Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: thirdheavenward
I am not really an expert on Cosmology, but I suspect that the author of this article isn't one either.

As a matter of fact, he's one of the premier experts on cosmology in the world (and a colleague of mine here at Penn). When it comes to testing cosmological models against hard observational data, there's none better.

The Big Bang theory stipulates that at the beginning the volume of the universe was zero. After that, it expanded (extremely rapidly) and continues to do so, such that the total volume of the universe grew and continues to grow at a high but finite rate.

That refers to our horizon, but not to the whole. In the standard Friedmann cosmology, the volume of the universe can be represented as the "surface" of a 4-dimensional hypersphere. We have a finite horizon, or "Hubble volume"--the volume of the universe that is receding from us at a velocity less than the velocity of light--but the whole is (in principle) finite, too: it eventually curves back upon itself.

[Geek alert: read carefully what I said. In any cosmological model, there will be parts of the universe that are receding faster than light. This does not violate special relativity, because these regions are out of causal contact with us.]

The question remains: what is the radius of that hypersphere? It could be anything, according to Friedmann; it's just something you have to measure. On Earth, for example, you can measure the radius of the Earth simply by noting that an equilateral triangle, 10 million meters on each side, will have interior angles of 90 degrees each, rather than the 60 degrees of a small equilateral triangle.

We now (as of 4 months ago) have a similar measure for the largest possible triangles that can be drawn in our Hubble volume. No matter how big, the interior angles sum to 180 degrees. This corresponds to a hypersphere of infinite radius; in other words, the universe is flat.

This agrees with the theoretical prediction of Inflationary Cosmology.

[Geek alert: the curvature could also have been negative, in which case the universe would have a hyperbolic shape, rather than a hyperspherical shape.]

62 posted on 06/25/2003 10:43:40 AM PDT by Physicist
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 37 | View Replies ]


To: Physicist
Then we would have had not only lots of parallel universes, but lots of parallel lines too.
72 posted on 06/25/2003 11:33:47 AM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

To: Physicist
You didn't directly address my main argument (that finite plus finite is still finite), but you did indirectly assure me that the guy who thought this stuff up isn't a crank. Therefore I deduce that the assumption I missed at first pass through the article is:

Assumption: The universe was infinite in extent at the big bang, just as it is infinite in extent now, but it was just a lot smaller back then.

I tend to like a tidy "little" finite universe better, but I can't think of any way one could tell the difference. So, OK, I guess I didn't read the article carefully enough.

Also, I don't think the radius of the hypersphere has anything to do with volume. If I understand things properly, the radius has to do with the curvature. For example, the universe could be all of one square meter in total volume, but the radius of curvature could still be infinite. So making that infinite radius more than just curvature, and saying that the infinite radius is both the radius of curvature and the radius of the volume of the universe, would also be an assumption (although it would be in some ways a satisfactory connection).
113 posted on 06/27/2003 9:36:00 AM PDT by thirdheavenward
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 62 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson