Historic Moment For Humankind..

[Born Hunter 17,817]

 

 

 

Dunno what you read mate but infinity is bullshit, nothing is infinite. When maths gives infinity, you've made a mistake!

 

The universe had a start and will have an end. Just not a center.

 

I am speaking from the viewpoint of the man in the street. I am just asking question to try and understand a little. An expanding universe if it is as you state like a ballon being blown up till it burst. Does it have a catalist for the expansion the same as a ballon has air injected to cause it to expand?

 

Why does the universe have to have a start and an end? I have read of the birth of stars and the death of stars.

 

Surly because we are just human and are constrained by our notions of our time scale. Whats to say that time is just non existant, and just a scale that we as humans measure to make sense of our orbit around our sun?

 

BTW re infinity and maths whats 1/3rd of a 100? Is it not 33.3 recuring?

 

A very puzzled TC

 

 

Okay, firstly our universe won't burst like a balloon would, it may do a number of things. What is actually expanding is space, which is simply a coordinate system not a physical thing. The universe is all the energy in that space, so as the space expands the density of the universe becomes less dense.

 

What happens next is unclear. What caused expansion was the big bang, like a stick of dynamite going off under water, an explosive force causing rapid expansion of space and the universe. Now, logically like a bomb going off the rate of expansion should attenuate as gravity slowly drags it to a halt........... but is that actually happening? I'm not sure but it's possible that the rate of expansion is increasing, which is illogical! Dark energy? Or does gravity become a repulsive force on a cosmological scale, a scale so large we just have little understanding of it? Or, is everything nice and sensible with expansion decreasing to a limit and then receding to a 'big crunch'?

 

Start and end............ depends how you define it or indeed how you define time. By a start I mean a singularity in which the entire universe started, what came before that I'm ignoring. It doesn't have to have an end but is probable, if it collapses is that 'the end' or if expansion continues unrestrained to nothingness is that the end. It's more a philisophical question I guess.

 

Time is just a dimension like space, not a physical thing just a mathematical concept so in that respect it's not physically existant. It's quite a fundamental concept like space.

 

Infinity exists in maths but not nature. 1/0 is infinite by definition but you can't devide 1 by nothing in nature. It's widely regarded that everything in nature is quantised, so everything fundamentally breaks down to something that cannot be broken down anymore, mass, distance, energy etc etc So if you took 100 fundamental particles and tried to divide them by 3, you can't so no infinite number of decimal places.... I hear it often that a black holes gravity is infinite and such like but it's not, if the black hole had infinite gravity the universe would instantly collapse, it just approaches infinity but hits some boundary condition near the event hoprizon. Nothing in nature is infinite, everything is finite.

[Born Hunter 17,817]

Walshie, ALL of knowledge IS theory! ALL of it, every damn thing you know and experience could be proven wrong with a single observation................... so what............... it's all bullshit and we go back to caves and clubs?

 

This is fundamentally what science is.............

[walshie 2,804]

Is that a fact?

 

I shall now concede gracefully as my head hurts.

[Malt 379]

 

 

 

 

The trouble with theories is that's all they are...theories. I have theories about lots of things but most of them are probably wrong.

 

Walshie, I beg to differ. You have hypotheses about many things, probably supported by varying degrees of evidence.

 

Scientific theories are supported by all the empiracal evidence we have, a lot of theoretical mathematics and years of academic discussion. They become theories the time honoured way by being tested by the scientific community.

 

What we are talking about here is the cosmological model, the exact model depends on a few things yet to be known and there are a few different hypotheses. I'm just telling you the general one. It's a fair bit different to "John, I have this theory that if we plug that wire into that gizmo, we'll get all those german porn channels for nowt!".

 

The cosmological scale makes gathering empirical evidence difficult. I can say the universe is like a baloon but I can't stick it under a microscope and show you. We're pretty shit hot these days with scientific theory though, how the hell can some boffin finish a shit load of algebra and say, "somewhere out there is a star that has collapsed in on itself so densely that gravity near the surface can suck in light"? Yet that chap has been proven right......

Hmm. I understand where you're coming from BH, but because these theories are supported by other theories, "empirical evidence we have" and theoretical mathematics, the result must be an educuated guess at best rather than firm evidence of what is happening. I'm not saying the theories are wrong, I'm just saying they are only theories rather than proven facts.

If you put an item under a microscope and tell me it's made up of so-and-so, that's not a theory, it's a fact. Telling me what something may or may not be made of when it's millions of miles away is a "best guess" scenario.

Not really.. They can be pretty damn sure of what the object is made of due to the characteristics of the light it gives off. Certain materials have signatures that can only come from those certain materials and nothing else..

Beg to disagree yet again. Certain materials WE KNOW of have certain signatures. There may well be stuff out there that has nothing to do with what we know, so x planet is probably made of whatever material, but no way is that a fact.

