A thread about "nothing"

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Let me try to explain it with better words. Nothing is what isn't. As the universe expands, nothing becomes something at a measurable rate. Stellar objects moving apart (due to the expanding universe) increase their distance at an increasing rate, essentially creating more space between them from "nothing."

Reading that over makes me wince, but it the best I can do at the moment.

Nothing is even more difficult to explain the fact that time did not exist before 1.37 X10^10 years ago or how 100 billion neutrinos from the sun can shoot through your thumb nail every second and have no effect whatsoever. Let me sleep on it. The words part of my brain works better earlier in the day.

I'll have a shot at explaining using an analogy that is commonly used in this situation. Picture some ants living on the surface of a balloon. They are (special) flat, 2 dimensional ants. They can see and comprehend forwards, backwards and sideways. They have no awareness of up or down. The ants universe is the surface of the balloon. Over time the balloon is inflating and the surface area of the balloon is increasing. All the ants see the galaxies of other ants speeding away from them. The ants universe has no end - if an ant was able to see far enough into the distance he would see the back of his own head.

Our universe is similar, but instead of it being flat and 2 dimensional we perceive 3 dimensions but there are in reality more than three dimensions, possibly as many as ten dimensions! So our universe is finite but without boundary/end, it expands creating space and time as it does so.

Don't know if this analogy helps.

But just because an ant can't see up or down, doesn't mean there is nothing up and down. Right?

As far as the idea that the universe is expanding into "nothing" goes, I don't think that is the case. Nothing, by it's very nature can't have anything expand into it because there is "nothing" to expand into. The balloon analogy is a good way to explain the expanding universe but it's impossible for me to imagine 3 spatial dimensions interacting with a fourth the way that it is to imagine 2 spatial dimensions interacting with a third.

I have heard the balloon analogy before, and it is the best way I have heard to describe it to someone without some heavy physics knowledge, but it isn't actually what is happening. The universe isn't really expanding so much as there is a constant creation of more universe, increasing its size. It isn't really pushing into anything. Beyond the universe is nothing.

There are just so many things that we know, but don't know why. It is an exciting time in the physics world.
The universe is flat. This is a relatively recent discovery; most physicists believed it to be slightly curved.
It is quite possible for energy to escape from black holes. This is something that Hawking has said he was wrong about. In fact, if a black hole is small enough, it can radiate all of its energy and cease to exist within milliseconds of its creation.
There is some evidence that some particles travel time in the opposite direction. For example, a positron may actually just be an electron that is going the other way along the time axis. There is a current theory that I find fascinating (but I am very skeptical of) that all matter and energy has a direct opposite that is currently travelling time in the opposite direction and when they meet will annihilate each other, essentially meaning that the end of the universe is really the beginning, just from the opposite direction.