I believe the other 34 billion light years would be extra, 14 or so with matter, more with other forms of stuff, mish-mash as Douglas Adams would call it. Maybe emptiness, maybe just neutrinos like our familiar space vacuum is filled with, maybe dark matter, dark energy, maybe plain ole regular energy. Cause I can't imagine NOTHING goes faster than light.
Also brings up the question, can or does a space with literally nothing in it exist? If so, well, brings up all kinds of possibilities.
Perhaps 47 billion light years is an estimate based on how much matter lies between us and the distant objects we're looking at? I honestly hadn't heard this statistic before. Got a source link?
The Economist first said that no astronomer can see beyond 13.7 billion light years, but in the correction of the article, they said that the universe has expanded, and it can potentially be as big as 47 billion light years. So I was just curious where this number came from.
OK! What they are saying is that the universe is 13.7 billion years old. It has been expanding for 13.7 billion years. We may be able to see objects that are now 47 billion light-years away. Since the rate of expansion is increasing, there is a cut-off point for when an object is too far away and the rate of expansion too great for the light to reach us. That 47 billion light-years must simply be the critical point at which light emitted by those distant objects is still able to reach us.
It's gotta be a hypothetical maximum viewing distance. We know the Universe is about 13.7 billion years old because that's the oldest light we can see.
But if the universe is expanding, and there are object out of range that we can't see now...then isn't that like hanging a doughnut on a treadmill while a fat kid runs for it? The distance would keep increasing, so to see the same amount of matter, we'd have to increase our telescopes to compensate for the distance that the universe expanded and...my brain hurts already.
I think Carter is thinking this. You are in the back of a truck going 100 mph, and you can throw a ball however fast. If you throw it backwards, will it even reach the car behind the truck, or will it still be going at a speed higher than that of the car. The answer is of course yes it will reach the other car, don't be silly.
Not only are variations of the light speed in a vacuum are EXTREMELY slight, but we are also moving outwards from the center. If you throw a ball in a car it will act as though nothing is moving, however, it is going as fast as the car. You throwing it is merely increasing or decreasing the speed of the ball, however, it will still act as though it in your hand in the car is a motionless state. This COULD mean, that if the universe is spherical, and the Big Bang did indeed take place at the center, that we would have a significantly harder time seeing objects moving perpendicularly to us, and would not be able to see through an electromagnetic means objects moving away from us on the other side of the universe.
However, The universe is not necessarily spherical in any way. It could indeed be a cylinder, traveling two ways (like the gases from a quasar) or indeed a cylinder moving in one direction.
Light does not behave in the manner described by the ball thrown in truck analogy. Light will always appear to move at the speed of light, no matter what the relative speed or trajectory of the observer might be. If you were in a spaceship traveling at the speed of light (c) (impossible, but for the sake of argument) and you looked behind you and saw another spaceship traveling at the speed of light in the opposite direction, you would observe that ship traveling at c, not 2c.
Does whiskey go bad after sitting in a cupboard for a while? I have a bottle of Jack Daniels that I bought at some point in time several months ago that I forgot about. I had drank about 20% of it before forgetting about it.
Anyway, I was drinking a tiny bit tonight, but it didn't taste as strong. Maybe my tolerance for hard liquor has gone up, but I thought it burned more than this. Any thoughts?
As long as it was sealed, the alcohol level will remain the same, it can evaporate slightly over time. But I'm pretty sure you can keep open bottles of hard liquor for at least the span of your life.
The ethanol contained within your drink, when exposed to oxygen, will begin to turn into acetic acid. This is why wine cannot stay exposed to air for long periods of time lest it become fancy wine vinegar.
