Finite or Infinite Number of Possible Images on an LCD Display?

The universe contains an infinite number of discrete events limited in infinitude only by the amount of time the universe and things in it exists. The vast majority of events in the universe cannot be observed from a single location, or even a finite number of locations.. Discrete energy events that leave any location at the speed of light can be observed exactly once and then are never observed from that location again. The time scale on which such events can potentially be observed is infinite both on larger scales and smaller ones relative to the scale of events we inhabit.

What theory is it exactly that makes you or others like Brian Greene, for instance, believe this universe is by any measure "finite"?

How exactly can the quantity of energy contained in the universe be considered "finite", particularly when such a large part of that energy / matter resides inside of the event horizons of black holes? Any energy residing in such domains will not be observable for many times the current age of the universe, until the black holes almost completely evaporate.

The universe itself can be though of as a sort of physical memory storage device. Current energy states, like inertia, may depend on a long history or sequence of previous states, but only the current state of motion / frame of reference is retained until or unless something induces that state to change again by means of imparting or removing energy and changing its state of motion or direction.

Many of your statements surprise me, Fraggle Rocker. I am truly interested in where such strange ideas like a finite energy universe are coming from.

 

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Fraggle Rocker said:

"You don't seem to understand that the Big Bang created a certain amount of matter and energy, and since then, no phenomenon has or will create any more. We're stuck with what we've got."

>>Now I understand perfectly. And this "certain amount" of matter and energy was very, very certain too, was it? Cannot a "certain amount" also be infinite, for all intents and purposes? What makes cosmologists so very certain that the Big Bang was the source of ALL of the energy / matter in the known universe? Carried it all in on the backs of giant (but finite) tortoises, was it?

If universe we see actually is finite, I somehow doubt the reason has very much to do with anything like a Big Bang. I don't believe for a zeptosecond in anything like a BB that violates conservation of energy for very long, much less 13.8 billion years. A black hole containing everything in the universe would take much longer than that to evaporate, so I'm all for a steady-state black hole universe with no BB, only an initial collapse. This would also be a "finite" universe, if the idea of an infinite one somehow bothers you. None of this is my idea either, but it is more plausible than what cosmologists seem to be pushing. And there's plenty more mass / energy outside our universe that is still being pulled into our EH. Don't bother asking where it all came from, because we will literally never know.

Give them the periodic chart though Li and they think they have the key to the whole universe of creation.

 

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stuff up.....

 

"A certain amount" by definition cannot be an infinite amount.
The BB being the source of all matter/energy, would also be logically a foregone conclusion, since it was also the source of all space and time itself.

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That's OK, as long as you realise it is only speculation.


Whether the Universe is infinite or finite, they both can raise certain questions.
Evidence though at this time, infers that the Universe is infinite and will expand forever.
A couple of interesting papers.........
http://fisica.ciencias.uchile.cl/~gonzalo/cursos/termo_II-04/seminarios/EJP_Stenger-bigbang_90.pdf
Abstract.
It is commonly believed that the origin of the Universe must have involved the violation of natural laws, particularly energy conservation and the second law of thermodynamics. Here is it shown that this need not have been the case, that the Universe could have begun from a state of zero energy and maximum entropy, and then naturally evolved into what we see today without violating any known principles of physics. The fundamental particles and the force laws they obey then come about through a series of random symmetrybreaking phase transitions during the period of exponential expansion in the first fraction of a second after the Universe appears as a quantum fluctuation.

and.......


A Universe from Nothing
by Alexei V. Filippenko and Jay M. Pasachoff

Insights from modern physics suggest that our wondrous universe may be the ultimate free lunch.

Adapted from The Cosmos: Astronomy in the New Millennium, 1st edition, by Jay M. Pasachoff and Alex Filippenko, © 2001. Reprinted with permission of Brooks/Cole, an imprint of the Wadsworth Group, a division of Thomson Learning.

In the inflationary theory, matter, antimatter, and photons were produced by the energy of the false vacuum, which was released following the phase transition. All of these particles consist of positive energy. This energy, however, is exactly balanced by the negative gravitational energy of everything pulling on everything else. In other words, the total energy of the universe is zero! It is remarkable that the universe consists of essentially nothing, but (fortunately for us) in positive and negative parts. You can easily see that gravity is associated with negative energy: If you drop a ball from rest (defined to be a state of zero energy), it gains energy of motion (kinetic energy) as it falls. But this gain is exactly balanced by a larger negative gravitational energy as it comes closer to Earth’s center, so the sum of the two energies remains zero.

The idea of a zero-energy universe, together with inflation, suggests that all one needs is just a tiny bit of energy to get the whole thing started (that is, a tiny volume of energy in which inflation can begin). The universe then experiences inflationary expansion, but without creating net energy.

