What do they think is at the end of the universe?

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Galvanise_ said:
Well, there are of course multiple theories concerning the end of the Universe. Big Crunch, Big Freeze etc.
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Yes, there have been many hypotheses and the Big Crunch as presented has been largely dismissed for many years. Universal collapse may still happen due to some phenomenon we are yet to observe or understand, but the Big Crunch hypothesis held against the context of known gravitational models isn't going to happen.


Outside of the Universe there wouldn't be any dimensions, so technically it is nothing.
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Again, there is no "outside". There might be a "somewhere else", but the Universe is expanding within itself, not into anything.


We need to understand a lot more about dark energy before we can definitely say it will always go on accelerating in growth.
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Well, depending on your philosophy we can't definitely say anything about anything. However, the current observations and model of the Universe suggest it will go on expanding at an ever increasing rate and that the fate of the Universe is heat death.

At any rate, the fate of the Universe is somewhere humans and post humans are unlikely to have to worry about because the chances are remote that we'll make it anywhere near that far.
 
zmoney said:
if you leave earth heading for one side of the universe, as soon as you hit the edge (B) you end up at the opposite edge (A) its like a big circle.
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So the universe is a Final Fantasy world map?
 
Dice said:
So, as I asked, do they think you at some point enter an endless void?

If there was a big bang, that means all the energies and stars and shit were together at one point. If they are expanding outward from that original point, then there must be a point they have not expanded out to yet. This is what I mean by "end" of the universe, where all the energy and mass of the universe has not yet expanded. Is it a void out there?
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Just because you can ask the question doesn't mean it's coherent or meaningful. There's no "beyond the edge of the Universe" in the same sense that there's no "north of the North Pole."
 
Required watching: A Universe From Nothing

To the people saying that the Universe is a infinite like the surface of the sphere, you're wrong with like 99%+ certainty. If you go in one direction long enough, you won't wrap back around, none of the math supports that. Watch the video.
 
Vaporak said:
Just because you can ask the question doesn't mean it's coherent or meaningful.
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Way to be an ass to someone humbly asking an honest question to remedy their admitted ignorance.
 
mike23 said:
Required watching: A Universe From Nothing

To the people saying that the Universe is a infinite like the surface of the sphere, you're wrong with like 99%+ certainty. If you go in one direction long enough, you won't wrap back around, none of the math supports that. Watch the video.
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Don't remember that point being made (or at least the suggestion there is an edge, but that may not be what you are saying). Either way, I need to rewatch.
 
Dice said:
I haven't really studied the cosmic things too much. Do they think that you can just pass into an endless void, or do you hit some sort of time-space bubble wall and all the typical rules go funky?

Please no religious debate, don't even troll it because that somehow starts it for real.
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You can't get to the end of the universe because space-time is expanding at a speed you can never hope to accomplish. If spacetime is curved in a certain way, then the universe is closed in on itself and reaching the "end" will take you in circles. If spacetime is not curved in this way, you will reach a spot where you simply cannot move any further. Not really a wall but you may as well think of it as such.

Don't remember that point being made (or at least the suggestion there is an edge, but that may not be what you are saying). Either way, I need to rewatch.
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Lawrence proposes it as one of three models, but posts that he thinks "Flat" is the only acceptable one because a flat spacetime geometry is one where the net-energy of the universe is zero, and thus the universe can exist without requiring an explanation for why energy exists as opposed to not existing (which is a very appealing notion).
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
Lawrence proposes it as one of three models, but posts that he thinks "Flat" is the only acceptable one because a flat spacetime geometry is one where the net-energy of the universe is zero, and thus the universe can exist without requiring an explanation for why energy exists as opposed to not existing (which is a very appealing notion).
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He doesn't just suggest that it's flat, he shows that mathematically the universe is certain to be flat.
 
Morn said:
mib_115Marbles.jpg
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And whats on the end of that?
 
mike23 said:
He doesn't just suggest that it's flat, he shows that mathematically the universe is certain to be flat.
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Are you certain about that? Because my recollection of that lecture was that he said that the evidence suggests that it's not, but that he thinks it has to be for the reasons I stated above. He made the joke about how they've measured it wrong because he knows what the right answer has to be.
 
Dice said:
I haven't really studied the cosmic things too much. Do they think that you can just pass into an endless void, or do you hit some sort of time-space bubble wall and all the typical rules go funky?

Please no religious debate, don't even troll it because that somehow starts it for real.
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The best understanding of our universe today is that it is infinite, and thus, a version of you, of this planet, and the milky way is floating around somewhere far far away.

The universe essentially can repeat itself, and because it is infinite, everything that is possible will have occurred somewhere in the universe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llVjXp9_XgY&feature=player_detailpage#t=1990s

Watch the whole show, its pretty mind boggling.
 
Probably more universes (formation of galaxies created by big bangs) but they are so far apart that their light would never reach us and to us it is just an endless void. Could just be an extreme void between each universe. Just a theory of course.
 
Misanthropy said:
Something (matter) expanding into nothing (void) was the most correct literal answer.
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A void is not nothing. A void has dimensionality.

Again, the Universe is not expanding "into" anything. It is expanding within itself.
 
Nobody can answer the question given, because nobody knows. Therefore, this thread is now just about cosmology.

Endless Universe by Steinhardt and Turok is an interesting book on the subject. The theory they present is cyclic, so before the Big Bang was a period like we have now, then there will be a contraction, another bang, and the cycle repeats itself.

We won't know enough about cosmic background radiation to prove or disprove many of the popular theories for a while, because the necessary equipment to test cosmic background radiation in such a way will be prohibitively expensive, even for governments to fund, for another good ten to twenty years or so.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0385509642/?tag=neogaf0e-20
 
Deku said:
The best understanding of our universe today is that it is infinite, and thus, a version of you, of this planet, and the milky way is floating around somewhere far far away.

The universe essentially can repeat itself, and because it is infinite, everything that is possible will have occurred somewhere in the universe.
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The universe is not infinite. It is finite and expanding.

Mario said:
A void is not nothing. A void has dimensionality.

Again, the Universe is not expanding "into" anything. It is expanding within itself.
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Yes. It's impossible to visualize this properly, however, since we can't imagine the absence of 3D space with our brains.
 
thcsquad said:
Endless Universe by ... Turok
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And here I thought he was into killing dinosaurs. I guess his interaction with Oblivion really made an impact.
 
Rather than think of distance, think of SCALE, ie, what is the smallest particle, smaller than an atom/quark etc etc... and likewise what is the biggest -- a universe or bigger?

So there is apparent infinity at both ends of the 'scale'... what if they are attached?
 
There are two three possibilities:

1) Big Crunch/Endless Universe - The expansion of the universe will slowly halt and then start to converge again, eventually reaching critical density and resulting in another big bang.

2) Big Freeze - The universe will continue to expand indefinitely until heat is so spread out that all movements slows and stops.

3) Something intervenes that we don't know about
 
Dice said:
I've read about wormholes and they try to explain it as a tube through a folded over piece of paper. I know that is not literal but rather an example to try and understand what is going on. I've also heard some say the universe is like the surface of a doughnut.

So you're saying it is just in the nature of the universe, that it has an extra form that is difficult for us to understand? Where earth might seem flat to someone walking along, it is actually a sphere, and likewise the universe may seem like an expanding sphere you travel around within, but the rules actually function differently from something that simple?

If that is the case, all this distance between us and other things is mostly just perspective, and there may be a way to shortcut through the "distance" we perceive?
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I think you're looking too much into it and needlessly complicating things.
 
How could the universe be flat when we experience the universe in three dimensions?

Citing geometry as a reason seems ridiculous as it is based on axioms. Axioms are great because they allow you to prove things mathematically, but there's nothing to say the universe works the way geometry does.
 
The Universe is expanding in such a way that, for a planet to form around a Sun and produce the proper stuff for life to form and evolve into sentient beings, it takes longer than is possible for a sentient race to ever "catch up" to the expansion. The Universe gives itself a head start.

In other words, the far side of the Universe is out of reach both from our mind's eye and our physical touch. Perfection confirmed?
 
Isn't there a difference between the space of the Universe and the space of the matter filling that space?

To that end, if you pass the edge of the expanding matter, you'd just chill in complete empty nothingness...until the matter presumably catches up to you?

Theoretically, at least?
 
I love it when someone in a thread posts the answer to something, and other people keep discussing it as if nobody knows.

Joey Fox said:
How could the universe be flat when we experience the universe in three dimensions?

