we can't really talk sense about, physically.
How big is infinity is not exactly the same question as how big is the universe, and an answer of infinity is not going to satisfy anybody either.
There is good evidence that the universe is hugely larger than anything we can see. No matter where we would go in the observable universe, we would see just what we see right here, even 14.8 billion light years away, where we see the observable edge from where we stand now. This is the cosmological principle, and it appears to be a good principle.
What lies beyond our observable universe is just more observable universe. What lies beyond that? Experimentally, no body knows, since we cannot see it. Actually, it does not matter, since it cannot ever effect us. However, the metaphysicist, and the philosopher are not satisfied with that either, so they formulate theories, or religion, as the case may be.
Contracting our inability to even see what we have in front of us today, back to a beginning time and saying that the universe was an infinite singularity point is speaking in riddles. It underscores our lack of true understanding. We say things like "expanding space", without defining space, let alone how it can expand. And if it is expanding, what did it expand into? There is not a comprehensive answer, so theorists write papers about bits of the problem. That's okay, since there is nothing else to do. There simply is no pat answer for such a fundamental question.
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I am not a mathematician or a philosopher. I'm just an old over-the-hill retired physicist, and am ill equipped to engage in a philosophical discussion of infinity.
This all started with your question about what happens when photons reach the edge of the universe. All I can say is that I am unaware of any model, except for maybe the Star Trek model, that hypothesizes some kind of impenetrable barrier at the end of the universe where old photons go phooot.
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No there is a super being that lives beyond that boundary that collects them, cos Spok went there [:D]
wOw the world spins?
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DrPhil, you seem to be a very knowledgable person whether or not you consider yourself over the hill.
I was being a bit facetious when I mentioned about them going phut. But can I bring another dimension (no pun intended) to this? If there is enough matter in the universe to cause it to be 1 giant black hole, wouldn't gravity gradually slow the photons down and eventually pull them back?
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The answer to that question hinges on knowing the density of the Universe. To determine that I'd need to solve the problem of the "dark matter." If I knew that, I wouldn't be here posting at The Naked Scientists Forum, I'd be on my way to Stockholm to collect my Nobel Prize.
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The big bang was not an explosion in space; it was more like an explosion of space. There are no fragments of a big bang bomb flying around. Matter was not ejected at varying speeds. The galaxies are not traveling through space away from us. Individual galaxies move around at random within clusters, but the clusters of galaxies are essentially at rest. Instead the space between the galaxies and us is expanding.
There is no center. It did not go off at a particular location and spread out from there into some imagined preexisting void. It occurred everywhere at once.
The redshift is not really a doppler redshift like you hear with a moving train whistle. It is a cosmic redshift which is a bit different than a doppler shift. As space expands, light waves get stretched. If the space doubles in size during the waves' journey, their wavelengths double and their energy is halved.
Unfortunately the terms "explosion", "receding" and "moving away" are used a bit too casually. The distances to remote galaxies is increasing because space itself is expanding.
(because I'm lazy parts of this reply were copied from: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0009F0CA-C523-1213-852383414B7F0147&pageNumber=2&catID=2 ) [:)]
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Thanks for the reply - the article is excellent just what I was looking for! [:)]
But now I have a problem... so the theory is saying space is expanding between (say) galaxies, but it doesn't have within it anything to explain why the further away they are the faster they are receding, it just says that's the way it is, v=Hd right?
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Well, I think my understanding of it can be explained in terms of lamp-posts.
If you think of a row of lamp-posts 10m apart and the space between any two lamp-posts is increasing at a rate of 1m/s then after 1s the nearest lamp-post is 11m away (1m further) but the 10th lampost down is 110m away (as each gap has increased by 1m) and so the gap between you and that lamp-post is increasing by 10m/s as opposed to 1m/s for the nearest one. And the same will apply if you look the other way down the street, or are in a carpark with lamp-posts in all directions... generalising lamp-posts to 3D may be a challenge, I'd best not try and push the analogy too far. But you get the idea (I hope).
I'm sure that misses all sorts of subtlties but it seems to provide at least a plausible answer to your problem.
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Rosy, that's a pretty good analogy. At each point in space the expansion is uniform (I think) so the further away any 2 objects are the more space there is between them to expand. I've seen it explained as dots on a balloon. Assume the dots are equally spaced when the ballon is flaccid. As the balloon is inflated the surface between each dot expands uniformly. Therefore neighbouring dots will move apart slower than dots that are on opposite sides. *wonders if, as the universe is at least 4-dimensional, time expands too*
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I've been reading through posts, and I"m nearly sure someone has said the same thing as I'm about to say....
The universe is as big as it's light sphere, outside which, not even light has reached. The space outside the material universe is void. I've heard that the universe is likely 12-14 billon years old, meaning it's exactly 24-28 billion light-years in diameter, and is a perfect sphere.
It might be possible to reach the light-shell of the universe if we were able to travel at the speed of gravity.
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
conclusion reached and referenced in this page: The speed of gravity is 2x10(to the 10th) c.
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Here again is the confusion. You are thinking of it as some sort of explosion with light and matter flying away from some central point. That is not the case.
However, there is a limit to what we can see, a.k.a the observable universe. If space were not expanding, the most distant object we could see would be about 14 billion light-years away from us, the distance from which light could have reached us in the 14 billion years since the big bang. But because the universe is expanding, the space traversed by a photon on its way here expands behind it during the voyage. Consequently, the current distance to the most distant object we can see is about three times farther, or 46 billion light-years.
There is no reason to expect that the space beyond the edge of our observable universe is any different than the space that we can see.
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Hi Rosy, nice analogy thankyou - I get it!
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I was interested by the inflating balloon analogy... my Dad was telling me that one explanation of red shift being given to GCSE students is that red shift is due to the expansion of the universe resulting in the increased wavelength of light.
When I was doing GCSEs, I was given an explanation in terms of the red shift being due to the wavelength increasing as the light source moved away over the period of the radiation.
I think I've convinced myself that the two could be equivalent but thinking about it makes my head hurt, and I don't have time to try to do the maths (which I suspect is either trivial or hideous). If anyone has a short explanation that makes it obvious it'd be nice to see it...
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I think we're all inside one inflating paper bag and one day it's going to go ' pop '......but, may I ask ( activates total layman mode !!)...if the Universe is expanding then isn't it in danger of being diluted ? and could it dilute so far that it just falls apart ?....if it's not being diluted then where is the extra ' space ' coming from to aid the expansion ?
