beyond the universe

Discussion in 'Physics & Math' started by stef 730, Mar 9, 2002.

  1. stef 730 Registered Member

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    19
    What could possibly lie beyond the visible universe? What if the universe is like a drop of water in the ocean and there are other domains much bigger than are own?

    I know that is impossible to look past the cosmological horizon, but if it weren't, what might we see? For me it is hard to comprehend and I was wondering what others had to say.
     
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  3. Tyler Registered Senior Member

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    What do we mean by outside the Universe? I can't even comprehend that idea. Like there's some barrier between the Universe and then further matter. But then how d we define Universe?
     
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  5. Pollux V Ra Bless America Registered Senior Member

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    Couldn't we just say that the universe is infinite, that it always has been and always will be? That no matter how far you go that you will never reach an end, that there is an infinite amount of combinations of everything to continuously regenerate new things.

    Welcome to sciforums, stef, since it may be overwhelming, I find it helps to close one eye

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  7. Hoth Registered Senior Member

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    He said "beyond the visible universe", not beyond the absolute universe, which makes the question harder.

    Maybe before the big bang there was another universe that was an opposite of ours, like a reversed time version of ours... one that started out infinitely large and thin and slowly coalessed to eventually become the big crunch that led to our big bang. That'd be nicely symmetric, and fun, even if it doesn't make too much sense from our perspecitve.

    If there's something which we can't observe the effects of, we'll never be able to understand it.
     
  8. Pollux V Ra Bless America Registered Senior Member

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    If it's not infinite my theory is that something sometime went faster than the speed of light, and we are inside that unlucky bloke right now.
     
  9. Tyler Registered Senior Member

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    If something is infinitely big, as far as I know my math, there is no way for it too shrink below infinte. Infinite - 1 = infinite; does it not?
     
  10. kmguru Staff Member

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    Can anyone tell me the following:

    The size of the visible Universe in light years (x,y,z)
    The average size of a galaxy in LY (x,y,z)
    The average distance between galaxies in LY
     
  11. Xelios We're setting you adrift idiot Registered Senior Member

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    2,447
    The size of the visible universe is the time since the Big Bang (about 15-18 billion ly) in all directions.

    I believe our galaxy is no more than 100,000 ly across (50 kiloparsecs) but only about 100 parsecs "thick" at its thickest point.

    The average seperation of galaxies in a cluster is several megaparsecs. The distance between clusters of galaxies is usually about 10 megaparsecs. Not sure what that is in ly though.
     
  12. Adam §Þ@ç€ MØnk€¥ Registered Senior Member

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    I was thinking that either the universe is EVERYWHERE, infinite, eternal, and there was no Big Bang at all... Or, maybe we have Big Bangs followed by Big Crunch/new Big Bang, et cetera, always expanding and contracting, like a big pulsating mess of matter and energy. But what if that is the case, and sometimes some matter escapes beyond the reach of that final contraction, keeps drifting outward where matter is more and more rare? What is there are "universes", big pulsating collections of matter/energy, spread out all over, like we consider galaxies in the universe? What if throughout some broader medium there are multiple clumps of matter? Just as there are galaxies here and there, what about entire "universes" expanding and collapsing here and there, separated by mostly empty space, with matter occasionally drifting between?
     
  13. kmguru Staff Member

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    11,757
    Xelios:

    Based on your data, I roughly calculate the distance between two Universes (assuming there is more) to be about 10,000 billion Light Years. If that is the case, the photon coming from another universe might lose all or major part of its energy by the time it gets to our universe. Besides we have no idea what may lie at the edge of our universe. It could be a fluidic medium that can not pass light....

    Just some thoughts to chew on.....(for hamster that is, btw, where is hamster?)

    On the big bang thing, I am not too convinced that is what happened. We may get a better explanation one of these days....
     
  14. stef 730 Registered Member

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    Adam's thinking like i am. Collections of universes outside our own like galaxies in our universe. Or there might be infinite nothingness in all directions.
     
  15. Boris2 Valued Senior Member

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    Stef
    >>Collections of universes outside our own like galaxies in our universe. Or there might be infinite nothingness in all directions.

    Yes either of these is a possibility.

    There is no "outside" to this universe. This universe is "made" of spacetime. So if this Universe is spacetime how can you have something that exist without space to exist in or time to exist?

    There are multiverse theories, do a Google, but there is probably no way for us to ever find out. This is because we would, or our probes etc, have to cross a region of no spacetime to find them.
     
  16. ismu ::phenomenon::. Registered Senior Member

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    infinitely large?...

    It may seem hard to believe that space can be anything BUT infinite! If space ends at some boundary, what could lie beyond the boundary, if not more space?

    But in the 1850s, the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann discovered an alternative -- a new geometrical shape that has a finite volume, yet has no boundaries at all. This new three-dimensional shape is called a "hypersphere." Although a hypersphere cannot be visualized from the outside, it CAN be visualized and drawn from the inside. One catch: the geometry inside this new shape is different from the Euclidean geometry we learn in school.

    Today we know that there are actually several alternatives to infinite space. That's good, because the concept of infinite space is a difficult one: If there are infinitely many galaxies like ours, would there be other creatures out there who looked just like you? We know of no other infinities in nature.

    Astronomers have not been able to directly detect a "curvature" to the universe, and have not been able to find enough matter in the universe that would cause space to curve around on itself. Therefore, we can not say with confidence that the universe is finite. But it is still possible for the universe to be finite and extremely large: If the entire universe were large enough, then measurements in the part we can observe wouldn't let us distinguish the shape of the universe as a whole -- anymore than we could tell if the Earth were flat or round based on observations in our own backyard. For the time being, we don't know what kind of universe we inhabit: an infinite one we can't quite conceive of, or a finite one whose size we can't quite determine!
     
