Ok, new to all this, and this is my second thread (the first was a disaster).

This topic has probably been covered a thousand times before, but I can’t find them.

We all sit there and have random conversations with our friends, particularly after a few beers on a Fri/Sat night.

One of the questions which really does my head in, and I mean seriously, is the question of how far does the universe expand, how far back does time go.

Now we can't answer these questions at our current development as a species, but I just want a few opinions on the subject.

So..... the universe........if we start at point A on earth and travel in a straight line, we eventually come back to point A, however, if we go up, into space, where is point B.
Even if the universe was round like the earth, what if we went up?
Where would it end, and what would be beyond that, surely there can't be nothing, even if just an empty void, there would still be that empty void, but where would that end, and what would be beyond that?
Surely nothing can just end, there must always be something after that, even if it is nothing, but then how can something just end? The universe is expanding into an empty void, but there is still that empty void, but how can that void go on forever, surely you would hit and end somewhere, but then there must be something after that.

Now, same principle, but time, how far back does it go, where did it begin, and what was before that?

We assume the universe was created by a build up of gases and a "big bang", but what was there before those gases; there must have been something to create those gases, but what was before that? There can't have been nothing, you can't create something from nothing, but there can't have always been something, it must have started somewhere, but what created that? At the very point time began, what created that first molecule if there was nothing there to begin with?

I really hope this makes sense, and I look forward to hearing other people’s opinions on this subject. It has really plagued me for years.

Peace.

my brain just exploded

Are you sure it was just beer? Hmmmmmm?

Lets start backward, as it were.

The Big Bang wasn't a buildup of gases. It didn't come from anything because there wasn't anything there. Except a very, very, very large amount of energy. In a very, very, very tiny....thingy. I don't know where it came from but that's OK because nobody else does either. Anyway, that energy was just too crowded so it started to expand. As it expanded it started to cool down (sort of, not exactly) and, as energy will do, some of it started turning into stuff (otherwise known as matter). That matter got together with other matter and made everything.

Now, what's at the end of the universe? There are two answers: everything, and nothing. See, by definition there can't be anything outside of the universe. On the other hand it space (the universe) can be considered to be infinitely curved (whatever that means). So what you would "see" if you got to the end of the universe is....yourself.

Clear now? Good.

Any direction you point your finger, you point to the universe. Make sense?

While it didn't come from nothing, it came from no thing. Make sense?

What is it? I think I'll define it more broadly than "The Universe" and simple state "existence" or "manifestation of thing-ness". I always liked that one.

I remember long ago during an elementary class a discussion came up concerning the universe, and I had a wonderful teacher. Someone asked if a rocket ship can travel from one end of the universe to the other, and the teacher gave the student a worn soccerball and a felt tip pen. He blindfolded the student and told him to draw with the marker a straight line 10 times around the ball, using each hand at a time in turning the ball. Of course the result was a web of crisscrossed lines on the ball.
Dunno exactly how this applies to this thread, just thought I would throw it in, lol.

I think this is everyones quest in life - secretly or outspokenly - I live in hope that one day i learn the true answers, Could it be we are all programmed to question this, i think so. Without wonder what would you have to inspire you or make you think? I think the answer may come from inside or even when our bodies are no longer required and we live on a concious plane, or we will be enlightened in 2012 who knows? Physics and meta physics are briliant, i only wished i'd paid more attention at school rather than discovering now how it helps us understand the seemingly unfathomable. Theories have been aknowledged and then disproven the proven again throught history - who is to say what we know now may be contridicted in a few years with a theory proven. We learn from our findings and our mistakes also. I personally have a pulling towards the Emerald tablet of Hermes. There's something about it that inspires me to think the guy who wrote it knew more then than we do now. Its like a riddle i am longing to solve, and i know i arent the only one but it really pulls at me more than anyother artefact. Issac Newton was many things, aswell as the great things he did for maths and physics he was a bit of a philosher to, one of the most well known translations of Hermes' tablet was by Issac Newton - read it then think where he may have been inspired about gravity. I don't think anyone can answer your question but i think the universe started with Hydrogen. Try NASA's website or The Discovery Channel (web too) and see if you find out a little more there. Failing that type your question into Google and fish for the information yourself - you find out even more that way and discover other stuff along the way. Enjoy learning, keep asking ;o)

The human mind is not designed to comprehend infinite anything. Even if the universe does have an edge where the known universe is continuously expanding (as scientific observations and discoveries suggest) I don't think ANYONE can fully comprehend that kind of distance scale.. It is impossible.. And that isn't even an infinite distance...