There is actually a step where the ethanol first becomes an aldehyde, but this picture is still a good representation of what is happening in your favorite alcoholic beverage!:tmyk:
Well there ya go! Does beer go stale if it hasn't been opened but hasn't been refrigerated? And what if, hypothetically speaking, you left a 30 pack of keystone in the trunk of your car for 2 days before you went to go get it? The car has spent most of its time in a parking garage but spent a good, oh, 6 hours or so in the sun beforehand. Since it's keystone and it doesn't taste good in the first place, is the quality of the beer that different from the original taste? I figure it would just be flat, but other than that it should taste roughly the same. Is it worth saving, assuming you're willing to drink keystone from the get go?
An excellent hypothetical question. However, hypothetically speaking, I don't drink any beer at all, so I must apologize. I do not have any hypothetical experience to base an answer on.
Well, if you ever try keystone at any point in your life, don't expect it to taste good. At all.
Eh, why even bother asking. Keystone tastes gross as it is, so drinking it when it's flat can't be THAT much different. I'll get to it eventually. Hypothetically.
If I don't really like it to begin with I'd use this situation as an excuse to throw it out regardless of the actual effect. I wouldn't say I'll get around to drinking it (and then never do so).
If time is infinite on both ends, then we have infinite rolls of the dice of probability. That means, however infinitesimally small the probabilities that brought “you” into existence, with enough rolls of dice, “you” will come into existence again, and again and again forever. And if time is infinite in reverse, “now” isn’t the only time “you” existed.
Accordingly, “you” have always existed and always will.
Is it necessary that people "always" existed? There are a lot more people now than a while ago. They could assert that humans as we know them now are just one of endless cycles of intelligent life, but there would still be HUGE periods of history with no life to support all these "souls".
I don't buy this at all. I don't know much about physics or any of this stuff, but the big assumption here is that there's an undeniable entity called "you" that somehow will keep popping up again and again and that somehow those "yous" will be linked and be the same person. I think Matt is right to use the word "soul" because that's what this seems like.
But I have a hard time accepting the argument for a soul in the first place, because what evidence is there that there's something persistent that makes us us? A much more convincing theory, I think, revolves around linked memory and consciousness: because we remember past events in our lives we link those memories to our current self and build a conception of "you." But what would possibly connect subsequent iterations of this "you"? If there's no shared memories or consciousness between iterations, how is that not just an entirely different person? Even if this person looks exactly like you and lives through the exact same life circumstances, without shared memories and consciousness, I think it's a different person.
And this model is also highly overestimates the presence of humans, as Matt points out. Though the universe is infinite, humans most certainly are not. On a universal time scale, one species' life span is certainly limited, and it's quite possible that in some future where humans have spread out, they might conceivably evolve beyond humanity, and where does that leave us?
That last statement is particularly problematic, because it implies your constant presence. His argument is about infinitesimally small probability, so you're not going to exist at all times.
Also time isn't infinite. There is a clear beginning as far as physics are concerned (the Big Bang). Time as a meaningful measurement of causality breaks down when the Universe is condensed into a single point, and is, strictly speaking, an invention of our human brains to explain how the Universe works, not necessarily an immutable infinite span.
Imagine that in any arbitrary slice of time, the probability of “you” is p > 0. Let’s call the probability of “not you” x. We for any number of time slices, t, we know that the probability of “not you” is:
x = (1-p)^t
Now, take the limit of x as t approaches infinity. No matter how close to zero p is, so long as p is positive x will fall to zero in the limit. So there exists some finite number of time slices, t, such that the probability of “you” is arbitrarily close to one.
No multiplication by infinity is required. And p being “infinitesimal” doesn’t mean it’s zero. If it were, you wouldn’t be here to argue the point.
If time is infinite in both directions, then by definition there are at least t time slices. In fact, by definition there are an infinite number of “chunks” of time t slices in duration. Therefore, “you” have existed an infinite number of times, and will exist an infinite number of times.
However, I don’t see how Jon can support the assertion that “‘you’ have always existed and always will.” Just because “you’ve” existed an infinite number of times doesn’t mean there haven’t been times when “you” didn’t exist. In fact, if the probability of “you” existing is small, then no matter how many time slices “you’ve” existed in (even an infinite number), there are even more time slices in which “you” haven’t existed!
