Posted on 11/04/2007 10:07:35 PM PST by SunkenCiv
Someday spacecraft will be powerful enough perhaps to journey at extraordinary speeds, spanning the vast interstellar voids. Our technology might develop until we become a vast, powerful intergalactic society, capable of resolving the deepest quandaries ever known. Only then could we definitely answer what is perhaps the ultimate question: "Is the universe shaped like a doughnut?" This last question pertains to an idea attributed to Homer and mentioned by guest star Stephen Hawking in an episode of The Simpsons. In the episode, Lisa Simpson joins Springfield's chapter of the brainy organisation Mensa, which assumes mayoral duties and vows to remake Springfield into a perfect society. The prospect of experiencing a blossoming utopia attracts the attention of the British cosmologist Hawking, who - in his first animated appearance on the show - decides to visit and see it for himself.
(Excerpt) Read more at cosmosmagazine.com ...
What's Science Ever Done For Us:
What the Simpsons Can Teach Us
About Physics, Robots, Life,
and the Universe
by Paul Halpern
Illustration by Itzhak Bentov, “Stalking the Wild Pendulum.” 1977.
It is a tribute to how far we have come in theoretical physics that it now takes enormous machines and a great deal of money to perform an experiment whose results we cannot predict. — Stephen Hawking in a 1980 lecture, quoted in Chaos.
In an unrelated specialty, pastry also can explain the Fall of Rome... and a bismarck produced a treaty system that kep the peace in Europe for forty years.
Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm .... Uuuuniverses....
What I wanna know is, if the ENTIRE UNIVERSE is a DOUGHNUT, how am I supposed to lose weight and lower my cholesterol?
The universe is spherical, finite, and unbounded.
Oxymoron or typo?
“Finite, yet unbounded” was used in a graphic novel (comic book) called “So Beautiful, and So Dangerous”, but is a quote of Einstein.
Take the surface of the earth. We know it's finite in area, but you can travel in a straight line anywhere on its surface and never fall off an edge, say, or bump into some kind of giant wall that lets you go no further. It's finite, but unbounded. The universe may be the same, except in three dimensions (or more) instead of two.
It’s topology. Mathematical concepts often seem strange at first.
I would agree it has three dimensions if it were finite, as do all finite things. But wouldn't it be more accurately described as having three directions if the universe was boundless? I know, I know, just a habit saying we have a three-dimensional universe, I suppose. But is anyone here suggesting we have a measureable universe, at least in theory?
I'm no scientist, of course, but yes, I think that's still a possibility in the eyes of science.
Someday scientists may be able to say definitively that the universe is X cubic megaparsecs in volume (I'm ignoring any other dimensions like time for the moment) and expanding at the rate of y (i.e., dX/dt) cubic megaparsecs per year.
Despite this finiteness, we'll be able to go out and jump in our starships of the future and fly off in a given direction forever and ever, and never come to an end. In other words, it's unbounded. We'd just keep looping around and around forever, as the article says.
Of course, here too, I'm ignoring something; namely, the Big Rip or the Big Crunch, or something equally catastrophic that would prevent us from doing anything forever and ever.
Isn’t there a pretty good restaurant at the end of the universe? Ford Prefect told me to mention his name there.
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