The Universe!... Yes.

[Lobstrich]

I've been thinking about the universe lately. Not in the sense of "what is the meaning of all this? What is the purpose of life?!"

I'm not that cliché.


As we all know. The universe is MASSIVE The milky way is such a very very small and unimportant part of the universe that out existence is practically a joke.

And here's the actual thing I've thought about

What is so massive that it can contain the universe?
What is it that we're inside?!

Take this example: A bucket, put a raisin in it, pretend that the raisin is the universe. What is the bucket?


I've come to the realisation that it's literally impossible to find out what the answer to my question is. But I'd love to hear some of your theories! =)

 

[Anthile]

I think that this is a common human fallacy, to believe that everything must be contained in another thing, that there is always a before and always an after. It makes sense on our mesocosmic scale for our brains to support that kind of thinking but I don't believe it to be true. The universe will continue to expand but someday it will reach its maximum entropy and, taking thermodynamics to the logical extreme, the Big Freeze occurs. Or so it seems.

 

[Lobstrich]

I think that this is a common human fallacy, to believe that everything must be contained in another thing, that there is always a before and always an after. It makes sense on our mesocosmic scale for our brains to support that kind of thinking but I don't believe it to be true. The universe will continue to expand but someday it will reach its maximum entropy and, taking thermodynamics to the logical extreme, the Big Freeze occurs. Or so it seems.

Interesting.. I had thought about the idea of the universe not being contained in anything. But as you said, it just seemed to unlikely.

 

[snafupants]

the milky way galaxy is a raisin one hundred thousand times smaller than a normal raisin and the universe is a standard sized bucket.

 

[onthewindowstand]

The universe would be a bucket without walls.

 

[bloozie]

The Answer is 42.

 

[Lobstrich]

the milky way galaxy is a raisin one hundred thousand times smaller than a normal raisin and the universe is a standard sized bucket.

Indeed! But being precise with the scale of which the universe is. Was not my point. I was just making an example =)

 

[Moocow]

Infinite empty space is only hard to understand if you look at it with preloaded ideas of boundaries, beginning, end, etc.
How exactly does it seem unlikely that the universe has no boundaries? Is it not more unlikely that the universe would have boundaries? The whole idea of a boundary is that it separates one thing from another, so you'd just have to constantly ask what is on the other side of the boundaries of the universe. The only answer would have to be nothingness, and if you can believe that nothingness can exist that way, why is the boundary necessary in the first place?
Same thing with time, if you ask me. The only possible conclusion is infinity, because the concepts of a boundaries like a beginning and end are man-made tools for quantifying change.

 

[Agent Intellect]

Maybe an n-dimensional brane? Perhaps it's fractal, and if we zoomed out from the universe far enough, we'd see that it's completely contained in the atom of another universe (or the inverse - zoom in on an atom far enough and see a universe)? Perhaps a strong (perhaps even solipsist) view of the Copenhagen interpretation, and all that exists is existing in a sort of ambiguity that size, space, or time would not be applicable to it? The universe being flat (based on WMAP readings and the density of visible matter and dark matter/energy) would seem to imply that it's infinitely large (of course, that only applies to the 4 dimensions of spacetime) and therefore need not be contained 'inside' anything.

 

[Lobstrich]

Infinite empty space is only hard to understand if you look at it with preloaded ideas of boundaries, beginning, end, etc.
How exactly does it seem unlikely that the universe has no boundaries? Is it not more unlikely that the universe would have boundaries? The whole idea of a boundary is that it separates one thing from another, so you'd just have to constantly ask what is on the other side of the boundaries of the universe. The only answer would have to be nothingness, and if you can believe that nothingness can exist that way, why is the boundary necessary in the first place?
Same thing with time, if you ask me. The only possible conclusion is infinity, because the concepts of a boundaries like a beginning and end are man-made tools for quantifying change.

I disagree. Personally I don't thnk that there is such a thing as "nothingness" It's THERE. Thin air is not, nothing aswell. It's right there, in front of us.

Same with the endless space. It's there. So what makes you think that suddenly the black, black space just stops and then there's "nothingness" Makes just as little sense as a boundary.

 

[Causeless]

How exactly does it seem unlikely that the universe has no boundaries?

How does the universal background radiation reverberate?

Not trying to disprove a thing, just food for your thoughts.

(I also think a fractal pattern bears clues as to the shape and construct of the universe, and that conventional thinking of a "box inside a box" will not necessarily continue to unfold our understanding.)

 

[SpaceYeti]

The universe is the bucket, and nothing exists beyond it's boundaries. Not even space or time or energy or anything. The raisin would be a very very massive galaxy.

 

[Moocow]

I disagree. Personally I don't thnk that there is such a thing as "nothingness" It's THERE. Thin air is not, nothing aswell. It's right there, in front of us.

Same with the endless space. It's there. So what makes you think that suddenly the black, black space just stops and then there's "nothingness" Makes just as little sense as a boundary.

Isn't the universe expanding faster than the speed of light or something? Every time you reach the 'edge' it's infinitely further away.

 

[Moocow]

I disagree. Personally I don't thnk that there is such a thing as "nothingness" It's THERE. Thin air is not, nothing aswell. It's right there, in front of us.

Same with the endless space. It's there. So what makes you think that suddenly the black, black space just stops and then there's "nothingness" Makes just as little sense as a boundary.

Black space doesn't end, it IS nothingness. I'm not sure how anything can be less existent than black, empty space.
That's a hypothetical nothingness though because even the black space around our planets and solar systems etc is full of radiation of various sorts.

If you traveled beyond the universe you would be extending the "boundaries" of the universe itself. As soon as you did, it would no longer be 'nothingness' because you would be there.
This is all severely confused by semantics. I don't actually believe there is any separation between existence and nonexistence because nonexistence only seems to occur as an idea and ideas do exist on the same level as everything else: our perceptive scope. Nonexistence can never be experienced because "experience" is something that only happens to that which exists.
So long as we perceive black empty space we can call it "something" yet that does not mean something actually exists other than the idea of it.

Nothingness is not a "thing" it's an idea based around the possible absence of something that does exist to our perception, yet even if one thing does not exist, something else does therefore "nothingness" remains only an idea. If at some point absolutely nothing existed, even then there would be no one to form the idea that "this is nothingness."

(I'm on a tangent now, I don't even remember if this answers or relates to your argument.)

I guess my point is that the black emptiness of space is as close to a sensory perception of "nothingness" as we can get, yet we only view it from afar and form ideas about it. If I was actually floating there in black empty space, my mental activity would be the universe that I perceive and consider "something."
Which is possibly a good way to approach analyzing the nature of dualistic belief, separation of ideas / physical forms, or mind / body.

 

[EyeSeeCold]

The Answer is 42.

Of course, it all makes sense now.

This would actually explain a lot if it were true:

 

[Lobstrich]

Isn't the universe expanding faster than the speed of light or something? Every time you reach the 'edge' it's infinitely further away.

True, it is.

Did I ever claim that the 'edge' was just around the corner?

 

[Lobstrich]

Black space doesn't end, it IS nothingness. I'm not sure how anything can be less existent than black, empty space.
That's a hypothetical nothingness though because even the black space around our planets and solar systems etc is full of radiation of various sorts.

If you traveled beyond the universe you would be extending the "boundaries" of the universe itself. As soon as you did, it would no longer be 'nothingness' because you would be there.
This is all severely confused by semantics. I don't actually believe there is any separation between existence and nonexistence because nonexistence only seems to occur as an idea and ideas do exist on the same level as everything else: our perceptive scope. Nonexistence can never be experienced because "experience" is something that only happens to that which exists.
So long as we perceive black empty space we can call it "something" yet that does not mean something actually exists other than the idea of it.

Nothingness is not a "thing" it's an idea based around the possible absence of something that does exist to our perception, yet even if one thing does not exist, something else does therefore "nothingness" remains only an idea. If at some point absolutely nothing existed, even then there would be no one to form the idea that "this is nothingness."

(I'm on a tangent now, I don't even remember if this answers or relates to your argument.)

I guess my point is that the black emptiness of space is as close to a sensory perception of "nothingness" as we can get, yet we only view it from afar and form ideas about it. If I was actually floating there in black empty space, my mental activity would be the universe that I perceive and consider "something."
Which is possibly a good way to approach analyzing the nature of dualistic belief, separation of ideas / physical forms, or mind / body.

This, I agree with though.

But I still hold to my opinion that even black empty space is still something.
Not really sure how I'm supposed to reply, though.

Sorry for cutting the debate off! Heh.

 

[Moocow]

This, I agree with though.

But I still hold to my opinion that even black empty space is still something.
Not really sure how I'm supposed to reply, though.

Sorry for cutting the debate off! Heh.

I'd agree that it exists as a hypothetical idea. Like love... or communism.

 

[Lobstrich]

I'd agree that it exists as a hypothetical idea. Like love... or communism.

I see what you're saying. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not.

We can't be sure, there's not any proof. Is there? Not as far as I know.

 

[Agent Intellect]

This conversation is beginning to sound similar to the atomism of Democritus.

Empty space is 'something' because nothing is nothing. The fact that there is empty space necessarily means that it's not nothing.

Also, general relativity depends on the warping of spacetime, which would mean that spacetime itself is a something (even if we don't really know what it is, exactly).