Great thread by the way.
Men are the same as women.... just inside out !!(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.world-of-smilies.com%2Fhtml%2Fimages%2Fsmilies%2Fmini%2Fmini018.gif&hash=43d4f680fb1e52aecb14b539cb9eba2c)
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In m-theory/string theory there is a symmetry/duality (Supersymmetry) between the large and the small that says strange things like the large is equivilant to the small and vise-versa.
Perhaps the same could be said of our universe, it is experienced/exists in our space-time frame in a multi-dimensional superlarge changing state, but to a photon it has neither dimensions nor change as they exist (traveling at c) in null spacetime.
This would mean (classical physics) that it exist at all points in its path at the same time and that all points in its path are the same point! If we add quantum mechanics then all possible points in all possible paths in the universe exist thus.
This sounds like a singularity to me.
Its all a matter of perception.
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I had always imagined the big bang as a balloon inflating. The 2D surface was like our 3D space, and it was expanding into 4D which we couldn't understand much like a stick figure drawn on said balloon can't understand us looking at him. It would mean though that space *was* expanding into something, hyperspace, and as you guys have said, the universe *is* everything and it's not expanding *into* anything. It also means there's a finite number of cubic metres of space like square centimetres on a balloon, and you guys said that space is infinite. Also, there would be a centrepoint, the centre of the balloon, that we couldn't understand because it'd be in hyperspace not on the surface. And it has been repeated that there is no "centre".
I guess this has been asked many times, but, if the universe isn't expanding into anything, (no reference point) how can we possibly tell that it is expanding? We have to have some sort of thing to compare to say if something is bigger or smaller, don't we? If I doubled in size, but my ruler doubled too, I wouldn't be able to tell that I had grown. Come to think of it, on a balloon the pen-dots are increasing in diameter too, so they wouldn't realise the distance between them was growing bigger. So if the space between two galaxies doubled, they wouldn't care because they would double in size too.
Oh wait a sec, I've just realised something, duh, light doesn't change! That's our reference point. :-)
Hey maybe now I can make a sketchy explanation about elecromagnetic radiation. All other waves are movements of the drawings on the balloon, so they require lines on the balloon to propagate. But light doesn't because its medium is the balloon itself!! As the balloon gets bigger, the wave is slows down (not really still same distance per time, but distance is increasing) and is stretched which makes the redshift, which is what someone else said here with space increasing... Maybe now I can get a sketchy explanation of magnetic and electric fields and why they work.. one is up/down movement of ballon-space, other is left-right (on a 2D balloon, just up/down). We can't "see" these movements because we're stuck in 3D like a paperman can't tell he's being folded... maybe charges are attracted in an electric field because the paper is being tilted? I can't imagine how moving charges make magnetic fields and moving magnets generate electric fields but that must be a special 3D/4D thing that we can't make analogies with 2D/3D for. Can anyone think of an analogy for magnetic and electric fields? I have ALWAYS wanted to understand them but so far none of my science teachers have been able to explain to me why they happen.
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What are your teachers doing??? You can "see" a magnetic field if you get some iron filings, then you don't need to imagine you can see it in 3D. You can sort of do the same with electric fields by measuring the potential difference with a probe to get an idea of what it looks like. You get magnetic fields when any current flows, but electric fields are present even if there is no flow of current, but if there is any difference in potential caused by more positive or negative charge. Imagine electric fields doing to charged stuff as the same as what gravity does to mass, but instead it can be attractive or repulsive.
Wish I found this link for A Level Physics it pretty much sums up classical stuff about electro magnetic fields:
http://lchc.ucsd.edu/fleetu/10_3_01.pdf
wOw the world spins?
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This is an interesting thread, and here is an interesting fact to add. The cosmic background radiation, CBR, is the most ancient radiation we can see. When we look at the CBR with microwave equipment, we see a dipolar moment in the radiation, that equates to a Dopler shift cause by earth's movement through the CBR. The speed of this movement is ~178 miles per second, more or less. Look it up if you want the exact figure. The point is that it's an entirely pedestrian speed by red-shift-recession standards, of 0.9 C for distant galaxies. I had to wonder if we had not finally found the one true fixed reference that Newton looked for.
Then I wondered what scientists on those distant galaxies would see when they measured their speed through the CBR. 0.9C? I think not. I rather think they will measure ~178 miles/sec. They will also see us receding from them at 0.9 C.
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Yes I know what electric and magnetic fields do ... but why do they do that? Where does the energy to make the force come from?
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gsmolin - can you explain a bit more about that 178mph thing? It does seem ridiculously slow. I'm aware of CBR, what it is & that we are moving relative to it. But surely, the CBR must be moving too, in line with universal expansion? Therefore it cannot be an absolute. Or am I misunderstanding CBR?
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That's miles per second, and its probably not the right number anyway. I found a number here: http://pdg.lbl.gov/2002/microwaverpp.pdf
They claim 371 +/- 0.5 km/s.
This number is not a measure of the recession-speed of the CBR, but rather the earth's movement relative to it. There is a solar system dipole moment, and a galactic dipole moment, also a galactic radiation which tends to obscure the CBR.
The point is that nobody is moving a very great speed through the universe. This has been known for some time, long before the CBR missions measured it so well, and was used as an argument for the steady-state theory. I remember the steady-state argument describing the ridiculous requirements in velocity changes that the big-bang theory required, and how there was no way that could have happened. Then Alan Guth discovered inflation, and that's exactly what happened.
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quote:
Originally posted by gsmollin
Then Alan Guth discovered inflation, and that's exactly what happened.
Unless Joao Magueijo's Variable Speed of Light theories pan out, of course. [8)]
http://frontwheeldrive.com/joao_magueijo.html
Currently reading his book, and must say he sounds like a pretty sane fellow for a crank.
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If light speed were dependent upon the phase of the space-time, it would solve the horizon problem. If this theory can solve the flatness problem, and produce the correct spectrum in the CBR as inflation does, then it could be viable.
Inflation certainly requires a paradigm shift in thinking. Variable c is actually easier to swallow. I would expect that such a theory would reduce to SR and GR at this epoch.
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Now I'm totally lost. I think I'll go back to contemplating my navel!
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Oh, don't be, DoctorBeaver, no need, I think. It just means that some people, not only Joao, think that in the beginning (ahem) the speed of light may have been different to what it is now. A lot different, as in numbers with lots of zeros in the power dept.
