Faster than light universe?
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Nope, but good try :) The speed of light isn't based on a revolution of a small planet orbiting a small non-descript star in the unfashionable western reaches of the Galaxy. Measurements of time and distance all follow the same rules when measuring anything from the size of the universe to the size of a molecule. Get down below that and you have to talk to Uncle Quantum Mechanics, who's surly, disagreeable and slipperier than a greased weasel.
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
It's also worth pointing out, not many people know too much about the outer extrimities of the Universe (if any) yet. We are trying to apply modern physics to it, but haven't completely succeeded. So, there still exists the chance we could be wrong about it.
Absolutely - and this is the beauty of Science. Trying to find how big the universe is is like being put in a pitch black room and being asked what colour the walls are. It's one deductive step after another and each step we take may be right or wrong, but with each success or failure we get another clue and get closer to the answer.
cheers, Chris Maunder
CodeProject.com : C++ MVP
Chris Maunder wrote:
Trying to find how big the universe is
Why can't we all just agree that it's BLOODY HUGE and leave it at that.
"Nothing ever changes by staying the same." - David Brent (BBC's The Office)
~ ScrollingGrid: A cross-browser freeze-header control for the ASP.NET DataGrid
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Yeah. God and the universe are mysterious things. Anything is possible. Hell (figuratively speaking of course), if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
There are II kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who understand Roman numerals. Web - Blog - RSS - Math
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Anything is possible.
For very small values of possible.;) Have you actually seen the probablility of something simple like a million monkeys typing 100 characters from any one of Shakespeare's plays.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
It hasn't yet. :~
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Chris S Kaiser wrote:
But this seems to be a function of Quantum Mechanics in general, if the universe is what's being observed, then the observation would affect it, but to what degree?
If you took 1000 philosophers and gave then 1000 years they wouldn't come up with anything as strange as quantum mechanics. Essentially there are 2 sets of equations governing time evolution in quantum mechanics. Unobserved mode and observed mode. The problem is that in traditional quantum mechanics the observed mode is a hack that physicists added just to make sense of the way things work. It is where the multiple worlds and all the metaphysical crap comes from. Without the observed mode quantum mechanics is a wave theory just like electromagnetism. Nobody is exactly sure what causes a transition between the 2 modes but if you put enough stuff vibrating randomly together it behaves in observed mode. One active research area is to find the biggest system that we can make behave quantum mechanically. I think the record is a C60 molecule. I believe the author mentions plans to try and send bacteria through a double slit and get them to interfere.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Just a notion. Any facts can disappear as the method gets more accurate. What is truth one day is a lie on another. Or rather, truth changes with time and space.
The observed world never really changes. All that changes is the mathematical model that we use to approximate it. A lot of problem arise from people getting that model confused with something called the truth.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Sure they would, and they have. We have it now as a result of philosophy. Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy. Well, we can't observe the unobserved mode so we need an observed mode to correlate, but that's its own catch22. Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first and then try to figure out what made it live. Similar case, you can't determine a fixed point for a particle, as its in motion. And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
This statement is false.
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Sure they would, and they have. We have it now as a result of philosophy. Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy. Well, we can't observe the unobserved mode so we need an observed mode to correlate, but that's its own catch22. Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first and then try to figure out what made it live. Similar case, you can't determine a fixed point for a particle, as its in motion. And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
This statement is false.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Quantum Mechanics and String Theory are just that. Philosophy.
Quantum mechanics is a theory which goes against every previous concept of phyisics. It it something completely foriegn to the human mind. Experimental results of a precision which greater then every other science is why we are forced to deal with quantum mechanics. It is quite simply the best tested and verified scientific theory the human race has developed. For example the entire field of solid state physics which covers the doped silicon that every modern computer is built on is part of quantum mechanics. Optics and electromagnitism are quantum mechanics too. The only thing that isn't based on quatnum mechanics is general relativity, which is a well tested theory on the scale of the solar system, plus various astronomical observations we can manage.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
And I don't understand the hang up regarding particle vs wave. Water does this. Its base form is particle but appears to act as a wave when grouped and in motion.
Imagine dropping several rocks into water. Only rocks of a specific size create waves on the water, and when the rock creates the water wave it disappears. Eventually the wave disappears and a rock shoots out of the pond somewhere else. That is one analogy. Another one is that if you watch the rock drop on the pond no wave is created, but if you look away when you drop the rock when you look back it shoots out of the pond as soon as you look, but it shoots out where the waves were the highest when you looked back, but you never get to see the wave. You have to drop many many rocks and plot the locations of the rocks when you look back to build up the wave pattern. It gets stranger when there is a pole in the middle of the lake. If you look when the wave is passing by the pole then the rock will show up either on one side or the other, but if you wait until the wave passes the pole you will observe dead spots where the rock will never show up caused by interference of the wave with itself. So essentially the rock went both ways around the pole occupying two places at once. This means that the system under observation behaves completely differently if it is observed then if it isn't.