Citing geometry as a reason seems ridiculous as it is based on axioms. Axioms are great because they allow you to prove things mathematically, but there's nothing to say the universe works the way geometry does.
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It's not flat as in 2-dimensional, but as in there are edges. If you go to the end, you won't flip around to the other side. Thinking about the universe in three dimensions is problematic because sometimes you need to go up a dimension (or 8) to explain whether the universe has an edge.
 
The Blue Jihad said:
Isn't there a difference between the space of the Universe and the space of the matter filling that space?

To that end, if you pass the edge of the expanding matter, you'd just chill in complete empty nothingness...until the matter presumably catches up to you?

Theoretically, at least?
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No. even deep space is not truly empty. I think the grade school conception of the big bang as an exploding ball of fire in a film set is what throws people off.

You have to imagine time and space itself being wrapped around this expanding mass of particles and that you cannot go beyond this.

Also, that only applies to OUR universe.

The theories of inflation at the big bang suggests multi-verses exist.
 
Dice said:
So, as I asked, do they think you at some point enter an endless void?

If there was a big bang, that means all the energies and stars and shit were together at one point. If they are expanding outward from that original point, then there must be a point they have not expanded out to yet. This is what I mean by "end" of the universe, where all the energy and mass of the universe has not yet expanded. Is it a void out there?
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Doesn't quite work that way. According to current theories, the big bang didn't just contain matter and energy, but space itself. There was nothing before, and then there was a almost instantaneous expansion of space and energy. Matter as we know it didn't actually form for a while, because everything was still condensing*

If we don't restrict ourselves to four spacetime dimensions though, some theories have it that the universe is a giant three dimensional "membrane", and its resting in a higher dimensional space along with a lot of other "parallel" membranes.

*Actually, at high enough temperatures and pressures, the various fundamental forces kind of absorb each other. In the conditions after the big bang, you just have this huge cloud of energy, and over time particles begin taking attributes and combining into larger particles. Temperature is dropping, and gravity gets its own identity, then the strong force, then the weak force, then the electromagnetic force. I think they've actually managed laboratory conditions where the electromagnetic and weak forces become symmetric, hence the new name "electroweak"
 
Deku said:
OUR universe is finite. The universe, at least as best as we understand it, is infinite.

I assume you haven't heard of the multi-verse either?
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There is only one universe, the universe is defined as "all that exists". Of course I've heard of the multiverse, but you're thinking about it all wrong. There are NOT infinite parallel spacetimes, even under the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM. There is 1 for every possible outcome to a probabilistic event. The number of alternate space-times is staggeringly large, but finite, because only some events are probabilistic and each probabilistic event has a finite number of outcomes.

At any point in time, the universe is finite. It is only infinite across infinite time.

The Universe is expanding in such a way that, for a planet to form around a Sun and produce the proper stuff for life to form and evolve into sentient beings, it takes longer than is possible for a sentient race to ever "catch up" to the expansion. The Universe gives itself a head start.
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It doesn't just have a head start, it's expanding at FTL speeds whereas information inside of spacetime is capped at C. That's why people talk about the "visible universe" - there is a huge expanse of stuff we can never have any information about because it's not only distant but expanding FTL.
 
The nature of the universe got me thinking about this thread on reddit about the nature of black holes.

RobotRollCall said:
Imagine, just for a moment, that you are aboard a spaceship equipped with a magical engine capable of accelerating you to any arbitrarily high velocity. This is absolutely and utterly impossible, but it turns out it'll be okay, for reasons you'll see in a second.

Because you know your engine can push you faster than the speed of light, you have no fear of black holes. In the interest of scientific curiosity, you allow yourself to fall through the event horizon of one. And not just any black hole, but rather a carefully chosen one, one sufficiently massive that its event horizon lies quite far from its center. This is so you'll have plenty of time between crossing the event horizon and approaching the region of insane gravitational gradient near the center to make your observations and escape again.

As you fall toward the black hole, you notice some things which strike you as highly unusual, but because you know your general relativity they do not shock or frighten you. First, the stars behind you — that is, in the direction that points away from the black hole — grow much brighter. The light from those stars, falling in toward the black hole, is being blue-shifted by the gravitation; light that was formerly too dim to see, in the deep infrared, is boosted to the point of visibility.

