Posted on 09/28/2008 12:26:40 PM PDT by LibWhacker
From the "jobs you never knew existed" file...
Ok, my head exploded.
Wow, who would have guessed that the ancient Greeks would have gotten the shape of the universe correct so long ago. Obviously they were talking something slightly different, aether, but the fact that Plato and Aristotle postulated the shape of it to be the dodecahedron is very interesting indeed. Did the scientist who did this study belong to the Pythagorean cult?
Wow! I live in a dodecahedron. 12-sided round round house. I can tell you that it is a real challenge doing interior decorating. And the only interior walls are the bedroom and bathroom. The rest is open.....kind of like a circus tent.
Everyone calls it an octagon. They’ve never heard of dodecahedron.
So THAT’S why soccer is so popular...
Pinging my favorite Freeper Cosmologists.
Wow....you can use that universe shape to predict the DOW move this week!.....lol
Cool, I just clicked on that link at the bottom of the page and was reading about that. Amazing!
The result of is finite volume, but has no boundary. (Just like the surface of a sphere has no bounding edge, but is of finite area, but up one dimension.)
Here's a link to an article in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society with more details.
Neener, neener, neener, now we all live in a dodecahedron! :-)
Hmm. If the universe has a boundary, doesn't that imply a frame of reference external to the universe? That would seem to violate the concept of universe.
Wel that shows my nerdiness then because I didnt even know they linked to that, lol. I just took a history of science course over the summer and we talked about the elemental shapes and the fifth element which is aether. Pretty cool stuff when you really think about it.
And all this time I thought the universe was shaped like Raquel Welch. You learn something every day.
About a quarter of the way down http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/PlatoSolid.htm, there's a nice little interactive chart showing various polyhedra. You can set them rotating, etc., and see that a dodecahedron and soccer ball are quite different.
Yep. Our heads exploded . . Just thinking about jillions and jillions of galaxies similar to ours with centers consisting of gulping black holes all fitting into dodecahedron shapes is just too much for my noggin. It all makes me feel underweight and small. I think I’ll go eat a donut now. - Oh, and there are probably also jillions and jillions of dodecahedrons in a never-ending bunch of them ad infinitum. - I think I’ll eat two donuts. Sigh. . .
So these guys would say our universe doesn't have a boundary either (i.e., you'll never bump into an impassable wall by moving around in it), but it does have a dodecahedral shape.
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