 

[SpaceYeti]

Black space doesn't end, it IS nothingness.

False. Space exists, which means it cannot be nothing. True nothing would be the lack of anything at all. No space, no time, no dimensions of any kind, and, due to the fact there's no space or time, there would be nowhere for anything else to exist.

 

[Moocow]

False. Space exists, which means it cannot be nothing. True nothing would be the lack of anything at all. No space, no time, no dimensions of any kind, and, due to the fact there's no space or time, there would be nowhere for anything else to exist.

Did you only read the first line of the post?

 

[SpaceYeti]

I read the whole thing. It was, as you pointed out, a tangent.

 

[Lobstrich]

False. Space exists, which means it cannot be nothing. True nothing would be the lack of anything at all. No space, no time, no dimensions of any kind, and, due to the fact there's no space or time, there would be nowhere for anything else to exist.

Absolutely agree. But you did kind of take Moocow's post out of context.

 

[Trebuchet]

Take this example: A bucket, put a raisin in it, pretend that the raisin is the universe. What is the bucket?

Whatever it is, it exerts a force on our universe. There is movement in the universe that is not related to its expansion, and current thinking is that there may very well be something outside the universe. I do think the name of this movement, "dark flow," is a bit precious.

http://news.discovery.com/space/dark-flow-universe.html

 

[SpaceYeti]

Absolutely agree. But you did kind of take Moocow's post out of context.

True. I should have put a disclaimer on it.

 

[MaxP]

I'm in support of the theory that the space-time curves back on itself, so if you were to keep going in a straight line for long enough, you would end up back where you started. The concept is very hard to grasp, but it can be compared to early perceptions that the world was indeed round.

I've also been doing alot of thinking about Dark Matter and how it could potentially be evidence that we live on one of many 4 dimensional branes in a 5 or more dimensional universe

 

[MaxP]

Let me elaborate a little bit. If we live on a brane (for this purpose it's easiest to picture the brane's as flat 2 dimensional sheets running next to eachother) then we will feel the gravity of a mass on a neighboring brane. This helps to explain why only a very small portion of the "matter" in our universe is matter that we can see and touch. This matter would be quite mysterious as the only way we would have of measuring it would be from it's gravitational pull on objects in our universe. This add's up with our observations, we have virtually no solid evidence for what "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" really are. The only reason we know that it is there is because we can observe the gravitational pull it exerts on galaxies on our brane.

Now I'm not a physics student (although the prospect of it is quite appealing [it would be nice to have a well educated foundation to help easily discard rubbish thoughts that come up in my mind]) so my speculations are to be taken as nothing more than that.

If we do indeed live on one of these brane's that raises some questions. Where did these brane's come from? I'll not even bother focusing on that since we would need some basic understanding of the characteristics of this "multiverse". It is key here when picturing this multiverse that we see the importance of it in the development of our own universe. Matter on one brane would be attracted to matter on other brane's, and galaxies would form as a result of the gravity from galaxies forming on another brane. It stands to reason that dark matter would exist almost exclusively around galaxies in our own universe. So we can then ask if this can be confirmed by observaton. As it turns out, in our attempts to see dark matter, we have seen a "cloud" of unexplained mass covering the entire galaxy and extending our a bit past galaxies.

Hopefully you're still following me (I tend to offer foggy explanations), and you are now thinking along the same lines as I am. The cloud could theoretically be explained as the gravity exerted from the large number of galaxies on other branes.

So from here I ask, what about black holes? Black holes would undoubtebly be strongly attracted to eachother. A "supermassive" black hole seems likely to be a result of the most concentrated area of mass in this multibrane galaxy formation. Black holes fall into eachothers immense gravitational pull, eventually forming a "trunk" or "central pillar" around which galaxies on all of these branes orbit.

This brings me to my current problem. Wouldn't these "pilllars" have an infinite mass? Clearly they do not, so why? It could be that eventually all of the matter in these galaxies will end up on the same point, and we just haven't gotten there yet. It could be that there is a finite number of brane worlds. Or it could be that for some reason we have yet to understand, the fundamental force of gravity can only be exerted accross a certain number of branes (this seems less likely but is worth consideration).

I think I need to go post my idea's on a physics forum so that my errors can be corrected because this is mostly a result of me letting my mind



Hopefully that

 

[Jesse]

The answer is more universe. It's kind of like seeing something changes it problem. Anything we can imagine to be outside the universe is actually the universe. So that bucket that you think is outside the universe, is actually part of the universe ect.

 

[MaxP]

The answer is more universe. It's kind of like seeing something changes it problem. Anything we can imagine to be outside the universe is actually the universe. So that bucket that you think is outside the universe, is actually part of the universe ect.

