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[Urprobablyright]

There are some theories being espoused in certain pseudo-formal sources of scientific information (yes, at the moment I'm referring to science documentaries) about the universe that i don't really think are as aware as they could be.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a scientist, I'm 99.99^~% certain my ideas are wrong. I just wanted to write them down.

A few ideas with which i am not convinced:

- Cosmic background radiation marks the edge of the universe.

How can we possibly be certain that this hiss of microwaves coming from all directions is the afterglow of the big bang? And the idea that we're smack in the middle of it? (Apparently that's just an artifact of the weird string theory kind of hyjincks that happened to space when it was happening) The idea that we can perceive everything? Kind of makes me think of how renaissance peeps thought we were the center of the solar system.

What makes more sense to me? The cosmic background radiation simply being the latest light to reach us. That would explain why it is uniform everywhere, because at such extreme distances even structures like galactic filaments would form a more or less consistent, seemingly flat field of material. And it doesn't need to be flat, it's not uniform. Dem peaks and troughs, tho!

- Lack of regards for the bending of light rays and their impact on how we view the universe

Light bends. This precedent, that light gets distorted by gravity, has been made clear everywhere from mirages, to detecting planets via wobbles in the light of distant suns, to black holes. So what the hell makes us so sure that what we see is a simple, clear gallery of 1:1 stars?

Mirage can make things look upside down, it can make things appear double, it can make things take on different shapes and all manner of distortions. What if scorpio is actually Orion's belt seen through the gravimetric distortions of a bazillion stars? What if our nearest neighbour is twice as far? Or half as far? Or not the nearest after all?

What if we are in the middle of a hall of mirrors?

- Heat death of the universe/Universe is destined to fail.

Just like people who assume that aliens would share anything like our values and concepts, it seems really presumptive and hubristic of us to feel that we're part of a one-off, doomed to end universe, that we are privileged to look upon an anomalous moment of exceptional accidental starlight.

I just think two things are undeniable: a) we don't know everything well enough to make this kind of prediction; and b) the idea that all of this is unrenewable seems to go against the precedent of organic nature.

Recent theories, according to a certain 2017 pair of Brian Cox theory summaries/documentaries, suggest that the big bang is something that happened in an already established universe. Something that happens from time to time. That there could be uncountable universes. I like that.

---

Happy to hear your own ideas, I reiterate that I'm certain that I'm wrong. Certain i love this stuff~ ur probably right!!

 

[Stouffers]

I had a dream last night we were living in a hollow Earth and I could see other continents in the “sky” riding on the inside of the Earths crust.

 

[slugbahr]

I had a dream last night we were living in a hollow Earth and I could see other continents in the “sky” riding on the inside of the Earths crust.

It wasn't a dream.

 

[Woo-Fu]

Every time I think about the universe I hit the finite/infinite question and stop there because I can't comprehend either case.

 

[jason10mm]

It seems strange to me that there could be light from 13 odd billion years ago still reflecting around (or rather, that we would know how old it is). If everything started expanding from a single point then it seems to me that all that 'old' light would have long since passed us by. Unless the idea is that opposing edges of the universe are expanding away from each other at almost the speed of light so that old light is just barely catching us.

It also seems that if the "edge of a balloon" theory NDT proposes is true then we ought to see definitive bright and dark areas in the sky. Instead it seems like we are in a homogeneous soup of galaxies all around us, so that no matter where we look it is just more and more galaxies.

I also think we are making a LOT of assumptions based on a very limited observational period and we are basing our math on what we see and basing what we see on our math with really no way to objectively prove any of it. Do stars really blow up and scatter heavy elements? How do we know this?

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

An infinite universe full of finite things is impossible. It conflicts with basic laws like conservation of energy.

Kicking the can down the road with the multiverse or "infinite chain of Big Bangs" isn't a suitable answer either.

Nor does it explain why everything in the universe is perfectly ordered. Not a single molecule, not a single speck of meteorite, not a single drop of water anywhere in the universe will misbehave. Even a supernova scatters its material in a perfectly ordered way, every particle following its path flawlessly, without error.

I do not assume everything that is came from pure chaotic randomness. We cannot find that randomness anywhere in the universe, so I don't accept it as a valid scientific explanation for the absurd level of complexity we see around us.

 

[eot]

- Cosmic background radiation marks the edge of the universe.

That's a misunderstanding on your part, it "marks" the edge of the visible universe, which is different from the observable universe, which is yet again different from the size of the universe itself.

How can we possibly be certain that this hiss of microwaves coming from all directions is the afterglow of the big bang? And the idea that we're smack in the middle of it? (Apparently that's just an artifact of the weird string theory kind of hyjincks that happened to space when it was happening) The idea that we can perceive everything? Kind of makes me think of how renaissance peeps thought we were the center of the solar system.