The thing is, there's some pretty compelling evidence that time isn't infinite in both directions. As I understand it, most models of physics have time starting with the Big Bang, and while time may technically continue indefinitely into the future, after the universe experiences heat death there isn't going to be a lot of life running around.
But any events that precede a Big Bang or follow a Big Crunch are basically happening in independent universes, and have no bearing on the events in our own Universe. A singularity event compresses all matter into zero volume and negates any causality. It's pointless to even discuss probability of repetition in post-Big Crunch/pre-Big Bang universes.
And of course, the discussion is just shoehorning math and physics into a metaphysical postulation. Who cares if a collection of atoms and molecules is going to resemble me to the point of being physically identical in an infinite number of alternate universes? It's not going to be me because I'm me, and the me that I am has the unique property of not being any of those other mes and therefore is uniquely identifiable. If time is infinite (which it isn't), then you can still differentiate the mes by where they fall on the timeline.
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Also brings up the question, can or does a space with literally nothing in it exist? If so, well, brings up all kinds of possibilities.
It's big stuff out there eh?
It was a correction from an earlier article celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescope.
The Economist first said that no astronomer can see beyond 13.7 billion light years, but in the correction of the article, they said that the universe has expanded, and it can potentially be as big as 47 billion light years. So I was just curious where this number came from.
Not only are variations of the light speed in a vacuum are EXTREMELY slight, but we are also moving outwards from the center. If you throw a ball in a car it will act as though nothing is moving, however, it is going as fast as the car. You throwing it is merely increasing or decreasing the speed of the ball, however, it will still act as though it in your hand in the car is a motionless state. This COULD mean, that if the universe is spherical, and the Big Bang did indeed take place at the center, that we would have a significantly harder time seeing objects moving perpendicularly to us, and would not be able to see through an electromagnetic means objects moving away from us on the other side of the universe.
However, The universe is not necessarily spherical in any way. It could indeed be a cylinder, traveling two ways (like the gases from a quasar) or indeed a cylinder moving in one direction.
Anyway, I was drinking a tiny bit tonight, but it didn't taste as strong. Maybe my tolerance for hard liquor has gone up, but I thought it burned more than this. Any thoughts?
There is actually a step where the ethanol first becomes an aldehyde, but this picture is still a good representation of what is happening in your favorite alcoholic beverage!:tmyk:
Hypothetically speaking.
Eh, why even bother asking. Keystone tastes gross as it is, so drinking it when it's flat can't be THAT much different. I'll get to it eventually. Hypothetically.
I also have two wine coolers, those are yummy.
Atheism, Reincarnation, and Immortality
Discuss.
But I have a hard time accepting the argument for a soul in the first place, because what evidence is there that there's something persistent that makes us us? A much more convincing theory, I think, revolves around linked memory and consciousness: because we remember past events in our lives we link those memories to our current self and build a conception of "you." But what would possibly connect subsequent iterations of this "you"? If there's no shared memories or consciousness between iterations, how is that not just an entirely different person? Even if this person looks exactly like you and lives through the exact same life circumstances, without shared memories and consciousness, I think it's a different person.
And this model is also highly overestimates the presence of humans, as Matt points out. Though the universe is infinite, humans most certainly are not. On a universal time scale, one species' life span is certainly limited, and it's quite possible that in some future where humans have spread out, they might conceivably evolve beyond humanity, and where does that leave us?
That last statement is particularly problematic, because it implies your constant presence. His argument is about infinitesimally small probability, so you're not going to exist at all times.
And of course, the discussion is just shoehorning math and physics into a metaphysical postulation. Who cares if a collection of atoms and molecules is going to resemble me to the point of being physically identical in an infinite number of alternate universes? It's not going to be me because I'm me, and the me that I am has the unique property of not being any of those other mes and therefore is uniquely identifiable. If time is infinite (which it isn't), then you can still differentiate the mes by where they fall on the timeline.