Simultaneously, the black patch of sky that is the event horizon seems to grow strangely. You know from basic geometry that, at this distance, the black hole should subtend about a half a degree of your view — it should, in other words, be about the same size as the full moon as seen from the surface of the Earth. Except it isn't. In fact, it fills half your view. Half of the sky, from notional horizon to notional horizon, is pure, empty blackness. And all the other stars, nearly the whole sky full of stars, are crowded into the hemisphere that lies behind you.

As you continue to fall, the event horizon opens up beneath you, so you feel as if you're descending into a featureless black bowl. Meanwhile, the stars become more and more crowded into a circular region of sky centered on the point immediately aft. The event horizon does not obscure the stars; you can watch a star just at the edge of the event horizon for as long as you like and you'll never see it slip behind the black hole. Rather, the field of view through which you see the rest of the universe gets smaller and smaller, as if you're experiencing tunnel-vision.

Finally, just before you're about to cross the event horizon, you see the entire rest of the observable universe contract to a single, brilliant point immediately behind you. If you train your telescope on that point, you'll see not only the light from all the stars and galaxies, but also a curious dim red glow. This is the cosmic microwave background, boosted to visibility by the intense gravitation of the black hole.

And then the point goes out. All at once, as if God turned off the switch.

You have crossed the event horizon of the black hole.

Focusing on the task at hand, knowing that you have limited time before you must fire up your magical spaceship engine and escape the black hole, you turn to your observations. Except you don't see anything. No light is falling on any of your telescopes. The view out your windows is blacker than mere black; you are looking at non-existence. There is nothing to see, nothing to observe.

You know that somewhere ahead of you lies the singularity … or at least, whatever the universe deems fit to exist at the point where our mathematics fails. But you have no way of observing it. Your mission is a failure.

Disappointed, you decide to end your adventure. You attempt to turn your ship around, such that your magical engine is pointing toward the singularity and so you can thrust yourself away at whatever arbitrarily high velocity is necessary to escape the black hole's hellish gravitation. But you are thwarted.

Your spaceship has sensitive instruments that are designed to detect the gradient of gravitation, so you can orient yourself. These instruments should point straight toward the singularity, allowing you to point your ship in the right direction to escape. Except the instruments are going haywire. They seem to indicate that the singularity lies all around you. In every direction, the gradient of gravitation increases. If you are to believe your instruments, you are at the point of lowest gravitation inside the event horizon, and every direction points "downhill" toward the center of the black hole. So any direction you thrust your spaceship will push you closer to the singularity and your death.

This is clearly nonsense. You cannot believe what your instruments are telling you. It must be a malfunction.

But it isn't. It's the absolute, literal truth. Inside the event horizon of a black hole, there is no way out. There are no directions of space that point away from the singularity. Due to the Lovecraftian curvature of spacetime within the event horizon, all the trajectories that would carry you away from the black hole now point into the past.

In fact, this is the definition of the event horizon. It's the boundary separating points in space where there are trajectories that point away from the black hole from points in space where there are none.

Your magical infinitely-accelerating engine is of no use to you … because you cannot find a direction in which to point it. The singularity is all around you, in every direction you look.

And it is getting closer.
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So that's interesting. A black hole has boundaries, but when you're inside it, there's no way to approach a boundary. You can't leave it. The whole of space curves and is distorted so that for all intents, there is no "outside."

As to what the universe is expanding into, who's to say. In terms of the internal nature of the universe, it may very well be irrelevant though.
 
Morn said:
Somewhere there's an alien browsing GAF and he's laughing his ass off at the primitive humans trying to explain the universe to each other.
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I'm not really laughing. Just interested in your opinions.
 
ThoseDeafMutes said:
There is only one universe, the universe is defined as "all that exists". Of course I've heard of the multiverse, but you're thinking about it all wrong. There are NOT infinite parallel spacetimes, even under the Many-Worlds interpretation of QM. There is 1 for every possible outcome to a probabilistic event. The number of alternate space-times is staggeringly large, but finite, because only some events are probabilistic and each probabilistic event has a finite number of outcomes.

At any point in time, the universe is finite. It is only infinite across infinite time.
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The question is whether the universe is infinite. And there is certainly no theorem to suggest that it isn't.

Some cosmologists are of course uncomfortable with the idea of an infinite space, but infinite space, means infinite possibilities, which means everything that can happen will happen.

This is quite different from the QM theorem of parallel dimensions. Because infinity in this case postulates they can all exist at the same time, just very far apart.
 
I don't understand that definition of flat.