People don't honestly know the comprehendible difference between 2 objects being a 10,000 years apart and 100 billion light years apart. It's as if we simply register it in our brains as a massive distance that we don't have any hope of ever truly understanding, so we tuck it away in our minds hoping that one day we might.

Singularities are one thing, infinite time and space is something quite different..

There are alot of really interesting paradoxes with wormholes too that have always had me thinking.. Last year I read an article in Discover magazine that was mind blowing.. it went something like this...

Let's say you are at a pool table.. There is a wormhole entrance near the pool table and the exit of the wormhole is right next to the entrance. Anything going through the wormhole (for the purposes of this thought experiment) goes back in time just a couple of seconds. You hit a pool cue into the entrance of the wormhole. The pool cue travels through the wormhole, travels a couple seconds back in time, exits the wormhole. But here is where things get tricky. The pool cue emerges from the exit in all its glory just as another copy of it was about to enter (since the original ball went back in time to that point). So now the pool cue exiting hits the pool cue entering, thus preventing the original ball from ever entering in the first place. How is that possible? Would they both disappear or explode? Would you even be able to shoot a ball into the wormhole AT ALL?? Perhaps if you tried, a phantom pool cue would pop into existence out of nowhere just as you were trying to shoot the pool cue into the entrance of the wormhole, thus ALWAYS preventing it from going in no matter what you did.

I've also thought greatly about black holes and white holes. Black holes are supposedly so massive that nothing can escape it's grasp, and white holes are supposedly the direct opposite. White holes fire matter and energy back into space (As if the black hole is the entrance to the wormhole, a white hole the exit). NOW.. HERE IS SOMETHING THAT IS MIND BOGGLING. A few years ago I was pondering all of this.. The big bang, black holes, wormholes, and everything in between when something dawned on me that blew me away...

What if the big-bang itself is the result of not the universe being born but the simple likelihood that it would? (Probability as a creative mechanism and in it's wake creating a universe built upon probability as a foundation of quantum mechanics and everything at that level).

When I started thinking about this more and more I realized that time doesn't matter.. Not in the way we normally think of time..

Black holes are basically like giant cookie monsters gobbling up EVERYTHING in their paths. When you try asking yourself where that energy goes, you run into a few basic problems.. But if nothing can pass the speed of light due to general theory of relativity, then obviously a singularity is the point at which matter simply cannot even exist in this dimension any longer because it warps time and space so much that there is a threshold at which some energy stays behind in the form of a singularity, some goes somewhere "else"..

The faster matter reaches the speed of light, the more time slows down for everyone and everything else around that matter, but for the matter itself everything is peachy. If this were a person we were talking about and not matter, the person would experience time just as he/she normally would.. (this is time dilation explained by general relativity).

That is why some people think that at speeds exceeding that of the speed of light, you might go back in time instead of just slowing it down a bit by being "close" to the speed of light. So if every black hole has a white hole expelling material, all black holes in the universe are sending matter and energy through a wormhole and quite possibly back in time... ONLY there is a catch.. The two couldn't exist in the same timeframe. You could never have a black hole and a white hole existing at the exact same point in time in corellation with one another.

What this would mean is that black holes fire matter and energy back in time to a time when the universe was much smaller and more compact because scientists NOW understand that the universe is continuously expanding. If the white hole exists 3,000,000 years before the black hole that creates it, and if the universe was truly smaller and smaller the further you go back in time, then that energy will become more and more compact the further you go back in time.. What that means is that if you were to look back in time at a much smaller universe, white holes would have ALOT less area to exist within.. This means that further and further back towards the big-bang, this matter and energy actually becomes more and more compact because of less and less space for white holes to exist (but they must because the black holes later on are creating them).

This means that as the white holes exist in a smaller and smaller area as you go back in time, ALLL THAT ENERGY AND ALL THAT MATTER would become SO compacted onto a tiny point smaller than a subatomic particle that it would simply explode... THUS creating the universe in and of itself... with no outside influence.....

This means that our universe was always here and always will be in one form or another. The simply probability that a subatomic universe could exist for a tiny fraction of a second would ALWAYS create a big-bang because of the black hole/white hole paradox in which the further back in time you go, the more and more energy gets expelled (which black holes in the future are gobbling up... and, thus, always sending back in time through wormholes)...



-ChriS

[edit on 26-9-2008 by BlasteR]