Border of the universe?

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Yea, that's probable. And I understand that we can do that. But no, nobody has it all figured out yet. Every equation and simulation, every answer, leads to more questions. All I'm saying is, there's more than meets the eye, a whole lot more, and I think just about any quantum physicist or scientist would tell you the same thing.

But again, that's just an educated guess.

But just because we don't have all the answers it is not proof of god. We are just curious little monkeys on some obscure planet at the edge of nothing. Maybe we will never have all the answers...

If you want my analogy of existence based on m-theory, here it is:

Imagine a room of almost infinite size with no entrance or exit. For the purpose of this explanation we can enter this room but in reality we cant exist there. Now in this room is an almost infinite number of grammar-phones and on each grammar-phone is a record/disc entitled "universe" . On the disc is every possibility that could ever happen with respect to the rules that govern that universe.

Now it just so happens that we manage to find our disc (or universe). You pick up the needle and drop it on a random area of the disc and listen to some music for a for a few seconds then lift the needle back up.

The music you heard is our existence.

We just skim the possibilities of existence, in reality. Past and future are the same as in neither exists, rather they are just a sequence of an almost infinite number of possibilities of interactions (this is expressed in quantum theory in the infinite number of possibilities/combinations of Feynman diagrams.). In reality everything HAS already happened, we experience our existence because of the interactions of particles leading to our reality.


I hope that made sense, its hard for us humans to understand something that flies in the face of what we experience in our short and rather restricted lives.

If you want an actual explanation rather than one silly analogy i suggest you read "The grand design" by Stephen Hawking.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?rlz=1C1C ... 80&bih=923

There is more in Heaven and Earth than is dream't of in your philosophy ---- Hamlet

ruveyn

Is it not just that the universe is infinite in the way that we only seem to perceive three dimensions, while string theory, although multiple theories exist, tells us that there are more then three dimensions, if that is the case, then maybe three dimensional beings like humans, or at least beings that can only see in three dimensions, can't see an so called "border" around the universe because the universe has more then three dimensions and therefore humans can not step out of the universe because humans can't travel in a fourth or fifth or etc... dimension. This means that we can not see the universe for something other than an infinite three dimensional thing, thus the universe might be finite but we will not be able to see the end. I might be wrong but from what I understand the theories on the "form" of the universe only indicate how dimensions roll up in a certain way.

But I don't know, It's some time ago that I was really in to space so I might have something not remembered right.

We are all time-travelers. But only in the forward direction. Sitting still, we travel at the speed of Now which is one second per second and that works out to the speed of light.

ruveyn

M-theory predicts 11 dimensions but they are so small (or thin) we cant interact with them. They are treated in theory as strings (String theory).

I think people mix up these dimensions with alternate realities. Alternate realities or the multiverse stems from when the universe was very young, only a few milliseconds after the big bang, when the universe was small enough for the the concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics to work at the same time (or together). Time also acted as a singularity with space, so there was no time as such.

Now, we know that an electron has an infinite number of possibilities. So the theory is basically that shortly after the big bang when the universe was at the quantum scale the universe had an infinite number of possibilities.

So our existence probably is just one of those possibilities (which must exist too).

Hope that made sense.

Last edited by Tom_Kakes on 04 Sep 2011, 11:44 am, edited 3 times in total.

I'm quite certain that that is exactly what I just said.

@Tom_Kakes, yes that does sound like a good analogy for it, but ultimately over-simplified analogies fail to encompass the scope quite as well as semi-lucid babbling.

I am an atheist. I'm a determinist - I'm pretty sure that we and everything else are automata. "God" is nothing more than a misconception, a flawed but basic understanding of the majesty of reality, the nature of information and consciousness at it's most basic and refined form - the building blocks of matter, and energy. Whatever it is that imbues amino acids and proteins, RNA and DNA and such, to direct the processes of flesh; the latticework of crystals, ferrofluids, our own inner subjective construction of the world; Information, what truly generates it at the most basic levels. It's this ultimate core of information that I refer to as consciousness or, for sake of simplicity, "god". The idea of parallel, mirrored-but-alternate realities, fits perfectly into what a fractal hologram really is - everything that exists, exists within everything. All that matters in determining the perception, is the angle of the one-dimensional laser penetrating the holographic point. We as humanity, are this laser, culminating in the vast illusion of this one facet of the fractal.