 

I think we are being tremendously arrogant to assume everything in the universe consists of stuff we understand. I have seen programs saying there might have been life on whatever planet once because there are signs of water. What's that got to do with anything? Just because WE need water, air and moderate temperatures doesn't mean that life on another planet needs it. There might well be life on many planets that thrive on living in minus 200 degree temperatures, and eat acid, but water and light would kill them stone dead.

 

I'm sorry, but these theories are based on what we know and understand from a couple of hundred years of scientific studies, and if everything in space conformed to our knowledge as it is right now, then the are most probably correct. But still theories.

If it was the case that there was materials out there we didn't know about, then by comparing the unknown with what we already know they'd be able to put a big ? over it. It hasn't happened yet to my knowledge.. Most the naturally occurring elements we know about were all created in the very last stage of a star's life, the remaing two are hydrogen, and helium which is formed from the former by fusion during the lifetime of the star. It's all made from the same atoms and by the same processes, no matter where about in the universe it might be..

[scothunter 12,609]

nae wonder some c**t put a brick through your window lol

[walshie 2,804]

There's things living in the sea - on our own planet that we don't know about or understand. Trying to impose our theories on the universe (to me at least) just smacks of trying to make sense of something that may not be fathomable to the human brain in 2013.

[Born Hunter 17,817]

There's things living in the sea - on our own planet that we don't know about or understand. Trying to impose our theories on the universe (to me at least) just smacks of trying to make sense of something that may not be fathomable to the human brain in 2013.

 

We don't know about them because we don't have the technology to observe them but we do distant stellar objects. And it's far more simple to model stars and galaxies mathematically than it is to model biological organisms, so cosmological theoretical work is much more straight forward.

[Malt 379]

There's things living in the sea - on our own planet that we don't know about or understand. Trying to impose our theories on the universe (to me at least) just smacks of trying to make sense of something that may not be fathomable to the human brain in 2013.

That don't mean we should stop trying to explain them and get our tiny minds round them though! A few thousand years ago humans had theories about thunder/earthquakes/volcanoes/etc being the work of gods. They were proved wrong, and in a few thousand years what we think we know about the universe might well get proved wrong again..

[scothunter 12,609]

All the money they have spent on probes and such like.,would have been better spent if they had used it to colonise the moon. went once and never went back again.I dont really see the point in exploring deep space,when we know very little about our own galaxy.

oh and if there is life in far off space,just maybe its a bad move letting them know we exist.

[Lab 10,979]

See this is the problem with these threads......all the normal dafties suddenly turn into Stephen Hawkings...:-)

[johnny boy68 11,726]

All the money they have spent on probes and such like.,would have been better spent if they had used it to colonise the moon. went once and never went back again.I dont really see the point in exploring deep space,when we know very little about our own galaxy.

oh and if there is life in far off space,just maybe its a bad move letting them know we exist.

There was 6 moon landings.

[walshie 2,804]

 

There's things living in the sea - on our own planet that we don't know about or understand. Trying to impose our theories on the universe (to me at least) just smacks of trying to make sense of something that may not be fathomable to the human brain in 2013.

That don't mean we should stop trying to explain them and get our tiny minds round them though! A few thousand years ago humans had theories about thunder/earthquakes/volcanoes/etc being the work of gods. They were proved wrong, and in a few thousand years what we think we know about the universe might well get proved wrong again..

 

 

We should try and understand them and the theories might be proven wrong in the future. The theories about thunder etc being caused by gods hasn't actually been proved wrong. We just prefer the latest theories.

 

And can you stop dragging me back into this thread? You lot will never understand that the Walshie theory of life is the only true one.

[Born Hunter 17,817]

All the money they have spent on probes and such like.,would have been better spent if they had used it to colonise the moon. went once and never went back again.I dont really see the point in exploring deep space,when we know very little about our own galaxy.

oh and if there is life in far off space,just maybe its a bad move letting them know we exist.

 

The Voyager probes were used to explore our own solar system mate, once it had done that they just pointed into the abyss and let it rip rather than ditch it into a planet. Purely took advantage of the situation that's all.

 

I agree with you on extra terrestrial life. We should keep our heads down! Too much of a gamble to hope anything out there has any sort of morals akin to ours. f**k that, I've seen Battleship and Independance day!

Edited September 13, 2013 by Born Hunter

[Malt 379]

All the money they have spent on probes and such like.,would have been better spent if they had used it to colonise the moon. went once and never went back again.I dont really see the point in exploring deep space,when we know very little about our own galaxy.

oh and if there is life in far off space,just maybe its a bad move letting them know we exist.

We should at least have had a base on the moon by now I reckon. Getting water there was the biggest obstacle and they think they've found it there now.. Guess it all comes down to ££ though.. Until we find a way to do away with money and people who thirst for ever more of it than the person next door to them we'll never really achieve what we're truly capable of collectively as a species..

[PIL 7]

Here's some porn for the geeks !!

Is that "rake" ??