Of course we can never be certain, because we can't run experiments on the universe. Cosmology is an observational science, however the existence of the cosmic microwave background, and some of its features, were predicted before it was ever observed, and those predictions were based on models of the Big Bang. It has nothing to do with string theory.

The basic argument is that any object with a non-zero temperature emits radiation (thermal radiation), and for idealized objects it has a certain type of spectrum called a black body spectrum. This means that you have specific amounts of radiation at specific energies, and this spectrum only depends on the temperature of the emitting object. Now, when we look at the cosmic microwave background we can study its spectrum, and infer a temperature (it turns out to be about 2.7 K, very cold). That temperature is the same in every direction we look. Now we want to explain this fact.

How do things come to have the same temperature? Unless it happens by chance, they have to interact and the laws of thermodynamics tells us that a closed system will eventually reach the same temperature everywhere. The problem is that the parts of the sky we're looking at are billions of lightyears apart, there wouldn't have been time for them to interact. Since nothing can go faster than the speed of light they simply couldn't have exchanged energy. However, in the early age of the universe when everything was extremely compact, these places that are now distant were able to interact, and reach the same energy, the same way that when you put milk in your coffee they will both eventually reach the same temperature.

 

[Urprobablyright]

Not a single molecule, not a single speck of meteorite, not a single drop of water anywhere in the universe will misbehave. Even a supernova scatters its material in a perfectly ordered way, every particle following its path flawlessly, without error.

I'm not sure i strictly agree with that.. there are plenty of things that behave in inexplicable ways, though grabbed that doubtless just means we don't understand it enough... Beyond that i don't think you can make such a sweeping statement in a universe with this like black holes...

THAT SAID, maybe what you're trying to say is that it all obeys the laws of physics. In that case i recognise that you're saying something quite lovely~

But still, there are things that seem to break the laws of physics.. paradoxes... Consider the paired atoms which interact with each other remotely and instantaneously, but exactly, no matter how much distance separates them~ so called entangled particles~ what's up with them?!

I agree, totally love this shit.

 

[eot]

But still, there are things that seem to break the laws of physics.. paradoxes... Consider the paired atoms which interact with each other remotely and instantaneously, but exactly, no matter how much distance separates them~ so called entangled particles~ what's up with them?!

Entanglement does not imply superluminal interaction. It "simply" gives rise to correlations, which if you tried to explain them classically (by assuming that the particles have definite states) would require superluminal influences. They are not paradoxical and we understand them quite well.

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

I'm not sure i strictly agree with that.. there are plenty of things that behave in inexplicable ways, though grabbed that doubtless just means we don't understand it enough... Beyond that i don't think you can make such a sweeping statement in a universe with this like black holes...

THAT SAID, maybe what you're trying to say is that it all obeys the laws of physics. In that case i recognise that you're saying something quite lovely~

But still, there are things that seem to break the laws of physics.. paradoxes... Consider the paired atoms which interact with each other remotely and instantaneously, but exactly, no matter how much distance separates them~ so called entangled particles~ what's up with them?!

I agree, totally love this shit.

Yes, everything obeys all laws of nature that pertain to them. Just because something behaves in a way we do not understand doesn't mean it is behaving against the actual rules of the universe. In fact, observing strange, inexplicable things is how Science grew. Even the most destructive forces in the universe like black holes and quasars and supernovas will unfold according to these laws.

The concept of "chaos" is a human invention.

Everything in the universe -- every atom, every bit of light, every tug of gravity -- has proceeded along a singular path since the beginning.

The alternative is belief that things happen in the universe "just because", or that supernatural forces can push the universe off its tilt.

 

[Urprobablyright]

some of its features, were predicted before it was ever observed, and those predictions were based on models of the Big Bang.

good point

That temperature is the same in every direction we look. Now we want to explain this fact.

I guess the distinction you made that it is the edge of the observable universe kind of speaks to the fact that my whole idea is basically agreeing with reality as we see it today, i just came up with it while thinking that the background radiation had been designated an ultimate extent of the big bang's expansion~

Anyway, and again i am fine with the reality that my musings are baseless, I'm just thinking that the kind of uniform readings we get from the background radiation could be artifacts of the uniform distance, the extreme distance, of this ever expanding sphere of arriving light/microwaves, rather than it all having a fixed starting point. You mention spectrum, and i understand that light spectra are one of the coolest and least fallible ways of charting the features of the heavens, but could it be that what we're reading at this distance, at the unimaginable scale and density of gigantic galactic structures that would surely be encompsssed in the immediate corona of that background fuzz, is not so much the precise temperature of a distant glowing forcefield (deliberately banal terms) so much as simply the average agglomerative temperature of a whole lot of imperfect vacuum and stars and galaxies, slowly revealing themselves to us by 9.461 × 10^15 meters a year? Ehh~

