[LibWhacker]

A little light reading for your afternoon coffee break, hehehehe... But there are some fascinating graphics and videos at the source link!

[GraceG]

The “rubber sheet” analogy of gravity is broken.

The space that and object displaces has to go elsewhere and it it is expressed as negative energy in a sphere some distance from the massive object.

[null and void]

Is there a FReeper cosmologist?

I have a way of explaining inflation without breaking the speed limit. I’d like to fly it by someone skilled in the art in private so I don’t embarrass my self in public with an obvious mistake...

[PoloSec]

In the beginning GOD...just keep reading from there.

[dr_lew]

Reminds me of NON SERVIAM by Stanislav Lem, reprinted with commentary in THE MIND'S I by Douglas Hofstadter.

From the story:

There is something unworthy in informing personoids that we have created them in enclosures that only simulate infinity, that they are microscopic "psychocysts," capsulations in our world.

[blueunicorn6]

I’m pretty sure that the rest of you were put here for my entertainment.

[Salgak]

It's quite complicated: it's a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey sort of thing. . .

[cripplecreek]

“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,”

Well I think its high time my user hooks me up.

[no-to-illegals]

Love these types of threads. I consider time to not be relevant, therefore my conclusion is the universe is one dimensional.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Don’t hold your breath waiting for this one to get sorted out.

It took 50 years just to find the Higgs boson. And almost as long to solve the solar neutrino problem.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Great post! This is a nice summary.

[Figment]

Sounds like someone on acid rambling...

[Pontiac]

In 2006, Ashtekar and his colleagues reported7 a series of simulations that took advantage of that fact, using the loop quantum gravity version of Einstein's equations to run the clock backwards and visualize what happened before the Big Bang. The reversed cosmos contracted towards the Big Bang, as expected. But as it approached the fundamental size limit dictated by loop quantum gravity, a repulsive force kicked in and kept the singularity open, turning it into a tunnel to a cosmos that preceded our own.

This year, physicists Rodolfo Gambini at the Uruguayan University of the Republic in Montevideo and Jorge Pullin at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge reported a similar simulation for a black hole. They found that an observer travelling deep into the heart of a black hole would encounter not a singularity, but a thin space-time tunnel leading to another part of space.

I found this fascinating. I have for years thought that the singularity before the Big Bang must have been very much like a Black Hole. This reinforces that theory.

In these two simulations both the singularity prior to the Big Bang and the singularity of a Black Hole become tunnels. It could simply be that both simulations have a common or different mathematical errors that lead to this tunnel effect but I find it intriguing.

[mikrofon]

Some interesting pull-quotes & observations from the various sections in the article:

---

[i]f theories cannot be tested, “then to me, they are not science. They are just religious beliefs, and they hold no interest for me.”

---

The reversed cosmos contracted towards the Big Bang, as expected. But as it approached the fundamental size limit dictated by loop quantum gravity, a repulsive force kicked in and kept the singularity open, turning it into a tunnel to a cosmos that preceded our own... [a]n observer travelling deep into the heart of a black hole would encounter not a singularity, but a thin space-time tunnel leading to another part of space.

---

“It is early days and our job is hard because we are fishes swimming in the fluid at the same time as trying to understand it,”

---

[a]dding causality changed everything. After all, says Loll, the dimension of time is not quite like the three dimensions of space. “We cannot travel back and forth in time,” she says. So the team changed its simulations to ensure that effects could not come before their cause — and found that the space-time chunks started consistently assembling themselves into smooth four-dimensional universes with properties similar to our own... [s]ome suggest that the appearance of dark energy is a sign that our Universe is now growing a fourth spatial dimension.

---

[t]he three-dimensional universe is being held together by quantum entanglement on the boundary — which means that in some sense, quantum entanglement and space-time are the same thing.

[Lawgvr1955]

Pass the Dutchie ‘pon the left hand side, man.

[Intolerant in NJ]

So what is on the other side of the Universe?....

[Bullish]

The holographic image of me ruling the entire universe isn’t far off now.

[Condor51]

“Imagine waking up one day and realizing that you actually live inside a computer game,” says Mark Van Raamsdonk

SIMCITY^TM, the final version.

[Skooz]

bfl

[21stCenturion]

...

[Hot Tabasco]

They argue that such a radical reconceptualization of reality is the only way to explain what happens when the infinitely dense 'singularity' at the core of a black hole distorts the fabric of space-time beyond all recognition, ...

After playing softball yesterday morning, me and my fellow seniors were sitting at the picnic table, eating chips and drinking beer when that very subject came up........what a coincidence.