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 Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 9:18 pm
I was sitting and thinking (doing nothing, really) and thought of the universe and infinity. Does the universe end? If so, where? How could we tell? Is it expanding? What about-
And then, inspiration struck.
What about circles? They don't end and never begin, and if you go in one direction, you end up where you started. Then I applied this to three dimensions, the sphere. Still, if you go in one direction you'll always end up where you start.
Think about the non-limitation; the universe wraps around itself, making it theoretically infinite and finite at the same time. Pretty cool, huh?
An analogy for ya:
Circle : Sphere :: Sphere : Universe
Feel free to flame away, explain how it couldn't possibly work, etc. Once again, this was thought up when I was *ahem* not trying to get out of work. sweatdrop I want to know how plausible it could be, at any rate.
Also tell me if some theory like this exists already. I'd make a real dummy of myself if it had already been debunked sweatdrop
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Posted: Wed Mar 14, 2007 11:40 pm
apparently they showed that the universe is flat, I know, I was dissapointed too. And you can't get out of the universe because you can't travel faster than light. The expansion though, what is it compared to the speed of light?
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Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 3:35 pm
If you can't get outside the universe, then what IS outside the universe? More universe? Then it's not outside...
Ah, the paradox. Love 'em, hate 'em.
"Imagine that you are standing at the edge of the universe with a spear. When thrown, what does the spear do? Does it bounce back? If so, there is a wall or barrier, and there must be something outside. Therefore, you aren't at the edge. If the spear continues on its path uninterrupted, then you are not standing at the edge, after all."
-Forgot where I heard it, but some wise dude.
If it's expanding, what's it expanding INTO?
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Posted: Sat Mar 17, 2007 3:56 pm
MyOwnBestCritic If you can't get outside the universe, then what IS outside the universe? More universe? Then it's not outside... Ah, the paradox. Love 'em, hate 'em. "Imagine that you are standing at the edge of the universe with a spear. When thrown, what does the spear do? Does it bounce back? If so, there is a wall or barrier, and there must be something outside. Therefore, you aren't at the edge. If the spear continues on its path uninterrupted, then you are not standing at the edge, after all." -Forgot where I heard it, but some wise dude. If it's expanding, what's it expanding INTO? the universe is not expanding 'into' anything, it's just expanding. A good, but misleading analogy is if we imagine the universe as the surface of a beach ball. In this way, when we look at a beach ball from the side, once we pick a center, we can rotate it and the center changes. In an analogous way, every point of the universe is the center (since it all expanded from a 'single point' [though I'm not sure if the universe had a dimension before it expanded']). Since we can think of the skin of the beach ball as our universe, we know that as our skin expands, that the skin of our beach ball isn't really taking up more air. THis is how an astrophysicist tried to explain it, it's not very good. I will work on a better explaination and get back to you.
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Posted: Sun Mar 25, 2007 4:52 pm
Sigh... This isn't really my field, but I like thinking a lot heart
Can anyone else get back to me?
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Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 7:32 pm
Well since the universe is flat and expanding at the speed of light you could never reach the edge because even if you could travel the speed of light it has a couple of billion years head start.
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Posted: Thu Jun 14, 2007 7:27 am
I had read somewhere (probably an extremely pseudo-scientific magazine) about mass and spacetime. One of the ideas that they threw around was that spacetime and mass are inexorably linked, as in one can't exist in a region without some influence of the other. The conclusion, then, was that if you ever happened to reach a region of the universe where there was no mass/space beyond it, your presence there would "create more universe" in front of you. You couldn't ever be a mass at the edge of the universe, 'cos then you would be deforming the edge and expanding it out.
Again, complete pseudoscience. Don't take it to heart.
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Posted: Tue Jul 10, 2007 7:58 pm
poweroutage apparently they showed that the universe is flat, I know, I was dissapointed too. And you can't get out of the universe because you can't travel faster than light. The expansion though, what is it compared to the speed of light? I've heard a theory that the universe appears to be flat, but actually it might not be, it might more like waves going up and down. But it was ages ago when someone explained it to me, so I can;t really remember the particulars.