What produced the energy before inflation? This is perhaps the ultimate question. As crazy as it might seem, the energy may have come out of nothing! The meaning of “nothing” is somewhat ambiguous here. It might be the vacuum in some pre-existing space and time, or it could be nothing at all – that is, all concepts of space and time were created with the universe itself.

Quantum theory, and specifically Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, provide a natural explanation for how that energy may have come out of nothing. Throughout the universe, particles and antiparticles spontaneously form and quickly annihilate each other without violating the law of energy conservation. These spontaneous births and deaths of so-called “virtual particle” pairs are known as “quantum fluctuations.” Indeed, laboratory experiments have proven that quantum fluctuations occur everywhere, all the time. Virtual particle pairs (such as electrons and positrons) directly affect the energy levels of atoms, and the predicted energy levels disagree with the experimentally measured levels unless quantum fluctuations are taken into account.

Perhaps many quantum fluctuations occurred before the birth of our universe. Most of them quickly disappeared. But one lived sufficiently long and had the right conditions for inflation to have been initiated. Thereafter, the original tiny volume inflated by an enormous factor, and our macroscopic universe was born. The original particle-antiparticle pair (or pairs) may have subsequently annihilated each other – but even if they didn’t, the violation of energy conservation would be minuscule, not large enough to be measurable.

If this admittedly speculative hypothesis is correct, then the answer to the ultimate question is that the universe is the ultimate free lunch! It came from nothing, and its total energy is zero, but it nevertheless has incredible structure and complexity. There could even be many other such universes, spatially distinct from ours.

 

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/infpoint.html
How can the Universe be infinite if it was all concentrated into a point at the Big Bang?
The Universe was not concentrated into a point at the time of the Big Bang. But the observable Universe was concentrated into a point. The distinction between the whole Universe and the part of it that we can see is important. In the figure below, two views of the Universe are shown: on the left for 1 Gyr after the Big Bang, and on the right the current Universe 13 Gyr after the Big Bang (assuming that the Hubble constant is Ho = 50 km/sec/Mpc and the Universe has the critical density.)

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The size of the box in each view is 78 billion light years. The green circle on the the right is the part of the Universe that we can currently see. In the view on the left, this same part of the Universe is shown by the green circle, but now the green circle is a tiny fraction of the 78 billion light year box, and the box is an infinitesimal fraction of the whole Universe. If we go to smaller and smaller times since the Big Bang, the green circle shrinks to a point, but the 78 billion light year box is always full, and it is always an infinitesimal fraction of the infinite Universe.


Note that the black dots represent galaxies, and the galaxies do not expand even though the separation between galaxies grows with time.

 

The WMAP experiment predicts this universe is infinite in extent. The geometry is flat. Not open or closed. By infinite in extent the universe has a beginning and will expand forever. The Planck experiment confirmed WMAP to a smaller error bar. Anybody actually interested in cosmology should pay attention to these great experiments. There's so much lack of scholarship in these threads concerning the science of cosmology. Hard to figure since it's the most interesting of all.

 

If you haven't read Guths book I predict you'd really enjoy reading it.

 

At least some cosmology ideas still acknowledge the universe may be infinite; WMAP and Planck for starters.

The estimate of 10^80 nucleons in the 'known' or observable universe has been around for decades, and that's finite for certain, but it's a cheat because we have no idea there could be anything further out. If one were standing on the most distant observable object in every direction, presumably from those locations one would be able to observe both the Milky Way and whatever was the same distance away from it in opposing orthogonal directions, so this has to expand the bubble a bit. 10^80 nucleons is a lot of discrete things to distribute and arrange in 4 dimensions inside of a space that big, particularly with every one of those interacting with free energy in every imaginable way for the last 13 billion years.

Guys, that looks pretty much infinite to me, but it could also be that I'm just infinitely dense. Suddenly, there seems to be no further argument here.

 

Fraggle;

I'll try to do some more reading, but I have to tell you, it's pretty tough to get through some of this new age cosmology for someone who grew up worshiping the cosmos Carl Sagan flew through. He wasn't so popular in some circles. Any problems with whatever Neil Tyson has written? That might be easier for me to read for a start. I can't stand Brian Greene, and only one book by Sean Carroll. Cosmology has a way of modulating from science into philosophy much easier than other sciences, I've noticed.

"sign of the cross"? Are you very certain those are scientists in the room?

 

As a final thought about the finite display problem:

Imagine the originally proposed 2 megapixel black/white display is working to its original program to try and display all possible images in its low resolution manner.

As it does this, a grain of peridot-colored pollen the size of a pixel comes in through a crack in an open window and adheres to one of the pixels being displayed on the screen.

