I watched a PBS nova special the other night and it discussed the big bang theory.
Here was the way I understood it.
The universe is infinite as we know it, yet the big bang had to begin somewhere… so that makes it finite…mmm doesn’t it? Even if the big bang began in terms so small we can’t understand, it would still be finite because to say that the universe had a beginning but has no end doesn’t make sense to me. So was Nova saying the universe is infinite or finite? Maybe I am misinterpreting it…hell there is an excellant chance that I don’t even know what I am talking about. If so where better else to be straightened out than the SDMB?
Anyone read or seen any information in regards to this?
Of course that’s just my opinion I could be wrong.
Dennis Miller
Last I checked, the universe was finite but unbounded. In other words, there is an end to it, but you can’t reach it – you’d just circle back to the starting point due to its curvature.
“East is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.” – Marx
If the universe is continuing to expand (as most physicists seem to believe it is…possibly even accelerating as it does so), and there isn’t enough mass to “generate” enough gravitational force to make it all draw back together again(The Big Crunch), then the universe is indeed infinite because it will continue to expand forever.
Now, the challenge is to prove anything I’ve said above.
The lovely bit is that there is enough reasonable disagreement about the amount of ‘dark matter’ present that it is not certain which it will be. Personally I’d prefer the big crunch - I find it more aesthetically pleasing than the ever-expanding-but-heat-dead universe.
Didn’t Vera Reuben calculate that Dark Matter would account for about 99% of the mass of the universe? (maybe I’m forgetting the exact percentage)
Hawking believes that this may not be the first time there has been a Big Bang. Maybe the last Big Bang (the one 15 billion years ago) was the second one that ever occured…or the third…or the 485 345 345th Big Bang. The Universe could blow up (Big Bang), expand, then contract (Cosmic Crunch) then explode again, and so forth, over and over again.
We all know that this universe has four dimensions, but what about previous universes (ones produced from previous big bangs)? Scientists believe that there could be up to 26 dimensions (you know, string theory and all that stuff), but, during the last Big Bang, only four of them expanded, and the other 20-22 remained “compact”. In previous universes, did 7 dimensions expand, or 14, or whatever?
“If first you don’t succeed, try, try again…then quit, there’s no use in being a damn fool about it.” - W. C. Fields