where did i say i dont believe in scientific methods lel

this is basic philosophy 101 class stuff youre talking about bruh

"if god is real... then WHO MADE GOD?? woaaaaaaaaah" --> if simulation is real who made the people running the simulation etc. this goes for every worldview, cant be answered, humans are finite beings we find out after death

"what if ... WE are god?" --> okay thats pantheism.. you are god, i am god, this rock is god, this pile of cow dung is god.. explain how thats supposed to work

Hollow?

Two questions:

1. Is this the most accepted scientific consensus, that it's like a balloon? I'm not sure what the latest consensus is.

2. In this balloon type example, the inside is hollow? Could a spaceship (hypothetical spaceship that can go light speed+, etc etc) could it travel to this inner area?

3. If the answer to #2 is no you can't, what happens when you travel in the direction of "inside the baloon"?

human imagination

But who was phone?

Not a consensus.

The inside does not exist,. Can you travel into something that does not exist?

You cannot travel in such a direction. Let's say we live in a 4 D space (not including time) can you willingly go in the direction(s) that are not up/down (Z), left/right (X), forward/backward (Y)? If you live on a 2D sphere (boundary of a 3D solid ball... i.e. hollow with no space inside) you cannot travel "inwards" only along the sphere. the only directions travelable are along the sphere

I guess I just don't quite grasp it yet but I appreciate your replies. We don't live in something 2d though, we clearly have 3 dimensions, right?


Anyway, another way for me to try to understand is this. I know you can't travel faster than light but let's say for example purposes I can. I have a spaceship, and I travel 14 billion light years away from my current spot.

Do planets and galaxies end there? If I continue to go straight another 5 billion light years, is it nothingness?

If I visualize a balloon, the balloon wall is just filled with galaxies, I still see an "up and down", why couldn't I travel "up" to head in the direction of the center? As if, if you were a single cell and you wanted to head towards either the outside of the balloon wall, or the inside of it.

I know I'm somewhat repeating myself, but just trying to better grasp it, if you actually do understand it.

1. There's no consensus; there's no detectable curvature in the universe, so either it's geometry is flat (i.e infinite), or it's huge and our tools aren't sensitive enough to detect curvature over the 50 billion light year observable universe; and it's what's geometrically known as a riemann manifold (basically sphereical) in General Relativity, but the geometry is the surface, it has no interior. We know it's probably one of these geometries because of the expansion of the universe and positive vacuum energy, but we're not sure which one.

2. The inner area isn't part of the geometric shape, it doesn't exist

3. It's not a balloon, this is just an analogy used to simplify the concept, because it takes knowledge of 4d geometry and the mathematics involved to properly express it.

When you travel at the speed of light, the lorentz factor is infinite, meaning the time part of the time dilation equation of special relativity goes to infinity; no time passes from the reference frame of objects moving at light speed, and length contraction reaches maximum. So from the perspective of an object moving at light speed, the current moment of the universe and the end exist at the same moment (well not quite, but it's hard to describe without using temporal terms), and there's no distance. At light speed from your reference frame you could reach anywhere in the universe with no time passing.

If you travel 15 billion light years away from your starting spot, you'll still be inside the observable universe, it is much larger than 14 billion light years because of the expansion. If you travelled 50 billion light years you'd end up outside the observable universe; we don't know what's there because light hasn't reached us. Most likely more of the same, since the universe appears roughly isotropic when viewed on large scales.

The balloon analogy is confusing you; the surface is all that exists, therefore there's no up down left right.

Just so OP knows, escaping 'observable universe' does not mean escaping the big bang's "sphere". the universe is escaping from our observation at faster than the speed of light.we have no clue what is beyond what we can observe, forget about after that

Yep, thanks for clarifying, I didn't make that very clear.

how can our eyes be real if we are not real??

In for later

1. An atom isnt the smallest thing, in fact the early universe was a quark gluon plasma before the formation of atoms, although quarks don't exist long in isolation due to the strong force and gluon interactions. Atoms are made of leptons (electrons), and a nucleus which contains protons and neutrons (which are made of quark/gluon interactions). There is a maximum amount of matter you can fit in an area and this is precisely what a black hole is; once a region reaches a threshold of energy density, spacetime collapses and a singularity is formed which is what a black hole is. We don't know for sure what the smallest thing is, because it's impossible to observe at that scale, as (roughly speaking) observation uses energy (because you need a photon or something to cause an interaction) and once you start trying to put into an area small enough ,you just form mini black holes.

