Posted on 01/20/2015 4:43:30 PM PST by LibWhacker
If so and if one could navigate space fast enough and head "outward" would there be an end of the "matter" infested universe in a sense that looking outward there would be nothing to see but darkness?
What exactly is an "Event Horizon"? I once saw a movie of that name but could never understand the term........
How long did it take you to type that?
The point in the mouth of a Black hole where the gravity is so strong light cannot escape.
Hence you see nowt but black.
As far as i know ,only X-rays are emitted back from the Event Horizon.
(Last line.) LOL+!
20, 30 minutes. I’m a software developer now, so I pretty much type for a living.
X-Rays: Nothing comes back from the event horizon [well, because of Quantum Mechanics that's not quite true, but close enough.]
The X-rays "emitted from" Black Holes are actually the result of gravitational effects happening within a few thousands or millions of miles outside the event horizon. Here is one explanation: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/24958/how-can-a-black-hole-emit-x-rays. There are other reasons as well. But all of them are well beyond the event horizon.
I hope you didn't take my question in the wrong way, I'm absolutely enthralled with your explanations on things that I used to dream about knowing...........thanks.
Not at all. I assumed it was just a point of curiosity.
if one could navigate space fast enough and head "outward" would there be an end of the "matter" infested universe in a sense that looking outward there would be nothing to see but darkness?
In essence, is there an outlying edge of the existing universe where beyond that point lies nothingness? Or, is the existing universe contained within a box where there is ultimately a wall at the end of the expansion?
After looking at it, I know, it's a stupid question The question is not meant in any manner of "gotcha" but rather a combination of astrophysical and religious curiosity.......Thank you
imagine that. seems like just yesterday that “string deniers” were *this close* to being burned at the stake.
Okay, got it — thanks.
Including some VERY BIG ideas that we don’t yet have.
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The 1890’s were about 10-20 years before Einstein’s work. It seems to me I’ve read articles that suggested that scientists of the day were seeing too many things that didn’t fit the then standard model. So they thought a paradigms shift was just over the horizon. And so it was.
Do you see a paradigm shift coming in the nest 10—20 years.
An outstanding and delightful read. Well done and much appreciated. Thanks.
In doing so, they created a problem, because you see, it was known that there was an enormous disconnect between the known properties of the electromagnetic force, and Newton's Laws of classical physics.
The problem, in a nutshell, is that Maxwell's equations were already Lorentz Invariant: they already obeyed the Special Theory of Relativity ... 41 years before Einstein!
And so it was known we needed to reconcile these two things because both appeared to work in the cases where you could keep them separate. That is very much analogous to what we have today, where you have this tremendously successful theory of Quantum Mechanics/Quantum Field Theory on one hand and General Relativity on the other. And, as was the case before, they can't both be correct [and it's pretty clear that it's General Relativity that has to be wrong.]
The difference now, unlike then, is that in the late 19th and early 20th century people were doing all kinds of cool things with electronics, electromagnets, motors, generators, radio waves, ... probing deeper and deeper. We can't to that now, because the energies we can reach in our accelerators are many orders of magnitude too small for us to really investigate things. We have the theories, but we don't have the experiments. [It took us a really long time to reach the energies we needed to find the Higgs, for example. The next levels we need to reach are so much higher.]
Now, there is some hope, and that hope is in space. Because the energies we need to reach that we can't reach in our labs existed once: in the 10-30 or so seconds right after the instant of creation.
So it may be possible that we can reason some of things these backwards from what we see in the sky. Not just reasoning from cosmology, but also in the so called "cosmic rays" which bombard the top of our atmosphere. These are really tremendously energetic γ rays [some are powerful enough to spawn particles in the range to test some theories that we can't test on earth.]
But it's going -- just in my opinion -- to take a lot of work, and I don't think that 10-20 years is enough.
The best way too think of this is the balloon analogy. The dots on the balloon are, say, galaxies or galactic clusters. As the balloon inflates, they are moving away from each other on the surface.
Now, this is a three dimensional model of our four dimensional world, so we have had cut out one of the dimensions. People living on the surface of the balloon can only move in two spatial dimensions instead of three. They are constrained only to have [as we have on the surface of the earth roughly] only two degrees of freedom: the polar and azimuthal angles θ and φ of spherical coordinates, or, what is more familiar to laymen, latitude and longitude. The third dimension on this balloon, the distance from the center of the balloon, is time.
This is a very old analogy. There is a story about Einstein that goes with it.
When Einstein escaped from the Nazis, he worked at the center for advanced studies in Princeton, New Jersey, and he used to go for walks to think his deep thoughts. In the course of those walks he had a favorite little ice cream shop he used to go into, and the store owner had heard about the analogy of the balloon, and he asked Einstein essentially the question that you're asking: "What's outside of the sphere of our universe?"
Reportedly, Einstein took a couple of licks of the ice cream, thought for a moment, and then said, in his heavy German accent, "Yah... Vell... chust don't chew go out dere."
Now, think about what is inside of the balloon, and it will tell you what is outside of the balloon. And it will also tell you what is on the outside of the four dimensional balloon of our universe.
I'll post the answer tomorrow. [But better: you post the answer to me first.]
Well, about the only answer I can come up with is that the universe is expanding outward as a result of the "bang" and the space between the point where the bang occurred and where the matter now sits, is just empty space like the inside of the balloon.
As far as the expanding balloon we are on, there is nothing beyond it but dark, empty space.........
My burns have just about healed. ;’)
[and it’s pretty clear that it’s General Relativity that has to be wrong.]
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Does this mean that its more or less likely that science fiction things like worm holes and warp drives are possible.
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