And he makes a decent case, solving indeed both 'horizon' and 'flatness' problems, gsmollin.
(These two problems arise from our normal big bang model, and are explained by Alan Guth's inflation model - although in all honesty the current accepted model is not the same as his original, far from it.)
Quite elegantly even. Also, fortunately, at some point of developing his theories he decided that sticking within the standard SR and GR framework as much as possible was not only a somewhat smarter 'career move', it actually made things easier. BTW Einstein had his own VSL in 1919, did you know that? Different from Magueijo's, and totally ignored as an aberration these days, if remembered at all.
The first part of the book does not mention his theories at all, btw - it is by far the most brilliant general introduction to get up to speed with current theory I've seen so far. His own stuff in part two is much less clearly written, more blog-style, but still comes out, discarded version after discarded version, which is a bit much, after a while.
Yet, as gsmollin also remarked, c having been/being variable is actually even easier to digest than inflation alone. Especially the 'flatness' problem becomes self-regulating, like a thermostat, turning a very improbable scenario into something almost inevitable.
Yep, recommended read, all in all.
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Could the speed of light have depended on the folding up of certain dimensions in the early life of the universe? I've heard it mooted that certain constants could be the values they are as a result of the size of these other dimensions. I've also heard the theory that these values could leak into our universe from another universe. Any thoughts on that?
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[scratches head]
Hardest thing to answer. Dimensions, normally 3 spatial and 1 time, can also be folded as infinitesemal small loops (Calabi-Yau Manifolds), but essentially that's sweeping unwanted stuff under the rug.
Scientists like their stuff as 'tensor-free' as possible, but they do not always know exactly what to do with certain parameters or constants.
You cannot really say whether those values 'leak' or 'create' our universe, or that saying it all comes from some other 'universe' is a meaningful statement. It's unfalsifiable, and out of our reach, except to speculate.
John Barrow (also mentioned in book in the previous posting btw) would be the person who can be seen as our most dedicated thinker maybe as to what constants of nature are, and how they influence what you can do - electromagnetics works in three dimensions, but also in only 1, interestingly. Stuff like that.
http://www.isepp.org/Pages/03-04%20Pages/Barrow.html
[rant]
Personally I suspect we do not live in a strictly 3-dimensional world, with time slapped on as some ghostly fourth, but in a universe with Pi dimensions, 'decohering' (for lack of a better word) continuously, and imperfectly, to a 3 dimensional one. Hence the illusion of time, and change. Never liked time. Out with it.
[/rant]
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Ah, dear John. As far as I'm concerned he may as well be talking a foreign language. That's the trouble with those Cambridge University academics (myself & Dr Chris excluded, of course!)
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Strangely, I find JB extremely easy to read. He's quite an author, keeps the math digestible, and has the best science quotes in the business. He also tells you up-front when he is as clueless as the next guy.
What more could one want? A brain transplant? It's heady stuff, but certainly not intended only for those 'slightly-out-of-touch-with-RL'.
Compared to some of my ideas JB's are totally mundane, parochial even. And those, in turn, pale in utter weirdness to some coming from other quite respectable and accredited sources, believe me.
What worries me is whether they are crazy ENOUGH.
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
...And he makes a decent case, solving indeed both 'horizon' and 'flatness' problems, gsmollin.
(These two problems arise from our normal big bang model, and are explained by Alan Guth's inflation model - although in all honesty the current accepted model is not the same as his original, far from it.)...
... BTW Einstein had his own VSL in 1919, did you know that? Different from Magueijo's, and totally ignored as an aberration these days, if remembered at all....
I knew that. I think it is most interesting that inflation was "invented" during a panicky time in Guth's post-doc career, when he discovered his GUT was not working. It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention.
I didn't know that. Do you have a source for this?
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I have to agree. His work is certainly more readily understandable than Hawking
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quote:
Originally posted by gsmollin
[1] I knew that. I think it is most interesting that inflation was "invented" during a panicky time in Guth's post-doc career, when he discovered his GUT was not working. It's been said that necessity is the mother of invention.
[2] I didn't know that. Do you have a source for this?
[1] If you read Magueijo, you'll see he was quite a Don Quichote with his inflation theory, taking incredible risks that could have ended his career in utter ignomy. He was very, very fortunate to convince just the right people at just the right time.
[2] It was 1911, sorry, the year he spent lecturing in Prague.
(mentioned btw in this review as well)
http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/VSLReview1.html
He published a paper and all, which described his VSL. I checked Einsteins publications list, but none of them from that year rings a bell, so you'll have to check the book (I already returned it to the Library).
Einsteins complete list of publications (German, pdf):
http://www.einstein-website.de/z_physics/AEWisPub-04.pdf
addition: the name of the paper is not mentioned in Magueijo's book, alas, but it is described in the works of Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein's collegue and biographer. He called it: 'Heresy! By Einstein himself!'
(Just looked it up. Ofcourse the book was in, noone but us cranks reads stuff like that, after all...:-)
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quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver
I have to agree. His work is certainly more readily understandable than Hawking
Lee Smolin said it best: GR describes that what moves, QM that which exists.
Therefore, using GR for describing non-moving things like black holes does not only seem inappropriate, but could indeed take some mathematical gymnastics that NOONE can follow - quite possibly because it is utter balderdash, ofcourse.
(This is not directed at RP btw, only SH...)
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When you say "non-moving", non-moving relative to what? Surely everything in the universe is in motion.
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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'Non-moving' by comparison - relativistic speeds, where GR excels. Quantum Mechanics is better at describing things at the particle end.
The other abbrevs are RP (Roger Penrose) and SH (Stephen Hawking) btw, one of whom I greatly admire... [:)]
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Something which just occured to me as an interesting idea was what would happen if near the beginning of the universe there were more dimensions and they all curled up sort of in the inflation phase...
<begin unqualified and probably incoherent babble>
I wonder if a collapsing dimension could somehow dump lots of energy into the other dimensions as it were... sort of what happens if you stand on a balloon (that doesn't burst)... you loose a dimension and grow lots in the other two.