 

[eot]

Anyway, and again i am fine with the reality that my musings are baseless, I'm just thinking that the kind of uniform readings we get from the background radiation could be artifacts of the uniform distance, the extreme distance, of this ever expanding sphere of arriving light/microwaves, rather than it all having a fixed starting point. You mention spectrum, and i understand that light spectra are one of the coolest and least fallible ways of charting the features of the heavens, but could it be that what we're reading at this distance, at the unimaginable scale and density of gigantic galactic structures that would surely be encompsssed in the immediate corona of that background fuzz, is not so much the precise temperature of a distant glowing forcefield (deliberately banal terms) so much as simply the average agglomerative temperature of a whole lot of imperfect vacuum and stars and galaxies, slowly revealing themselves to us by 9.461 × 10^15 meters a year? Ehh~

I want to make it clear that people didn't just come up with the one explanation I presented and then called it a day. The reason it is the current consensus is because alternative explanations have come up lacking in some or multiple ways. In quantitative ways. For example, if you see a picture of the CMB like the one from the recent Planck survey:

we are not only able to explain the average temperature, but also these temperature fluctuations. The scale on the bottom is in millions of a degree, that's how small the variations are. Quantifying these is quite technical, but I just wanted to point out that we don't have an idea just of the broad picture, but also the details.

Now you mentioned the uniform distance, and you're actually right. The temperature we observe is related to the distance, because the distance is related to how much the universe has expanded. Because that expansion is uniform, the same in every direction, the distance is the same in every direction and that is indeed why we observe the same temperature.

However, we could imagine that the universe isn't expanding, and that there's just something out there emitting this light. Then we need to explain why it has the colour, or equivalently temperature, that it has, and also why distant objects look more red. This is a hypothesis called tired light, that the light simply loses energy as its propagating through space. It's a fine idea, but to test it we need to quantify it, we need to describe how and by which mechanism the spectrum of the light would be affected. Of course, people have done this and found that it is not consistent with our observations in many respects, to very high precision.

I'll describe one effect we would expect to see. If the universe isn't expanding then distant objects, such as galaxies, would appear to have the same surface brightness regardless of how far away they are. What this means is that we receive less light from distant objects, but they also appear smaller in the sky, and these effects cancel each other, resulting in the same amount of light per surface area. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding two things happen: it will take slightly longer for each subsequent photon to reach us, because the distance from the object to us is increasing all the time. This is an additional effect that makes distant objects dimmer, because the actual rate of photons we receive would go down. A second effect is that the object was closer to us when the light was emitted than the total distance the photons travelled, which means that the object would look larger in the sky. Both of these together mean that the amount of light per surface area would decrease for distant objects, instead of staying constant. Like this:

 

[#Phonepunk#]

i really like this. theorizing on cosmological stuff is fun. from what i understand cosmic background radiation is sort of the after shock of the big bang. what substance, God, or whatever, that powers the universe, and was there in the Big Bang, is still there in faint echoes, all over the universe. IMO there is no such thing as "nothing", a pure vacuum is probably impossible, some kind of power or substance penetrates and binds all of reality. echoes of the Big Bang or God or whatever they end up calling it.

when i took Astronomy 101 in college, it was such a mind blow. the red shift/blue shift phenomenon in particular is a mindbender. the idea that light has a speed, that it has a limit, is a mindbender.

the day i really grokked the implications of the Speed of Light, my brain was going off in all kinds of weird places, trying out models, eventually i think i arrived at a static universe, thinking that red/blue shift meant not that stars were leaving us but that they were stationary and the shift was actually some other dimension of time, some way to see backwards in time or something. i mean, in essence, it means you are seeing light that has not yet arrived? the shift seems to be coming towards us, which scientists take to mean matter is moving away from us, yet i wonder if that shift would still appear if everything was static?

but then again that discards the fucking solar system, moon, sun, etc. all known observable matter. still, always fun to imagine what is possible and to wonder.

 

[appaws]

I am so big brained on certain stuff....but when it comes to all this stuff I am as grug-brained as possible.

My brain is so slanted to one side, the verbal and writing side. I mean, I got a 630 in the LSAT, and my reasoning score was below average...but with my expressive side being like 100th Percentile I still got a really high score. My GRE made me look like a super genius because it only tested the verbal/vocab/expressive side.

But then I only made it to Algebra I in high school, and if you give me any sort of geometry or anything I feel like I have some sort of actual spatial/numerical retardation of dyslexia.

Do any of you guys feel that way, or do you have a better balance?

 

[EverydayBeast]

All theories are vulnerable because nobody knows enough about the universe, cosmic radiation, big bag etc. are all very important. I think you could make a good argument that everything in the sky is ancient light being it takes millions of years for neighboring lights to appear in our vision.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

All of this is completely irrelevant until we understand what Death is, why it occurs and how we can stop it.