2. It's not really scientifically accepted as such; it's just the most respected theory of quantum gravity so far. It's difficult to explain to be honest, as it's highly mathematical and theoretical; roughly speaking though by modelling fundamental particles as vibrating strings instead of points, some interesting mathematical concepts emerge and gravity is forced on you. However, string theory has such a vast parameter space that it's really hard to narrow down the theory to 'our' universe, although it does suggest a multiverse. To try to put it as simply as possible, string theory creates a huge math space that appears to be able to model our universe; but also a ridiculous amount of other theoretical universes. There's a lot of math trickery involved which is why some people are skeptical of it; there aren't really experiments to test for it and it's mostly leveraging what we know and mathematical relationships. Most String theory guys only do string theory, so it's quite mathematically complex.

Personally i wouldn't be surprised to see String theory studied less and less by physicists, and more by mathematicians in the future.

How can mirrors be real if our eyes aren't real?

There is missing mass in the universe. Everything we see is only a percentage, and dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the rest. It is believed to be the reason for the universe expanding, among other strange things.

I dont know how people can waste their time talking about the universe when we got so many problems here on earth.


not srs.

A plank length is the smallest possible distance. Nothing can be shorter than a plank length. I'm not sure how they figured that out, but there it is.

Dark matter is not just predicted by the galaxy formations, but also by the cosmic microwave background radiation. Some people believe modified gravity is the answer, but so far it's not near as successful at explaining things as dark matter; any alternate theory would need to explain both galaxy formation and the CMB, as well as still being consistent with General Relativity. It could even be some combination of dark matter and modified gravity is the answer; we're not sure.

The main principle of dark matter is; it's much more dense than regular matter (hence it's stronger gravitational field), and it doesn't interact with the standard model, hence why 'its dark'. This is why it's mysterious; we can't detect it because it doesn't interact with any of the forces in the standard model; only gravity. We have not measured it. It could be that there's an entirely different model of particles of dark matter like the standard model, but because our model doesn't interact with them we simply don't observe them apart form the gravitational effects. There are several theoretical dark matter particles you can find on google

Dark energy is far less mysterious tbh, it's the vacuum energy of space, it's completely uniform and it's what drives the expansion of the universe. As the universe expands, it becomes the dominant force of the universe.This isn't true, it's the shortest theoreticalmeasurable distance; not a limit on how small something can be. It may be the smallest thing; but we don't know. Trying to measure something smaller than this results in black hole formation.

It was derived from the planck constant, that Max planck used to solve the 'ultraviolet catastrophe', by treating energy as discrete instead of continuous.

https://falsabeh.medium.com/the-unso...0a%20blackbody.

The answer to all these questions is simple:

Chaos

Holy ****. Both of these posts.


So essentially, we just have no idea what's beyond the observable universe, but there's likely still galaxies/planets just.... forever? That's so hard to even fathom.

That reminds me of the many worlds theory (which I'm proud of myself because I came up with that theory when I was about 13 and told it to friends, I had never read it, finally read about it years later).


Should there truly be infinite distance, then... that would mean every possibility exists right? Another planet nearly identical to earth? I believe that's the many worlds theory. It's just so hard to imagine.


So, the big bang happened, and matter just appeared...everywhere?I visualize one point of a "thing" happening, and matter exploding everywhere, but there being a line/edge of the matter that is being projected outwards. To me that indicates there being a limited amount of space that is filled with galaxies, as in... the galaxies probably stop somewhere.


Is it possible that galaxies go on forever? And, the big bang just populated dust and gasses everywhere?

There's a dick joke somewhere in there.

Anyway, that is extremely interesting. As in... how exactly is there a minimum. How and why is there a minimum to the size something can be. That's so... odd.

Consciousness

We don't know if it goes on forever, it depends if it's flat or a manifold, but yeah it's possible they go on forever if its geometry is flat. The reason to suspect there's more of the same is simply because the universe looks roughly uniform on very large scales, and there's no reason to arbitrarily suspect everything changes just because it's outside our light cone because that's all the observable universe is. String theory suggests that maybe there's regions of space where the laws of physics differ slightly, so a kind of multiverse, which is another option. The observable universe may just be 0.00001% of the actual universe, or if its infinite then then it's infinite times bigger than the observable universe. We really have no clue how big it is; all we know is that if it isn't infinite it's very, very, very big or we'd be able to detect the curvature in our observable universe.