If you think of how gravity works if all the dimensions were closed but some smaller than the others - say we have a fourth dimension called w which is the small one
everything would be closer together in the w dimension than in the other ones so the mass would all tend fall towards itself along the w dimension more than teh other 3. when two objects got close to each other they would orbit round each other and fly apart in a random direction - often in the x,y, or z directions - so overall you would be converting potential energy in the w direction and converting it into kinetic energy in the x, y and z directions...
so the w direction would collapse into a small loop and everything would suddenly accelerate in the x,y and z directions... would this appear to us afterwards as inflation?
apart from anything else if it happened really late it would screw up the assumptions about the brightness of a light source as intensity wouldn't go as 1/r^2 any more. I think it would screw up a lot more than this including orbits as there are no stable orbits in more than 3 dimensions, so it would have to have happened before the universe went transparent...
Maybe I should have gone to some of the optional cosmology courses and then I could talk more convincingly or see more of the great big holes in this... ho hummm
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Interesting idea, could explain where the extra dimensions in string theory 'go to'.
On an equal tangent: you know what set me off thinking that if you try to unravel space backwards, stuff does not fit, and you have to start thinking how it sort of breaks down from a 'rational' number of dimensions? Our number system, which you could see as a 'representation' of how we count reality, has similar problems. I could show you very simple rules in numbers, that break down as you approach zero, or long before that, near three actually you can say things suddenly work out differently than 'before'. Also think primes. When I was young both 1 and 2 were considered primes, with 1 as a kind of obligatory odd duck, and 2 as the only even prime, making it unique. Nowadays primes start at 3. Easier on the rules... that single simple shift speaks volumes, though. There is something distinctly strange going on at that cusp.
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Here's one example where you see the simplest of rules go very linear - above three, that is.
http://www.research.att.com/cgi-bin/access.cgi/as/njas/sequences/eisA.cgi?Anum=A076505
That's only one example, mind you. And they cannot always be explained because the 'numbers are too small' or 'don't fit' or whatever. It's like a spiral suddenly twisting differently, more tightly.
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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OK, I follow that "Hello" thing but I'm not sure I understand the significance of it.
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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Short answer: if you do statistics, your population cannot be too small. Likewise, for certain phenomena to occur at all, you need a basic framework of particles/forces in place. If you keep taking away stuff, at specific points you see the rules change. Shapes and configurations can be equally important, there appears to a minimum in necessary complexity.
Now what daveshorts is trying to do is similar to what I'm researching: see what happens with the rules in different situations.
To give you a better, but harder to grasp, example of how rules change in different 'areas' in number theory, here's Robin's theorem, which states that below 5041 our neat number system does something totally peculiar:
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/RobinsTheorem.html
now interestingly, 5040 is a number already acknowledged by Plato to be very special, and its neighbour 5041 is interesting not only because it's 71*71, but also because it ties in with how many cannonballs you can stack in a minumum space.
This is completely different what goes on above 5041, btw. This is of interest to a lot of people because of its possible implications not only in all kinds of prime number theories etc, but also in cryptography. They want to know if this 'hickup' in number theory has any cousins 'out there' in higher number regions, where their calcs could screw up bigtime, and predictions/theorems like the Goldbach suddenly would no longer hold.
Where it all comes togethere is that the series I gave you and other, more important ones agree and to a certain extent not only confirm, but help to better explain the behaviour of quarks in QCD and how they combine to create mesons.
Those rules are essentially calculations - bookkeeping if you will. Lie groups, su(3) etc and how crystals are built up are all related, simply because similar rules apply.
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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I'm aware of the low population rule. Have you come across "Life" on a computer? I think that illustrates the point quite well.
As for Robins & Goldbach - erm... I want my mummy!
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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Here it is! It's been coded in Java! John Conway's Game of Life.
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/
I still remember that Scientific American article. Was that really 1970? I programmed it in FORTRAN and BASIC, and ran it on timesharing mainframes and S100 bus microcomputers. Damn, that's making me feel old.
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Game of Life is different in the sense the rules stay the same no matter what size the population, although you could program that different.
My point is just that the opposites of primes, the Highly Composite Numbers (those with the most divisors) are spitting images in their behaviour and composition compared to how particles are built up under different circumstances (combinatorics again), and there are striking similarities how the 'rules' collapse, or break down depending on where you are...
Especially if you find out that these numbers come with '3' at heart (Niven Harshad numbers), like the number of quarks in particles, and that they propagate in a 24-fold cycle (always), which happens to be the number of possible mesons you can make - the building blocks of all matter.
To put it in a nutshell: with high numbers (read: a lot of particles), things behave differently than if you go towards 1 (a singularity of sorts, too). And the way these series break down is maybe capable of teaching us a trick or two without having to smash atoms, because at heart the same thing happens.
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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the energy comes from the earths core
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Ok.... urr was this supposed to be posted here?
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
Especially if you find out that these numbers come with '3' at heart (Niven Harshad numbers), like the number of quarks in particles, and that they propagate in a 24-fold cycle (always), which happens to be the number of possible mesons you can make - the building blocks of all matter.
To put it in a nutshell: with high numbers (read: a lot of particles), things behave differently than if you go towards 1 (a singularity of sorts, too). And the way these series break down is maybe capable of teaching us a trick or two without having to smash atoms, because at heart the same thing happens.
So are you saying that numbers & sequences of numbers determine how particles behave? Or that the behaviour of particles somehow determines maths? That sounds very Qaballistic (ancient Judaic teaching is that numbers are the basis of creation & everything has a numeric value. The way these values interact to produce other values is the very key to creation, life & an understanding of God).
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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No, not determine, as much have parallel behaviour with how particles act. Not as strange as it sounds, because we use all kinds of metaphors be they prisms, pieces of cardboard with holes to see which hole the light goes trough to make stripes, and ultimately the computer as super-abacus that allows you to take simple calculations a lot further, and put them in nice graphs that look more like plants than anything to do with numbers, or anything else.
Quabbalists would probably freak out from using Clifford algebra, where a times b does not equal b times a (i.e. is non-commutative), fractals, Lie groups, shapes that exist only in 4 dimensions, and the sheer domain of numbers that are involved. 858899288969751 is a unique number for instance, but to find out it's the only Carmichael under 10^16 that's 15 modulo 24 really takes a computer, I think, although you can even check that result with your ordinary 32-bit desktop calculator. You won't find any others, though. Pretty strange, that.
So basically, you look for surprises in places where there should be no such surprises and compare the differences with other regions. My 'galaxies' of numbers are no more or less real than the 'real' galaxies which you only can see on film, btw - they're too dim for the naked eye. Most people don't realise they only know those nice swirlies from pictures, and can never find them looking up, even on the clearest of nights. You have to lock a camera into looking at the same spot for a very long time to pick them up.
