The Universe issue

Hi all, I have ten mins to fill again before I put my daughters to bed. After successfully solving the Greek debt crisis I thought I would aim higher this time and solve a more challenging issue.

The issue is the expanding universe.

What is it expanding into?

It can't be expanding into nothing, because there is no such thing as nothing.

Imagine drawing a circle, this is the universe. Then draw a bigger circle outside that, this is what it is expanding into. This is also impossible as that outer circle becomes the universe as soon as you draw it. Our brains cannot comprehend 'nothing' or the edge of the universe.

I have heard theories such as the universe is infinite (which it is) and that if you keep looking ahead through the universe you will eventually see the back of your head.
(think pac-man going off the screen left and appearing right)
This theory is wrong.

For this to happen the universe would have to be spherical. It is not. It is infinite.

Now the bombshell
I have worked out the real answer.

As humans we can only deal with 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional. We naturally assume that the universe is 3d. Because everything around us is 3d. From a tree to this keyboard I am typing on. What we need to see the universe as is a measure of 'time.'

The big bang was the past. It was minute 1.
The first star you see tonight twinkling in the sky is the past. The light it emits is billions of years old. Its light source began travelling to earth BEFORE the dinosaurs.
The universe is expanding into the FUTURE.

We cannot see the future, yet we have faith that it exists or will exist. We talk about tomorrow or next week. It doesn't exist yet, but it will.
That is the key phrase.
The universe is expanding into something that doesn't exist yet but it will.

Now my other concern is will the known universe dilute as it expands, until it reaches saturation point? or even reverse?

I am working on a formula for this,

D/M x A3/T

Dilution over mass = area cubed over time.

If we could work out the mass of the known universe and times it by the cubic area and divide by the time since the big bang we would have the dilution rate so far.

Then knowing the mass we could estimate the time left before saturation.

How do we work out the mass of the universe?

Our galaxy is one of billions.
Black holes have more mass per cubic mile than open space.

This is a problem I will ponder over.

Again this is brilliant haha,

I think it is expanding towards, not "into" something...another universe maybe, or something else.

The problem with this is of course the entropic heat death situation. It'll take a really long time, but if some of the solar elements in our galaxy move just a little apart, our planet will become an ice block and the gravity will be rather odd. Of course the sun may wink out of existence before then and hopefully we'll have evolved into a type 2/3 civilization with access to several planets.

But yeah, I don't think it is expanding into anything.

Hey Mr Darren an interesting topic, one I have also mulled over and still do

Firstly I have never believed in the singular big bang theory, multiple big bangs throughout the universe maybe, but not a singular one as you can't have a center of infinity. It was thought the universe was expanding from a central big bang and moving outwards in a uniform pattern. Yet some stars and galaxies have been found to be moving in different directions, multiple big bangs may account for this discrepancy.
But infinite is infinite, no beginning, no end, no time. What is time other than the distance between two points. It's integral in our lives but irrelevant in the universe

I like your analogy of drawing a circle, I do the same, the problem is getting our brain to comprehend all this. Its estimated that there are 1000000000000000000000000 stars that are viewable in our universe by the Hubble telescope. Now if you were to draw a dot on your piece of paper then draw a 1 inch circle around that dot and say that's our universe and all those stars are within that circle (forgetting about the planets and moons that circle those stars). You then get in a rocket and fly to Pluto some 3 billion plus miles away, as explorer just has done and draw another circle from there around your piece of paper (stay with me people) how many of our universes are going to fit within that distance ? approx 190 trillion 1 inch circles. Noting that's a straight line not the volume within that 360 degrees 3 dimensional circle, that number would be horrendous

If .000001 of those stars had planets orbiting them and .000001 of those planets had similar conditions as ours and if .000001 could support life, the number of planets like ours is in the billions. and thats within that circle which is a finite distance.....

I think our viewable universe is expanding and will continue to do so until we are caught in a black hole were gravity rules and fall in upon ourselves until the contained energy once again explodes outwards creating galaxies and even maybe life

But trying to comprehend all this is currently pretty meaningless other than point out how irrelevant greedy and self-obsessed we are on our tiny little planet, we could be gone in the blink of an eye

Currently the universe within our minds rule wow

Kirstin you stole my avatar :)

The special theory of relativity specifically addresses the structure of spacetime. Time as a dimension is integral to all modern physics, most often used in terms of velocity.

There is nothing wrong with expanding and creating space as you go. It's not necessarily "nothing" except for semantics. The standard idea of a balloon blowing up fits the concept. On the other hand if the "bubble" theory is correct we're a hemorrhage from another universe that will eventually be reabsorbed.

Regardless, the issue in an expanding universe is whether it re-collapses. If it does not, then entropy does truly end all. Every motion and transformation generates heat. Nuclear reaction creates a great deal of heat. Loss of matter and energy through heat is entropy.

There is currently no explanation of what happens to the heat. It is considered "lost" to the universe. In an ever-expanding universe, eventually the loss of heat will deplete all matter and energy in the universe except for particles so distant from each other that interaction is impossible.

On the other hand, if the universe does eventually begin contracting, the level of entropy greatly increases, robbing the universe of usable matter and energy at an ever increasing rate. Black holes, devouring matter & energy in their event horizons send out showers of free ions from their north and south axes, some of which is drawn back into the galaxy, but much of which disappears into the space between galaxies. The effects of a collision between massive black holes has not yet been calculated, but it surely does not release free matter or energy. In the final contraction we have universal singularity and a great deal of heat.

How is heat recycled? That should be the question for the 21st century. I'm willing to bet there is a tie in between heat and dark-energy and dark-matter.

Thanks for your insight guys.

I have worked on the "more room out than there is in theory" for so long I am addicted to farting

I am glad it is all out in the air ...thank you

What if...we have been misinformed for all these years??? Take the Pluto flyby for example...Pluto is a fairly new 'discovery' (1930) and was at first thought to be at least the same size as earth now we know it's not so...how do we know for sure that the universe is expanding? Who said it was and what proof do they have??

Well Hubble was very late last century and...astronomy was being discussed way before then and followed, so..people were actually 'seeing and experiencing the universe' way before Hubble's telescope don't you think?

Yeah..I know who you meant...Edwin Hubble among others brought us to how we kind of think about our "universe today" and "what's out there" but..my point is...what if he and many others of his time got it wrong?...like the Pluto thing...expectations not matching reality for example....

"We live in an expanding universe.
Mind beholds its own enlarging consciousness.
But how our understanding shrinks
As profound discovery yields more data
Which demonstrates our abject ignorance. "

"So the cosmos ages, for lonesome eons;
And we, wiser, encode more data in fewer spurts,
Blithely ignoring the impossibility of being."

"Why should this reality be the end of the line?
What audacity to think that our mortal perception,
Timorous and yet accreting on the coral reef of knowledge,
Will not itself be put out of the textbooks
When our grandchildren discover
What ignorant savages we are
And then seek to reconstruct the cosmos
In their own image - and so it goes - "

Larry the heat death model only fits the singular big bang theory where the heat energy given off can no longer be collected, through the law of conservation of energy, where energy can't be created or destroyed. But the existence of black holes also gives credence to more than one big bang. But we could talk in circles as we know so little of the universe. Once we are forced to leave this planet maybe we will find out