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Posted: Fri Jul 20, 2007 11:45 am
Soy un hombre muy honrado,
que me gusta lo mejor Wait, the universe is flat? What about gravitational spacetime distortion? Or do they mean "pretty much" flat? Or flat, on average? I need details  Las mujeres no me faltan,
ni el dinero ni el amor
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Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 11:24 am
Baron von Turkeypants Soy un hombre muy honrado,
que me gusta lo mejor Wait, the universe is flat? What about gravitational spacetime distortion? Or do they mean "pretty much" flat? Or flat, on average? I need details Las mujeres no me faltan,
ni el dinero ni el amor Flat on the large scale. There are small bumps, but if you look at a big enough portion of the universe it looks like it's just flat. And poweroutage, I think the beach ball analogy is at least somewhat pertinent, even if a beach ball is the wrong shape. The point is that the universe can expand without there being an "outside" according to beings in the universe.
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Posted: Wed Aug 08, 2007 12:36 am
I've read in a few places (I think the first was Discover magazine a while ago or something.. I don't remember) that scientists have pretty much narrowed the shape of the universe down to three possibilites: spherical, flat, and hyperbolic, and that they're leaning towards hyperbolic. But like, with the diagrams I've seen in multiple places of those universe shapes, they seem like bent pieces of paper. Here's a pic from wikipedia, I dunno where they got it from... But they don't say how thick those planes are supposed to be; they look more 2d than the universe would be. confused Well, anyway, if you want more information, the wikipedia article on it is pretty interesting.
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Posted: Fri Aug 10, 2007 12:51 am
__penguin__ I've read in a few places (I think the first was Discover magazine a while ago or something.. I don't remember) that scientists have pretty much narrowed the shape of the universe down to three possibilites: spherical, flat, and hyperbolic, and that they're leaning towards hyperbolic. But like, with the diagrams I've seen in multiple places of those universe shapes, they seem like bent pieces of paper. Here's a pic from wikipedia, I dunno where they got it from... But they don't say how thick those planes are supposed to be; they look more 2d than the universe would be. confused Well, anyway, if you want more information, the wikipedia article on it is pretty interesting. Those are what we like to call "analogies." The universe has 3 spatial dimensions, not 2, but since we can't see 3-dimensional objects as well as we'd like to, they give us pictures of two dimensional objects that are similar. In particular, the sphere has positive (2D) curvature, the saddle has (2D) negative curvature, and the plane has zero (2D) curvature. This is analogous to us having a universe with positive (3D) curvature, a universe with negative (3D) curvature and a universe with zero (3D) curvature, respectively. Last I heard, the universe is basically flat, having on average zero (3D) curvature on the large scale. What it does have is a positive cosmological constant, which makes it act (at least in terms of ultimate fate) kind of like a negative-curvature universe.
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Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2007 1:54 pm
A sphere has a finite surface area. For your analogy to work, space must also be finite.
If space is finite, then what is beyond it? ... (Yeah, I need to actually read all the posts in this thread. sweatdrop )
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Posted: Tue Sep 25, 2007 12:19 pm
Aetherius Lamia A sphere has a finite surface area. For your analogy to work, space must also be finite. If space is finite, then what is beyond it? ... (Yeah, I need to actually read all the posts in this thread. sweatdrop ) Why must there even be a beyond? If space is contained strictly within the universe, then "beyond" doesn't make any sense.
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Posted: Wed Nov 14, 2007 7:20 pm
Okay. Forgive me if this post makes me look like a horrid idiot, but it's the end of a long day and I've only scanned the proceeding posts... (And I'm a few weeks away from physics class.) I saw penguin's picture: And I was thinking... What if you combine all three into such an arched parabolic shape that it turned into a torus. Then, the planar one would be any given point on the torus... So that from any point it goes to infinity on the plane, but is spherical and also parabolic. Oh, I just shot down my own theory, methinks: What about the 'donut hole' in the middle? Dangit. Well, maybe not. It would be null space, but what is space besides null? razz  Well... I just hope maybe there's something in there to start a conversation up. . . . EDIT (November 15th; 8:31 pm): I was looking in the Hyperspace Thread and I discovered that someone already thought of this. D: I am dismayed. >_< So... grey wanderer It's still possible to have a wrap-around universe when space is flat. It requires the 3-dimensional equivalent of a torus and the proper choice of metric, but it works as well as an infinite plane.
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