Never heard anybody complain about that, either [:)]
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Rob - I'm still don't see the significance of some of the maths you're talking about. When you say that "858899288969751 is a unique number for instance, but to find out it's the only Carmichael under 10^16 that's 15 modulo 24", not being a mathematician, I don't see what's so unusual about that. To my mind, saying that 4 is the only square of a whole number < 3 is just the same.
I think I'd better butt out of this post because obviously it's all about esoteric maths & I haven't a hope in hell of understanding it. But thanks for trying
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It's not so important, just a curious side-effect of something that IS of relevance, but indeed, let's drop it.
Just remember that numbers pop up in the weirdest of places:
here's how to calculate pi by throwing a needle repeatedly over a few lines drawn on a table...:
http://www.mste.uiuc.edu/reese/buffon/buffon.html
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Now that pi thing has really melted my brain!
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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Careful with the cotton-tips, then. [:)]
Back to the topic: howcome we can only see 12 billion years of light.
Strangely, as I mentioned in another topic, there are structures withIN that area that by all accounts have to be older than that, by quite a margin: 80 billion years for super-clusters to form as they are now.
Maybe gsmollin would like to take a shot at that one? Can't say I've heard any really good explanations for that yet, and would make the whole original question slightly silly, wouldn't you agree?
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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I think the reason that there is a limit to how far we can see is that before 12 billion years ago the universe was a plasma so was opaque to light - the light released by all the hydrogen atoms catching electrons at the end of this period forms the microwave background radiation. (greatly red shifted for UV to microwave)
I would have thought that the estimates of the age of super clusters were pretty dodgy as cosmologists are working on very little solid data and don't entirely understand the physics yet.
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quote:
Originally posted by daveshorts
I would have thought that the estimates of the age of super clusters were pretty dodgy as cosmologists are working on very little solid data and don't entirely understand the physics yet.
Well, I wouldn't call the results of 5000 galaxies 'very little solid data' and it's true the physics isn't yet known, 80 billion years is a conservative possibility.
The entire pattern stretches across a quarter of a diameter of the observable universe, a distance of over seven billion light-years. At the known expansion speeds both current and past that would add up to a 150 billion range figure.
keywords: supercluster, Tully, Fischer, Great Wall
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Maybe it is because I am more of a solid state type of person I find the number of layers of calculations that are enevitable in cosmology... worrying. Basically a very small change in the physics, or even in their data would radically change their conclusions.
I don't know anything about this particular example, but data from 5000 galaxies could be rubbish, depending on what the error bars are, how sensitive their model is to the data, how good their model is etc etc.
essentially you may be right or not - I don't trust cosmology enough to get worked up about its results...
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These numbers have always been at issue, so this is no news. The first expansion numbers for the universe put its age at less than the earth's. Cosmology is not an exact science. The steady state proponents have been quoting those big numbers for about 50 years to discredit the big bang theory. This problem falls under "details". There are fatter fish to fry. As the more fundamental problems get good answers, the rate of organization of superclusters will fall out. I think the answer will be that the organization of the supercluster is primordial. We are seeing an imprint of a structure that formed in the first instant.
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If it's primordial, then why does the process seem to be speeding up, one could ask oneself.
Found this quite recent link that explains why neither dark-matter or the newer dark-energy theories are quite capable of getting to grasps with the phenomenon:
http://universe-review.ca/F03-supercluster.htm#fluctuations
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
[typo]
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There's some quite interesting stuff on that link: but i'll need to read it through a few times to really get a grasp of it.
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Yeah, as I said, just came across that one, pretty new. Think they use some Java menu or so, and I've got that turned off just now, but also check out the main page, it's pretty extensive:
http://universe-review.ca/
Oh, and I see they've now mapped over 3 million galaxies, not the measly 5000 local ones.
Correction - that's several weeks down the reading drain. That's a lot of goodies. [:)]
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Oh my good God - it'll take ages for me to read that lot. I'd better get another crate of Stella!
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Well, thanks a bunch. I just started reading the QED section and now my brain's frazzled!
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Ha, and no turning back to the pristine 'before' state via worm-hole, either! Timetravel is strictly Verboten from now on. Gosh, those 911 laws are getting tougher and tougher, with some nasty possible side-effects for our supermassive black friends themselves:
One physicist told BBC News they could see problems with Hsu's and Buniy's conclusions.
"Violations of the null energy condition are known to occur in a number of situations. And their argument would prohibit any violation of it," they commented.
"If that's true, then don't worry about Hawking radiation from a black hole; the entire black hole vacuum becomes unstable.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4564477.stm
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
If it's primordial, then why does the process seem to be speeding up, one could ask oneself.
Found this quite recent link that explains why neither dark-matter or the newer dark-energy theories are quite capable of getting to grasps with the phenomenon:
http://universe-review.ca/F03-supercluster.htm#fluctuations
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
[typo]
"Most theories attribute the origin of large scale structures to quantum fluctuation, which occurred near the beginning of Big Bang. The fluctuation is subsequently enlarged by the inflation and served as a blue-print for the large scale structures such as the superclusters. Figure 03-08 depicts the supercluster formation from quantum fluctuations. The dot at the top shows the actual size, just at the end of inflation. An enlargement (about 300X) of a small section of the universe at this time is shown in the middle. Eventually, after about 14 billion years, the imprint has accumulated enough matter and form the Coma supercluster today. In gravitational terms, the superclusters are merely slight irregularities on a basically smooth universe. It requires only one part in 100,000 of its rest-mass energy to pull the structure apart."
Exerpted from your link, http://universe-review.ca/F03-supercluster.htm#fluctuations
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A bit one-sided excerpt, but naturally, in our deterministic universe, the seeds of such a structure should in theory be there from inception, can't have emergent properties at every junction, now could we. The issue was not that they're not OLD. How old, is, as you can also find on that page, still far from clear, even with the latest theories.
Still impressed by the effort of the people putting those pages up.
On a related note, gsmollin, do you think there's a similar 'lattice' structure underlying all known physical phenomena, or is it strictly field and particle in your view?
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
A bit one-sided excerpt, but naturally, in our deterministic universe, the seeds of such a structure should in theory be there from inception, can't have emergent properties at every junction, now could we. The issue was not that they're not OLD. How old, is, as you can also find on that page, still far from clear, even with the latest theories.
Still impressed by the effort of the people putting those pages up.