The big bang is kind of misrepresented, there's this idea we 'exploded' from an infinitely small point, but this idea is outdated. Think of it as rapid expansion of our region of the universe, that happened at all points in space, not just our region. Basically it comes from extrapolating the equations of general relativity backwards, the 'big bang' is basically where the equations break down when you time reverse them, it's the boundary of the theory. We are largely clueless about the actual birth of the universe, and the earliest moments of the observable universe. Here's a link that goes through it in more depth if you are interested:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw...h=580808c77d81See my post above (post 54), planck length isn't the minimum size things can be, it's the smallestobservable unit of measure, trying to measure smaller distances causes too much energy density, and thus space time collapses (i.e mini black holes form).

In fact if you could prove there was a minimum possible size then there'd be a Nobel prize in it for you; because that would violate Lorentz invariance which would be huge.Why wouldn't an electron act as a particle and a wave? It isn't just an electron, everything behaves as a wave and evolves according to the Schrodinger equation before decoherence, an electron isn't special in this regard. Scientists have isolated fairly massive particles (think 50+ atoms; google 'buckyballs') in the quantum regime, before decoherance which express wave-particle duality. The fact the world appears quantum and classical is a mystery and i think is the better question, but this isn't limited to electrons; although i personally think Everetian (many worlds interpretation) explains this well; stuff appears quantum until you become entangled with it, then you're essentially viewing your 'slice' of the wave function, and thus the world appears classical.

Many worlds interpretation isn't the most respected theory although it is becoming more respected nowdays; that's probably the Copanhagen interpretation, although i think the MWI is the best we have as it does a far better job of explaining things like the wave function collapse/measurement problem, and why things appear quantum and classical. Whereas the Copanhagen interpretation is very hand wavey in this regard. It basically says 'the wave function collapses and that's that, you just have to accept it'. At least in MWI it makes complete sense; the world evolves according to the Schrodinger equation and we become entangled with our environment making it appear classical to us, whereas the Copanhagen interpretation is arbitrarily 'choosing' a solution from the Schrodinger equation randomly, although there's no real explanation as to why.

I suppose you should consider we are living in a simulation that could be contained in our solar system.

Though as to unsolved mysteries, the fine constant is probably the top of the list.

late but

in

seems like they know very little, I see humans doing better things in engineering


so hats off to the engineers

I wonder if the answer to this is so obvious that it's in plain sight, yet overlooked. You have some advanced neural network AI computer, next to a human brain. What is the fundamental difference between the two things in front of you? Is it the level of computational complexity and number of network connections etc, is that what results in consciousness in the one over the other? I think not, and am skeptical that advanced artifical computing machines will all the sudden gain consciousness after a certain threshold of complexity is reached. The answer may be simply in the chemistry of the two things. Brains have an organic chemistry made up of various biological molecules. It is one thing that computers, no matter how advanced the super-duper hyper-computational quantum computing machine, do not have, and are not made up of...there is an asymmetry here.

We already know what certain molecules can do to affect your state of consciousness, be it drugs, or hormones, or the chemicals in the brain that are associated with the feeling of love, etc. Computers dont have the biology (chemistry) to interact with such entities, and it is their makeup that is the reason they arent conscious. They dont feel at all....the concept of "feel" itself has a lot to do with those chemical molecules.

It should be noted that little is really known about what consciousness is, or even if it could be defined accurately, and in general there is a ton of babble and quackery out there about the subject (I'm looking at you quantum consciousness and mysticism). I suspect consciousness is not as grand of a concept as some make it out to be.

As a side note I would not be so sure dogs arent conscious/self-aware....the truth is we simply cannot be within the mind of a dog or other animals so we cannot say what they are thinking exactly. The level of intelligence and "higher" thinking in terms of abstract thinking (and this is a rather human-biased idea, maybe discerning scents for a dog is "higher thinking") compared to a dog lies in the differently evolved brains and size/foldings of the cerebral cortex etc, but again we cannot say what's going on in the mind of a dog.

The above is probably not saying all that much, just some rambling...it's a topic that is not well understood. I do not think the answer, if one exists, will be one from computer science/complexity theory, philosophy, psychology, or any of that. More a mundane issue of biology and chemistry. Unless you start building computers from the stuff of life we are made of (the atoms for example, the organic compounds, the nucleic acids and proteins), I dont see consciousness arising.

Incredible reply, I knew we'd find intelligent, well read people in here. Loved reading this, and thanks for updating me on the latest science. It's so mind boggling. So if the universe does go on "forever", there is likely another planet with being almost identical to us, who ironically named it earth, in a country they ironically named the United States, on a thing they ironically called the Internet, on a forum they ironically called the Misc. That's just... yeah.



Anyway, can you help explain in the most easy to understand/basic terms what the many worlds theory you mention at the end here is? I mean, I assume it's more than what I just said above based on your post.

Basically just type more about the most interesting things you know about the universe lol this is good reading.