It's all a matter of perception. I do think there is "something else" that we are not seeing. Whatever we eventually find to be that something else is all part of the same system of existence, so in that sense it is part of our universe. But one could also argue that the observable universe is what we are going to call "the universe" and whatever we find that explains the universe could potentially be labeled as something other than the universe.

Universe is just a word we invented to describe everything that we observe. We could just as easily modify the meaning of the word.

But I agree with the concept your are describing

 

[Glordag]

Let me elaborate a little bit. If we live on a brane (for this purpose it's easiest to picture the brane's as flat 2 dimensional sheets running next to eachother) then we will feel the gravity of a mass on a neighboring brane. This helps to explain why only a very small portion of the "matter" in our universe is matter that we can see and touch. This matter would be quite mysterious as the only way we would have of measuring it would be from it's gravitational pull on objects in our universe. This add's up with our observations, we have virtually no solid evidence for what "Dark Matter" or "Dark Energy" really are. The only reason we know that it is there is because we can observe the gravitational pull it exerts on galaxies on our brane.

Now I'm not a physics student (although the prospect of it is quite appealing [it would be nice to have a well educated foundation to help easily discard rubbish thoughts that come up in my mind]) so my speculations are to be taken as nothing more than that.

If we do indeed live on one of these brane's that raises some questions. Where did these brane's come from? I'll not even bother focusing on that since we would need some basic understanding of the characteristics of this "multiverse". It is key here when picturing this multiverse that we see the importance of it in the development of our own universe. Matter on one brane would be attracted to matter on other brane's, and galaxies would form as a result of the gravity from galaxies forming on another brane. It stands to reason that dark matter would exist almost exclusively around galaxies in our own universe. So we can then ask if this can be confirmed by observaton. As it turns out, in our attempts to see dark matter, we have seen a "cloud" of unexplained mass covering the entire galaxy and extending our a bit past galaxies.

Hopefully you're still following me (I tend to offer foggy explanations), and you are now thinking along the same lines as I am. The cloud could theoretically be explained as the gravity exerted from the large number of galaxies on other branes.

So from here I ask, what about black holes? Black holes would undoubtebly be strongly attracted to eachother. A "supermassive" black hole seems likely to be a result of the most concentrated area of mass in this multibrane galaxy formation. Black holes fall into eachothers immense gravitational pull, eventually forming a "trunk" or "central pillar" around which galaxies on all of these branes orbit.

This brings me to my current problem. Wouldn't these "pilllars" have an infinite mass? Clearly they do not, so why? It could be that eventually all of the matter in these galaxies will end up on the same point, and we just haven't gotten there yet. It could be that there is a finite number of brane worlds. Or it could be that for some reason we have yet to understand, the fundamental force of gravity can only be exerted accross a certain number of branes (this seems less likely but is worth consideration).

I think I need to go post my idea's on a physics forum so that my errors can be corrected because this is mostly a result of me letting my mind



Hopefully that

I got my BS in physics and math and it doesn't do me any good, don't worry (; . Maybe if I had gone on to get a graduate degree that would be a different story.

Anyways, your post wins this thread for me, so far.

I'm not sure I understand the original question posed by this thread. If the universe is defined as "everything" (as I believe it commonly is), then clearly there cannot be something "more". Anything that you could imagine to possibly contain the universe would, by definition, become part of the universe.

 

[Bossness]

Well that bucket is a representation (or an attempted one) of what space is. Now the next question would be, if the raisin is in the bucket, what is the bucket inside of?

 

[Glordag]

Well that bucket is a representation (or an attempted one) of what space is. Now the next question would be, if the raisin is in the bucket, what is the bucket inside of?

It doesn't matter, because the bucket BECAME the raisin, and whatever is outside of the bucket also became the raisin. Everything is the raisin. All hail the raisin.

 

[MaxP]

I got my BS in physics and math and it doesn't do me any good, don't worry (; . Maybe if I had gone on to get a graduate degree that would be a different story.

Anyways, your post wins this thread for me, so far.

I'm not sure I understand the original question posed by this thread. If the universe is defined as "everything" (as I believe it commonly is), then clearly there cannot be something "more". Anything that you could imagine to possibly contain the universe would, by definition, become part of the universe.

So you're saying you actually know shit about physics and there were no obvious flaws in my theory? Oh how this makes me want to pursue this idea even more :smiley_emoticons_mr

Edit: The other question that I can't stop asking is what about objects smaller than the distance between branes??? Wouldn't they feel a larger pull from gravity (as the force of gravity has yet to hit another brane so the full extra-dimensional pull would be felt on these objects?) or am I not understanding something? Could this line of thought offer a unification between gravity and other fundamental forces?