On a related note, gsmollin, do you think there's a similar 'lattice' structure underlying all known physical phenomena, or is it strictly field and particle in your view?
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
Well we could always swap quotes back and forth like a couple of debating evangelists... Give me your best shot. I don't understand your last question, so I can't answer. Since I have no info on that, I suppose the answer is "Insufficient data for meaningful answer."
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quote:
Originally posted by gsmollin
Well we could always swap quotes back and forth like a couple of debating evangelists... Give me your best shot. I don't understand your last question, so I can't answer. Since I have no info on that, I suppose the answer is "Insufficient data for meaningful answer."
Nah, we're too old for that crap, I guess.
As to my question:
ok, let me rephrase that, your honour: does the witness think the vacuum in outer space in its empty state already contains all possible attractors and phase spaces as mathematical entities in their own right, or are they only inherent as boundary conditions to the physical properties of real reactions?
Simply put, is empty space already the recipe, or just the an empty drawing board without any real say to what's written on it.
[edit - clarified]
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I don't think there is any "recipe". I do think that cause-and-effect have far-reaching consequences. As an illustration, those pictures of galaxy clusters look a lot like foamy bubbles. It could be quantum foam, the tiniest spaces possible, blown up to megaparsec size by cosmic expansion. We could count the bubbles of galaxy clusters and say that's how big the universe was at the beginning, in quantum foam bubbles. We could also be wrong about that, but its just an illustration of my point. The tiny foam became galaxy clusters. Now in those galaxy clusters we have a huge amount of detail. Now, the largest structures were only quantum foam in the beginning, so there was no recipe for the small structures. The quantum foam does not control what you ate for lunch, but it has something to do with the placement of the galaxy that contained the stars that supernovaed eons ago to synthesize the elements in your lunch. You might not be here at all, except for the quantum foam, but if you ate an unhealthy lunch, don't blame it on the quantum foam!
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Does look like foam a bit, doesn't it? Could you estimate its fractal dimension? It's not 3, that's clear.
On a side note, just been reading something really strange. Could you even begin to explain what would be needed to turn a star looking like one of those tesla balls, all hairy sparks?
And finally, this has been bugging me longer: if the universe was really hot once, and this is a nearly frozen blown-up version, is it not gaining in structure more than losing it, like water gains structure by becoming ice?
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
Does look like foam a bit, doesn't it? Could you estimate its fractal dimension? It's not 3, that's clear.
I don't think so. It's 4D spacetime now, when it was quantum foam, it could have had as many as 11 dimensions. This is where it gets really complicated, and becomes the domain of the specialist.
quote:
On a side note, just been reading something really strange. Could you even begin to explain what would be needed to turn a star looking like one of those tesla balls, all hairy sparks?
I don't understand this question. You will have to supply more information. Is this about high voltage or astronomy?
quote:
[And finally, this has been bugging me longer: if the universe was really hot once, and this is a nearly frozen blown-up version, is it not gaining in structure more than losing it, like water gains structure by becoming ice?
Oh yes! It's becoming more complicated every second. That is the second law of thermodynamics at work.
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quote:
Oh yes! It's becoming more complicated every second. That is the second law of thermodynamics at work.
Erm... I'm obviously going to show my ignorance here but I thought the 2nd law stated that the level of entropy could never decrease. If structures in the universe are becoming more coherent, doesn't that mean they are becoming more orderly & that the entropy IS decreasing? [?]
Isn't the implication of the 2nd law that the universe should be more disorganised now than it was at the start?
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Yep, same question here. Stuff ought to get more boring, according to 2nd law. Oh, and this kind of foam does have a pretty simple fractional dimension, not something OTT at all, pretty simple even. I'll look it up.
Here's a picture of what I meant btw, gsmollin, like a star gone plasma, could that be 'done', even as a weird scenario?
http://www.cebunet.com/kirlian/sparks.jpg
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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quote:
If structures in the universe are becoming more coherent, doesn't that mean they are becoming more orderly & that the entropy IS decreasing?
When water becomes ice that's because although the matter becomes more ordered energy is released and so the distribution of quantised energy becomes more DISordered. The reason why it happens at low temperature is because essentially the energy distribution (enthalpy) becomes more important than the matter distribution (what people sometimes think of as entropy) (I'm not sure if that's a good or even a valid description, but it's sort-of how I think of it) anyhow, look up "Gibbs free energy" if you want a clearer explanation.
I wouldn't know whether there's any sort of parallel on the grand astrophysical scale (I'm a chemist, of sorts).
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A chemist? PAH! heh [:p]
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Rosy - on a serious note... are you saying that the entropy of the energy increases but the entropy of the physical material decreases?
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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Pretty much, yeah. The ice structure contains more hydrogen bonds than water, bond formation of any sort releases energy, and so there's more free energy drifting round the universe as a whole in consequence. More energy quanta have more different ways of arranging themselves, so overall the disorder increases.
If you're interested, check out this lecture handout (I don't *think* it's a firewalled site)... there are bits missing 'cos it's intended to have gaps to fill (the great fight for students' attention), but I think it should make sense even without those bits (and I guess you could find more info elsewhere on the web)
http://www-teach.ch.cam.ac.uk/teach/IBA/MELT_handout.pdf
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Yeah things on a large scale may be getting more ordered in some ways, but on a microscopic scale things are getting much more disordered so overall things are getting more disordered, just like when ice freezes the ice gets more ordered but the universe less so.
One of the big increases in entropy in the universe now compared to near the big bang is the amount of space the photons have in the universe.
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quote:
The ice structure contains more hydrogen bonds than water, bond formation of any sort releases energy, and so there's more free energy drifting round the universe as a whole in consequence. More energy quanta have more different ways of arranging themselves, so overall the disorder increases.
Now hang on... something sounds wrong here. For however long it was after the Big Bang there was no matter, only energy: so how can there be more energy now when some of that initial energy has become particles? No matter how you look at it there must have been more energy at the start.
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I'm only going to comment on what I meant in my remark about the large scale structure of the universe.
First, we have to be careful, since the second law is very tricky. Its tricky enough, that I'm not sure about its applications. However, in this case, I think it is clear. The primordial universe was a a highly uniform state. Its temperature fluctuations where millionths of degrees out of millions of degrees, at least at one instant of its development. This is astounding uniformity, and has long been the subject of study, since it was an essential input to the big bang theory. It is no longer so uniform. It has stars and galaxies with densities as high as black holes, and then vast empty spaces. The average temperature is 3 kelvins, but it reaches millions of degrees inside stars. Not uniform. This is all disorder, and its been increasing ever since the beginning. That's what I meant about the formation of galaxy clusters showing the second law at work. What was once a fluctuation of 10e-12 is now a fluctuation of 10e8. I hope that clears this up.