Those watching the display are shocked and astounded, for this display is not one of the possible 2^(2,000,000) possible combinations, and yet there it is, a BRAND NEW combination and artistic statement (on the part of the pollen grain) for all to see. The designers of the display and the program to put it through its paces are flabbergasted, and cannot conceive of the idea that something as insignificant as an event of a single grain of pollen adhering to a display screen has accidentally opened up so many new venues of expression on a formerly black/white only display, but now with a single pixel that is capable of displaying darker or lighter shades of peridot.

There are more uncountably infinite things in heaven and the Earth than are dreamt of in a philosophy that is based on discrete mathematics and combinatorics. Absolutes in any form are not the key to understanding very much of anything. Counting complements, but does not replace cognition. Symbolic representations of anything real has similar limitations. These are tools of a finite mind.

 

danshawen #13

If the number of pixels is n, and a pixel has 2 states, (white/black, 0/1), then all possible combinations would be 2^n. A single scan, top to bottom, would define a frame.

1. It would not render every event, since the gray shades would be filtered out to 0 or 1, i.e. a loss in resolution. Two objects that varied only in shades of gray, could be displayed as identical. The detail of some events/things exceeds the capacity of the display. Some frames would resemble known patterns in memory, others would be unrecognizable. A person could imagine things as when looking at clouds, or dirty socks that fold themselves into profiles of Lincoln.

2. All possible combinations includes rotated images. The rotation of a display screen does not alter the resolution.

3. A sequence of frames over time is not the same as a frame.

With the set F of all possible frames, one could generate expanded frames using F (your mosaic). This would be similar to words from a finite set of letters (alphabet), sentences from words, etc., forming more complex structures. Most letter combinations would be gibberish. This also notes the inefficiency of random processes to form meaningful ideas, eg. the chimp at the keyboard writing stories.

As for "infinity", it's a nonsensical, ambiguous, useless word, which should be removed from any language.

 

I was following what your post says, up to this:

Mathematics, if it's a language, would not make a lot of sense without the notion of infinity. There are different kinds of mathematical infinity, but it must exist.
Mathematical proofs would probably be impossible; numbers would all belong to finite sets and quite useless.

You wouldn't be able to draw any vertical lines because they have infinite slope. You see what I'm doing here, is making your claim look patently ridiculous.

 

arfa brane #34

“Infinity” could be substituted with “without limit”, implying an indeterminate value.
That would be more specific to the relation or condition that “infinity” is supposed to represent.

Examine your own claim. Anyone can draw a vertical line. The infinite slope is the result of trying to divide a number by zero, in the process of making a measurement.

 

"Infinite" and "without limit" are two ways to express the same concept. So I don't see anything here beyond a tautology.
The infinite slope of a line isn't a "result" of trying to divide by zero, it's an axiom of geometry.

There are an infinite number of lines with finite slope between two perpendicular lines when the latter are "horizontal and vertical", such that a horizontal line has a slope of zero.

 

I'm perpetually troubled by this imprecise characterization of infinity. The set {1/n} as n ranges over the natural numbers is infinite, yet has a limit, namely 0.

The unit interval in the real numbers is bounded, yet contains an uncountable infinity of points.

It's meaningless and misleading to define or characterize infinite as "without limit."

 

I think it's a misconception that without limit cannot be a type of "well-defined" infinity. What you're saying is therefore misleading, probably meaningless too.

One conceptual problem is with the use of "infinite number", when all numbers are finite in value. This is an abuse of terminology, but we live with it.

 

arfa brane #36

A tautology involves redundancy, using two different words in a statement, when one would suffice. Eg. there was nothing in the empty container. I was suggesting substitution of one word for another.


When consulting a dictionary and Wikipedia, both make frequent use of the term "unlimited" or "unbounded", which is the essence of the word "infinite", i.e. translated from latin "not bounded". The problem with "infinity" is confusing/misinterpreting it with "number", which has a value. Even the math world misuses it in the definition of a limit. The definition of a limit contains the phrase "as x approaches infinity", but infinity has no limit! You can't approach the horizon either. A simple revision like "as x increases without limit" or "...without bound", is more specific to the issue of a value vs no value.

The slope of a line is the ratio of vertical/horizontal, y/x. If y=0, it's a horizontal line. If x=0, it's a vertical line, but y/0 is indeterminate, having no value. Fortunately we don't rely on rectangular coordinates to measure angles. Geometers and carpenters knowing there are 90° in a right angle, have been constructing vertical lines for ages without "infinity".

 

someguy #37

A boundary for (1/n) , but not for N.

A boundary for 1 , but not for R.

Real numbers/points have no extent, thus you can put as many as desired in a line segment. Infinity has no value in either case, and any other case, by definition. If it doesn't have a value, then precision is not an issue.

As mentioned above, "without limit" is a common expression that explicitly defines the nature of the concept.

If infinity has a value, what is it?