Why would anyone think that flying in one direction would eventually bring you behind yourself? We're in three dimensional space, not on the surface of a sphere like the Earth.
 
britt0n said:
Neil Degrasse Tyson told me on NOVA that there is no end. HOWEVER that traitor told me pluto was not a planet.
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Pluto is not a planet. It's a dwarf planet. Deal with it.

If you truly want Pluto to be redefined as a planet, than there's at least four other bodies you'd have to recognize. One of them is between Mars and Jupiter. How's that for blowing your mind?
 
Joey Fox said:
I don't understand that definition of flat.

Why would anyone think that flying in one direction would eventually bring you behind yourself? We're in three dimensional space, not on the surface of a sphere like the Earth.
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Its...difficult for us to think about, our brains are instinctively wired to think in terms of Euclidian geometry. Think of a piece of fabric: its two dimensional, but that doesn't mean its perfectly flat, you can ripple it in three dimensions. But if you were a two dimensional figure on that fabric, who's third dimension was time, then moving over the ripples would seem perfectly flat spatially to you, but warped temporally. Things would seem to slow down and speed up relatively as you slid over them.
Spacetime is kind of a similar fabric, but we move in three dimensions in four dimensional space. Hence why warping the three space dimensions with a force like gravity results in a warp in the time dimension as well.

Getting back to your question, basically the conception of space as a three dimensional void in all directions is wrong, and its hard to visualize why. And thats not even touching on the havoc that accelerated reference frames wreck with our instincts.


We still don't have a good theory for why time is the only dimension that demands linear movement, other then that certain laws of thermodynamics demand it.
 
wienke said:
First reply nailed it!

Stay cool GAF.
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REally? I tire of these quick gags, i wish at least OP can post when real discussion begins. Sifting through horrid jokes takes its toll.

Anyway - the discussion has begun, looking forward to reading the rest of this thread.
 
Deku said:
The question is whether the universe is infinite. And there is certainly no theorem to suggest that it isn't.
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Big Bang Cosmology demands finite space. Spacetime was infinitesimal, and has been expanding since t=1. The evidence for this is the expanding, accelerating universe, and in order for space to be infinitely large you must invoke some kind of steady-state theory. This is not anything close to accepted and you will struggle to find three astronomers who will tell you that space goes out into infinity in all directions at any point in time.


This is quite different from the QM theorem of parallel dimensions. Because infinity in this case postulates they can all exist at the same time, just very far apart.
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You outright said you were talking about "the multiverse" in your previous post. That is QM Many Worlds, and what you're talking about now - infinite spacetime with infinite matter and energy with infinite possibilities - does not match any known scientific theory.

I don't understand that definition of flat.

Why would anyone think that flying in one direction would eventually bring you behind yourself? We're in three dimensional space, not on the surface of a sphere like the Earth.
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Because when you are talking about three-dimensional flatness it isn't the same as what you are thinking of, which is two dimensional flatness. Don't stress over the fact that you can't imagine it, because nobody can. What's important is that the mathematics work and it makes useful predictions about nature.
 
Joey Fox said:
I don't understand that definition of flat.

Why would anyone think that flying in one direction would eventually bring you behind yourself? We're in three dimensional space, not on the surface of a sphere like the Earth.
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You can turn any dimensional space into a loop in the next higher dimension.

1 dimension -> A line becomes a circle. If you can only travel along the line, you'll eventually reach where you started.

2 dimensions -> A plane becomes a sphere. If you travel in one direction along the sphere, you'll eventually reach where you started.

3 dimensions -> ...well, you can't imagine it, because your brain can't work with dimensions beyond 3. When people say the universe is flat, they really mean, if you projected the 3D universe onto a 2D plane, because then we can think about it again (even if it's not entirely accurate).
 
ianp622 said:
You can turn any dimensional space into a loop in the next higher dimension.

1 dimension -> A line becomes a circle. If you can only travel along the line, you'll eventually reach where you started.

2 dimensions -> A plane becomes a sphere. If you travel in one direction along the sphere, you'll eventually reach where you started.

3 dimensions -> ...well, you can't imagine it, because your brain can't work with dimensions beyond 3. When people say the universe is flat, they really mean, if you projected the 3D universe onto a 2D plane, because then we can think about it again (even if it's not entirely accurate).
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This is much better then the poor explanation I tried to give.
 
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