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quote:
Now hang on... something sounds wrong here. For however long it was after the Big Bang there was no matter, only energy: so how can there be more energy now when some of that initial energy has become particles? No matter how you look at it there must have been more energy at the start.
I can't put my finger on it, but it has all the hall-marks of sleight-at-hand, but with the unique twist the trick is taking place too slow for the human eye to notice the switch. No offense to gsmollin, he makes all the correct provisos.
Somehow this does not make sense. Assuming the universe started out with a grand sum of energy available, expansion alone would have made this less, per given volume.
So 'order' is a lack of energy, nice for the 'powers that be' to know that.
Doesn't all this mean the universe will freeze at one point in time? Solid? The Ultimate Ice Age? Without any energy to reconvert matter into energy?
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quote:
Originally posted by chimera
Yep, same question here. Stuff ought to get more boring, according to 2nd law. Oh, and this kind of foam does have a pretty simple fractional dimension, not something OTT at all, pretty simple even. I'll look it up.
Here's a picture of what I meant btw, gsmollin, like a star gone plasma, could that be 'done', even as a weird scenario?
http://www.cebunet.com/kirlian/sparks.jpg
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
You showed me a Kirlian photograph. It's a type of photography using high voltage, and it usually shows haloes around objects. This was all the rage during my college days. I remember the girl who lived downstairs getting all excited about it; she had some Kirlian images of people and it showed these "auras" around their heads. She was all agog about it being their souls or something, and I just poo-pooed the whole thing as a corona discharge. Not smart. I think I could have parlayed that into a trip into her pants if I had only acted interested. Oh well, just another lost opportunity from my youth. I think that mid-life crisis is just the realization of all the times you screwed-up in your youth, and it gets you crying in your beer...
Now look what you started, with your stupid Kirlian photography! You got me monologing about lost girlfriends. Well, I think I'll go get some beer and cry into it.
Meanwhile, you can Google "Kirlian photography" if you're really interested in it. Here's the first hit http://skepdic.com/kirlian.html
Shortly later: Wait a second! That was a pic of the corona streamers from a Tesla coil. What's the question? If you back up one level into that URL, you can see the whole story about the Tesla coil and the Kirlian pics taken with it. So what's the question? Can you do that? Sure! Just make a Tesla coil. It's real 19th century sparks and arcs. Just beware of those neon-sign transformers, they WILL kill you if you get across them!
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Mmm. Interesting, but I'm afraid you're missing my point here, somewhat. I could have showed you some other pictures of Tesla balls, like these:
http://www.osiwanlan.de/tesla_research/tesla_2a/globe3.jpg
and
http://www.electronixandmore.com/tesla/teslav1_7.jpg
which are more like it, although the Kirlian looks somewhat similar. I was wondering if a star could be transformed into plasma with filaments shooting out into space like that - would there be any physics that you know of that would cause something like a large amount of gas like a star e.g. going 'plasma', in brief. I mean, if the question is not too odd, else forget it.
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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Oh, maybe I understand now. Let's try again.
I think you are referring to the solar wind. All stars have a solar wind. This is happening all the time to our own sun. It ejects a plasma of charged particles. We can see them as auroroas when they hit the upper atmosphere. Also, there is a related phenomenon called the sun's corona, a million-degree atmosphere. You can see that in any good total-solar-eclipse picture.
Then there are the special phenomena. A helium flash is an explosive ejection of the sun's outer layers as it transfers from hydrogen to helium as its nuclear fuel. That won't happen for billions of years, and its a good thing, since we wouldn't survive it.
Other events in the life of stars cause large solar winds. In some stars, solar wind may remove the majority of the mass of the star.
Is that the question, or am I still missing the point?
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quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver
I've read those links & i'm just as confused as ever. So, answer me this... if photons travel at the speed of light there must come (or have been) a time when some reach the edge of the universe. What happens then? Do they just go phut? Or do they cause the universe to start expanding at the speed of light with the photons forming the edge?
I chose your question among many similar about the “expanding universe” and photons and so on.
It isn't the universe that is expanding, it is the light's waves that are displaced by elongation.
This is an entropy-effect that forces the electrodynamic waves to accelerate towards equilibrium.
The quanta or photon is a misinterpretation of measurings of hot-body radiation.
Planck analyzed measurements of temperature and wavelengths and found that
there was a small fractional difference between the wave-units.
Planck's mistake was to transform the wave-units to frequency-units.
He did so to find the energy per time-units (second).
His interpretation that he didn't understand (and no one since then) was
that energy is: the wavelengths/sec x fractional difference.
But the reality behind is that a continual elongation of the electrodynamic waves
displaces the radiation at fractional the size of Planck's number (the light's entropy constant).
Planck compare one wave-unit with one (any) other and found that there was a small fractional difference between them. This fractional elongation difference was interpreted as a quantum-unit (or photon-fiction).
The same measuring did Edvin Hubble, and even he misinterpreted the measurings.
He measured the radiation from galaxies and compared their spectral-lines displacement to their approximated distance.
He found that the redshift was proportional to the distance.
As there was no other interpretation than the velocity-related Doppler-displacement, he (reluctantly) calculated the redshift as an expansion-velocity.
But as you can see at my web-site: http://www.theuniphysics.info
both Max Planck and Edvin Hubble have measured the same displacement,
but made different interpretations. None of them have understood why.
I offer you here the accurate and complete explanation, and,
I will later give you more interesting and intelligible information.
Ingvar, Sweden
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quote:
Originally posted by gsmollin
Is that the question, or am I still missing the point?
No, I think we're getting there... so basically a star with its disk 'blacked out' would already look like a tesla coil. Is the similarity coincidental, or is that hot plasma you see during an eclipse also an electrical phenomenon in that sense?
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Ingvar - you raise some very interesting points on your website. I especially agree with what you say about lack of funding for theories that are not "de rigeur".