 

[DESTROYA]

All of this is completely irrelevant until we understand what Death is, why it occurs and how we can stop it.

Maybe to you but I love this sort of stuff.

 

[SLoWMoTIoN]

Time and a place, slowmotion

 

[Darkmakaimura]

We Actually Live Inside a Huge Bubble in Space, Physicist Proposes

What if the Earth, the galaxy, and all the galaxies near us were enclosed in a weirdly empty bubble? This scenario could resolve some longstanding questions about the nature of the universe.

www.vice.com

What if the Earth, the galaxy, and all the galaxies near us were enclosed in a weirdly empty bubble? This scenario could resolve some longstanding questions about the nature of the universe.

 

[Slings and Arrows]

Maybe to you but I love this sort of stuff.

It is interesting. We find all out answers when we conquer death.

 

[Tesseract]

It is interesting. We find all out answers when we conquer death.

dead is just dead, there's nothing to conquer

 

[triplestation]

what if parametric measures are irrelevant at the "edge" of the universe

 

[Darkmakaimura]

Carbon stars with ancient satellites colonized by sentient fungi. Gas giants inhabited by vast meteorological intelligences. Worlds stretched thin across the membranes where the dimensions intersect... Impossible to describe with our limited vocabulary!

 

[Karma Jawa]

I’ve thought this for many years, but the Big Bang seems a hell of a lot like the exact opposite of a black hole.

Ultimately the universe is beyond our comprehension. As humans we’re capable of some incredible things, but our minds are limited.

Imagine a tree. Imagine three trees. Imagine a million trees? You can’t. You picture some generic canopy of trees that seems to match the idea of a large number of trees. Our minds have limits, and that’s where philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience come in.

We can’t conceive the idea of a universe without a beginning. We think in terms of causality. Something happened and caused this, then that, then that. Determinism. We can’t comprehend the idea of something coming out of nothing, because we think that nothing would have to contain something to lead to the beginning of everything...but where did that something come from. And so on, and so on.

I think mankind trying to understand the greatest mysteries of the universe is like trying to describe music to a lifelong deaf person. You can perhaps paint a picture, but it’s not something they can ever really experience or understand.

The best we can do is understand the extent of our capacities within an inevitable limit..

 

[Urprobablyright]

All of this is completely irrelevant until we understand what Death is, why it occurs and how we can stop it.

I'm not trying to be argumentative but.. it's obvious what happens after death. Our brains, which are the seat of every iota of information and processing we enjoy, cease to function, we cease to be, we dissolve away.

I know that one could easily counter what I've just said by asking me about the soul etc.. but to be frank, that's innuendo and fantasy and it's not in any way convincing to me.. there is no such thing as a soul, anything that we are stops the moment our brain malfunctions, everything we think we know about our existence is an illusion constructed by our brains.. people might say they don't like that idea, but that doesn't make it any less true.

As such, i make zero connections between the state of death and the wider universe...

If you feel like calling me wrong you can decide to and i can't do anything about it, so that's fine by me~ my username~

 

[Whitecrow]

I had a dream last night we were living in a hollow Earth and I could see other continents in the “sky” riding on the inside of the Earths crust.

Thats Cocoon from FF XIII : 3

 

[Slings and Arrows]

I'm not trying to be argumentative but.. it's obvious what happens after death. Our brains, which are the seat of every iota of information and processing we enjoy, cease to function, we cease to be, we dissolve away.

I know that one could easily counter what I've just said by asking me about the soul etc.. but to be frank, that's innuendo and fantasy and it's not in any way convincing to me.. there is no such thing as a soul, anything that we are stops the moment our brain malfunctions, everything we think we know about our existence is an illusion constructed by our brains.. people might say they don't like that idea, but that doesn't make it any less true.

As such, i make zero connections between the state of death and the wider universe...

If you feel like calling me wrong you can decide to and i can't do anything about it, so that's fine by me~ my username~

I don't disagree that it's light out when the brain dies. We can reverse the aging process with cells, so on a biological level we could stop Death, theoretically.

I probably should have used Entropy or Entropic decay when talking about the universe. Why is there anything if it inevitably reverts to nothing. Why have a universe at all if it's destined to die?

 

[Urprobablyright]

Why have a universe at all if it's destined to die?

I tend to think that asking "why" is probably not as good as just finding out the "what" of everything.

I do however kind of agree with your feeling re: entropy. I'm not saying i think the arrow of time theory is in any way wrong, I'm just saying that it seems to just radiate incomplete understanding for us to think that everything would just fizzle out.. like an underwater fart bubble which surfaces and bursts, distributes stank and essential oils then eventually dissolves away~

I don't think it is for us to understand the long term functioning of the universe(s), but i seriously doubt it is all so linear.