If that makes any sense.

I can actually see your thinking but you have to keep your feet on the ground and go with interpretations of actual observations rather than making the whole thing up lol.

With regard to the whole importance of the human race in existence:



The blue pixel is earth...



.

Actually, in string theory, the curled up extra dimensions are not themselves treated as strings. Rather, the strings move and vibrate within these extra dimensions to form all the known elementary particles, where each kind particle, for example whether it's an electron or quark, is a different vibration mode of the string. One of these string vibration modes always seems to include a graviton, which is why string theory appears to successfully unite general relativity with quantum mechanics. Sorry if I seem to keep correcting you.

In any you're right that extra dimensions are just what they are defined as in the mathematical sense, more dimensions than the common three, breadth, width and height (or four if you include time in the common description of space-time). Nonetheless, some people such as Leonard Susskind, have interpreted the string landscape (the common name for the many solutions of string theory) to mean that we could possible live in a multiverse. Though I don't think that's empirically testable.

Or as Carl Sagan said billyuns and billyuns of times: the pale blue pixel.

ruveyn

I'm aware of that, but everyone I've talked to in real life disagrees with me. It's extremely frustrating to deal with.

Nah its fine, i was getting at the fact that string theory got its name from the way the strings were first described. The strings emanating from the extra dimensions were described to be very thin, so thin that we cant interact with them but they could be described to each have unique length. Hence "string theory". Of course i don't mean length in the classical sense, rather length measured through time and space.

Now the strings are described in two states, closed (loop) and string. As said the so called "vibration" of the string is said to correspond to the particle it creates in our 4 dimensions.

So i suppose you could look at our 4 dimensional existence as kind of like a shadow on a wall...

Lol

Everyone must have seen that image by now but as the old saying goes "a picture is worth a thousand words"...

If god exists and the universe was created for humans he made way too much black stuff...

A being who lives in the water/air surface of the ocean and can only "see" surface waves can not look to the sky and see that he already lives in the border of the Earth.

But so I shouldn't picture those extra dimensions from string theory as directions which we are unable to see? And strings are only two dimensional right? But I shouldn't think that we are like flatland to the fourth, or fifth dimension?

By the way, everything outside the border of our universe should be nothing, because the fundamental laws and forces of nature only exist inside our universe because they are bound to the dimensions of our universe, right?

If there are in fact multiple universes, there could be other fundamental laws and forces in those universes, we don't even know for sure if our universe has only the four fundamental forces of gravity, the electromagnetic force, the weak and the strong nuclear force, but we have observed those and think we can explain everything using those four forces.

So to my idea we can see the universe as a system that we can explain using laws, and outside this system there can't be anything except for if our system is part of a bigger system, but we can't know that until we are able to even get to the border of the universe but I don't think that will ever happen.

You can interpret the strings as being two dimensional but its very hard to picture the nature of the 7 extra dimensions as we have no real concepts in our four dimensional realm to explain them by. That said, i did read an article where a computer "map" was made of the extra dimensions but i cant find it right now.



That is correct but your thinking too human lol. As said, the uncertainty in the early quantum scale universe gave rise to every possibility being fulfilled so each reality took off from there, the multiverse. Much like an electron can have an infinite number of possibilities/positions so too could the quantum scale early universe. The almost infinite number of universes each went their own direction from there.



Correct!



There is probably no outside system(as yet lol), rather different iterations of the same universe(kind of). The "border" might be closer than we think

Last edited by Tom_Kakes on 05 Sep 2011, 7:53 am, edited 1 time in total.