  17. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    It seems strange, but I think that our universe is about 90-100 billion light years in diameter.

    A recent article in Scientific American stated that photons from the Cosmic Microwavve Background have traveled about 45 billion light years, but only took about 13 billion years to make the trip. The expansion of the universe elongated the path they took to get to us.

    The above suggests that we are at the center of an observable universe which is 45-50 light years in diameter.
     
  18. MacM Registered Senior Member

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    10,104
    I personally see the universe as being finite. That is there is "Nothinness" as our Domain . Nothingness being defined as absence of time space. As Dinoasur has stated I too see the universe being much larger than what we observe.

    I see time-space as an ongoing expansion from the initial Big Bang with time-space expanding faster than the material expansion within it. So galaxies are moving out into newly created universal volumes.
     
  19. ddovala Pi is exactly 3 Registered Senior Member

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    What if to an outside observer our universe expands and contracts incredibly fast, almost infinately, and radiates energy as such. Then expanding outward our universe could be some kind of subatomic partical to a higher world, persay. And likewise all of our matter, (if we could zoom in that far, which, i know, is impossible) were other universes expanding and contracting almost infinately fast (making a spherical shape?). Etc. etc. If this were true there would be no "elementary" particle right?
     
  20. jellyca Registered Member

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    1
    this hurts my head. i want the answers. i feel that when i am older i will accept that we are not ready or meant to know and will leave it be but for now i like to think about my different ideas. I always used to imagine that the universe was like a bubble and when you came up to the edge, it was like a force holding it all together. the wall would be trasparent and you could just pass through it like fog....even my imagination wont let me see what is beyond the 'bubble' though. P.S more life must be out there! just us in the whole universe, yeah right... and let me guess, it revolves around us too!

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  21. Billy T Use Sugar Cane Alcohol car Fuel Valued Senior Member

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    "Beyond the Universe" is located the region "the inside of the outside."

    Zen anyone?

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    To MacM:
    Glad to see you active here again. Your and my, (when it comes to how mind works) quality of crackpots are rare.

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  22. Dinosaur Rational Skeptic Valued Senior Member

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    If the observable recession velocities are correct (they probably are at least reasonable), then there are galaxies moving away from us at velocities greater than the speed of light. This is independent of the validity of the current Big Bang Cosmology: It only depends on the validity of the observed recession velocities and the derived relation between recession velocity and distance.

    On the basis of the above, the regions beyond the observable universe are not very different from the observable universe. There are clusters of galaxies separated by large volumes of space which are empty or close to being a vacuum. Perhaps the density of that region is less than the density of the observable universe (I do not know about this issue).

    Since the observable universe is a sphere centered on our solar system, I suppose that the region beyond it is best thought of as a spherical shell. Note: That region is not only not observable, it can have no cause/effect relationship with us.

    Note: From the point of view of Alpha Centauri, the observable universe is a sphere whose center is offset from our observable universe by about 4 light years. Similarly, the observable universe from the point of view of the Andromeda Galaxy, the center of the observable universe is offset from our observable universe by about 2.5 million light years.

    In my mind, I think of the entire universe as a 3D sphere. That view is not consistent with the above. If the entire universe is a 3D sphere, the observable universe could not be a sphere with a center offset from our observable universe from the point of view of every galaxy, including those receding from at velocities way beyond the speed of light.

    The above suggests either an infinite universe or some 4D or higher dimensional geometry.
    • If Bang cosmology is correct, an infinite universe does not seem reasonable, since it has only been expanding for about 13 billion years. Note again: This is not dependent on the validity of Big Bang Cosmology. It is only dependent on the validity of the observed recession velocities, which seem to be at least close to correct. If the recession velocities are incorrect by a large amount, the data still indicates an expanding universe with a finite age, not an infinite universe.

    • This leaves us with a finite universe conforming to some higher dimensional geometry rather than its being a 3D sphere. A 4D geometric shape with time as the fourth dimension? A 4D geometric shape of some sort with the fourth dimension being spatial rather than being time? Some 4D shape embedded in a much higher dimensional space, allowing for very counterintuitive geometric properties?
    Note that objects like Klein bottles (a 2D surface) cannot be embedded in a 3D space. With our 3D intuition, we cannot visualize such geometric objects.

    Note that a cone or a cylinder and many other 2D surfaces have the same intrinsic geometry as a Euclidean Plane. In higher dimensional spaces, there can be some weirdly curved 2D & 3D spaces which conform to ordinary geometry.

    Once you accept the notion of our universe being finite (which it might be), you can speculate that there are other universes external to ours, although we or our descendants are unlikely to ever be able to interact with or observe such universes. I obviously do not acept the notion of colliding branes (My intuition has been wrong on simpler issues so I will not try to defend this opinion).

    BTW: Cantor showed the logical consistency of the concept of orders of infinity. The real numbers are an example of an infiinty beyond that of the infinite set of integers. I suppose our universe could be infinite without negating the possibility of universses external to it. This boggles my mind too much for me to try to think deeply about the concept.
     
  23. nietzschefan Thread Killer Valued Senior Member

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    Big bang = just a really big Quasar? One of many?

    We really would not see anything coming at us from and equivalent "bang" 1 trillion LY away...

    We accept that other galaxies exhist, because we can see them. So far we have not detected another ummmm "universe-bigbang", so we don't know. It could be we would never know right? As the masses start to pull back on each other again and we go back to the "big crunch", we get pulled away from other bang-crunches. One would think perhaps that eventually all of these would also be pulled together...
     

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