Chris S Kaiser wrote:
Just like the study of what causes life. Life can only be studied while living, but we usually kill something first an
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Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Anything is possible.
For very small values of possible.;) Have you actually seen the probablility of something simple like a million monkeys typing 100 characters from any one of Shakespeare's plays.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
if you try to think what the smallest molecular object is, your brain will explode.
It hasn't yet. :~
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
Andy Brummer wrote:
a million monkeys
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
Andy Brummer wrote:
It hasn't yet.
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already. :)
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
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Andy Brummer wrote:
a million monkeys
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
Andy Brummer wrote:
It hasn't yet.
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already. :)
"I know which side I want to win regardless of how many wrongs they have to commit to achieve it." - Stan Shannon
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
But make that infinite and the probability goes to one.
The difference between math and physics.
Bassam Abdul-Baki wrote:
Amateur. Mine has exploded, imploded and reformed so many times already.
Well, quantum mechanically, by not exploding my head has done all those virutally.
Using the GridView is like trying to explain to someone else how to move a third person's hands in order to tie your shoelaces for you. -Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote:
11 and 26 dimension versions are really unstable and back backwards compatibility problems, though.
which is why superstring theory has moved onto compactification of dimensions to 10. Bosonic hyperspace of 26 dimensions suffers the problems of tachyon particles with imaginary mass. More current discussions involve supersymetry, dimensional compactification, and M-theory variants. :cool:
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
You people need to stop now. You're going to hurt yourselves.
Isn't this the X-Games, Cosmology division? danger is part of the excitement! It gives you that adrenalin rush...
_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)
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I don't think there is anyway currently to measure the existence of gravitons, nevermind trying to determine if they cross universal boundaries. I have no clue how they plan to figure it out either. The idea behind them, I think, is that they are can be closed strings which can leave the "surface" of the universe, called a brane, and travel to other branes. Open strings attach themselves to the brane thereby remaining within a single universe. I might have that wrong, it's all very new to me and a bit fantastic really.
BW
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
-- Steven WrightSounds like you watched the same Nova show I did...
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Sounds like you watched the same Nova show I did...
Yes, I did. :) I bought The Fabric of the Cosmos[^] earlier this year, though I keep pushing it back in the list of books to read. I noticed Brian Greene's involvement in the 2 part Nova series and had to check it out.
BW
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
-- Steven Wright -
I'm a simple kinda guy, so feel free to poke fun at my complete lack of understanding in the domain of astronomy and astrophysics. However, this article, Universe Might be Bigger and Older than Expected[^], concludes that the universe is 15.8 billion years old and 180 billion light years wide. If the big bang is still the current predominant thinking, then assuming a somewhat spherical universe, 180 billion light years wide would indicate a radius of 90 billion light years. So, if nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and the universe has expanded so wide that it would take light 90 billion years to reach the outer extremities, how is this distance possible in only 15.9 billion years? Are objects in the universe travelling faster than the speed of light to compensate, or did they just look at the source code to find out where the cheats are? :-D Yes, I realize that there are probably perfectly good explanations for this that simply point out my ignorance. However, from a layman's point of view I do it a somewhat entertaining concept. :)
Author of The Career Programmer and Unite the Tribes www.PracticalStrategyConsulting.com
HAHAH, I have exactly this text in my clipboard ready to ask the same question! Thank the bunnies I drifted this far back :)
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Jim A. Johnson wrote:
Nothing. No space, no time; nothing.
But even nothing is something. ;P Besides, I have a hard time believing (assuming the Universe isn't inifinite) that we could only possibly the only "thing" out there in the great big void, seems kinda self-centered. On the other hand, if it's nothing, it may only be nothing because we cannot yet or ever preceive it. After all, 3,000 years ago there was no such thing as bacteria.
Jeremy Falcon
Jeremy Falcon wrote:
assuming the Universe isn't inifinite)
This is the point my brain cries "foul"! So often we hear people combine "infinite" and "messurements". That is impossible! The only distance that can be messured that is infinite is a loop where you arrive at where you began. What is beyond our universe? I really do not know and neither does anyone else on this planet. Unless there is some kind of warp in space where it doubles back on itself, I would have no clue. Bigger issues though come to mind such as how do we know anything beyond a few light years even exists? If it takes light so long to reach us, who is to say it has not already all ended anyway? Just have to wait each year and find out ;)
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