In my field of psychology I have come across this sort of thing many times: mainly where government-approved theories of child rearing and drugs/alcohol are concerned. Research that shows the official line to be wrong are conveniently pushed aside and so-called eminent experts in the field are wheeled out to discredit the researchers (We won't mention the fact that most of the eminent experts are in the employ of the government. Oh yes, they often say it was an "independent" piece of research: hmmmm - maybe the researchers don't actually work for the government but you can bet your life that without government backing they'd be out of a job).
There is a lot of evidence that contradicts the official line on drink-driving. There was a very interesting experiment carried out by London Transport a few years ago on bus drivers. It showed the official line to be totally wrong. But, guess what - it got buried & never saw the light of day. I only found out about it because I know 1 of the researchers involved.
Cannabis is another case in point. The government (& when I say that I mean the British government) has made a really big thing about there being "irrefutable evidence" (their words, not mine) to show that cannabis is addictive. I looked at the research they based that conclusion on. It was this - monkeys in a cage could press a button to get a diluted cannabis drink. When the strength of the mixture was increased the monkeys pressed the button more frequently. The conclusion was that this indicated a growing dependence directly proportionate to the strength of the mixture. Eh? That's crap! (very scientific terminolgy is that - crap! heh) For cannabis substitute orange cordial & think about the results again. The stronger the mixture the better it tastes so you'd be more inclined to want more. It's got nothing whatsoever to do with addiction! I even wrote a paper challenging the validity of the conclusions but, need I say, it conveniently disappeared into the black hole of government censorship.
(dependence/addiction is my field of speciality. For my masters degree I studied alcohol & drug abuse in 12-20 year olds & my PhD was on identifiable psychological markers that could indicate potential addictive tendencies)
The so-called evidence that cannabis causes paranoid schizophrenia is just as shaky (in fact probably more shaky). But, as you so-rightly said, any research that goes against the official line is squashed.
As you may be able to imagine, I have not succeeded in getting government funding for any of my research
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It's just occurred to me that my last posting has nothing whatsoever to do with cosmology, the speed of light or the expansion of the universe [:I]
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Its an electromagnetic effect. Here's a decent web page on that. There are a ton more.
http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wcorona.html
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Funny I remember I used that page as one example for one of my game creations, albeit through google's image search, I wasn't really reading it - cool:
http://www.aidainternational.nl/beheer/11.jpg
The living are the dead on holiday. -- Maurice de Maeterlinck (1862-1949)
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quote:
Originally posted by sia
I offer you here the accurate and complete explanation, and,
I will later give you more interesting and intelligible information.
Ingvar, Sweden
Hi Ingvar, find your theories intriguing, but cannot find anything to really sink my teeth in on your website. Also put up a similar message in your new thread, would really like to have a peek at a pdf or similar showing the nitty-gritty.
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Rob - I recently read a book called "Forbidden Science". Unfortunately I can't tell you the author. The book was well bibliographed with examples of research being squashed because it didn't fit it with officially-accepted truisms.
I'm not sure if that's the part of Ingvar's website that you're talking about & if it's not then I apologise
It wasn't me - a big boy did it & ran away
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quote:
Originally posted by DoctorBeaver
Ingvar - you raise some very interesting points on your website. I especially agree with what you say about lack of funding for theories that are not "de rigeur".
In my field of psychology I have come across this sort of thing many times:
“DoctorBeaver”,
Your profession is psychology. Have you wonder about the why people obey under "Jante-law". Remember Robert Hooke, John Harrysson, Michael Faraday, they were clever but not noble. I read an intelligent formulated analogy that I like: "God created the genius and the devil created his colleagues”.
I don't understand why people dislike creative individuals. I have been fired from many works, because of that. I have offered many inventions gratis to the company where I was employed. But they ignored all of them and told me to stop searching and solving problems. I was told to "not believe that I know anything" and "here we do as we always have done" and "shut your mouth and do just what you are told to do".
A year or so after that I was fired from a job, I read in a Swedish business&techics magazine that an invention that I had offered this and many other companies was patented and implemented in Norway. Many years back I had searched for support by a broker who also worked in Norway to find an entrepreneur. So, I am sure that this invention -- that was worth billions -- was stolen from me. I had tried to get patent grants from the government institutions for invention-support, but just met scorn and arrogance.
When I tried to apply for grants (about $1000) to the Kazan-conference (2003), the same Swedish government’s VINNOVA, an innovation&research institution told me arrogantly, both that that my project was to big for them, and, that it must be impossible to get it accepted. The same institution’s experts refused another invention based on my discovery of a new air-current phenomenon. I show them an experiment that gave very high effect compared with the conventional jet-engine. They refused what they saw by a quick and short answer “… no, it shall not be so, we know that this is not known, so it cannot be right”. True was that they did not believe what they saw.
I still try to find an interested and intelligent company that will develop this invention that can save billions of gallons of gasoline for the air-transports.
So, I am used to people who believe that they know that I know nothing and don't understand anything.
But why are people so, why not being happy with someone who have succeeded with something?
The modern (pata)physics logic's has perverted knowledge and education so that a "rainman" who learns all the pages in a book but don't understand it, has a more successful career than the "brainman" who doesn't believe what he can see isn't true in a book and instead learn by intelligence and experience from the nature.
Ingvar
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My maxim is my bright last line (maybe not bright English?) after famous sentence by the Swedish poet Thomas Thorild (1759–1808):
To think free is great, but
To think right is greater, yet
To think self is the greatest
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Ingvar - I hadn't come across Jante's law prior to your post. I've just done some quick reading & it does seem quite an interesting phenomenon. I wonder if it has something to do with the formality of Swedish society.
I remember being told a joke by a Dane. A ship carrying Scandinavians on a cruise sank & the survivors landed on a desert island. 1 year later when a rescue ship came along the Danes were all madly fornicating, the Norwegians were all drunk & the Swedes were still introducing themselves to each other.
Maybe that joke is a case of over-stereotyping but it fits in with most of the people from those nations that I've known personally.
I'm aware that privacy is a big issue in Sweden: for instance celebrities do not face an intrusive media as they do in many other countries. Could valuing privacy so highly also partly explain Jante's law in the sense that showing off your wealth & status to another person is in effect an invasion of the 2nd person's right to his private belief that he has everything the 1st person has? Would that have the effect of levelling people's views of others & cause those who stepped outside of that framework to be regarded with suspicion & distrust? I'm just guessing here but it seems to make sense to my warped way of thinking.
I think this is more a question for a sociologist or social-psychologist, among whom I do not count myself: but it has certainly piqued my interest & I may well look into it further. Thank you for raising it. [:)]