The Universe

[Bairnardo]

See when the universe was a dense wee ball that exploded.... Where was the ball?

[Melanius Mullarkey]

59 minutes ago, Bairnardo said:

See when the universe was a dense wee ball that exploded.... Where was the ball?

Just outside Cowdenbeath.

[Lurkst]

9 hours ago, Bairnardo said:

See when the universe was a dense wee ball that exploded.... Where was the ball?

My guess, D20...

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Ff1936c70-bd75-11e6-a53a-ca2ad7b229f9.jpg?crop=2268%2C2835%2C0%2C0

 

Edited April 11, 2022 by Lurkst

[welshbairn]

As real as your hair m8. The settlement on Mars bit anyway.

[Bairnardo]

As real as your hair m8. The settlement on Mars bit anyway.

There are a few accounts out there that say technology/medicine etc is available now that could make someone live forever.

An absolute NAP that this psycho Bond villain twat is one of the first to tell us all that his gift needs to survive for future generations.

[dorlomin]

On 11/04/2022 at 07:19, Bairnardo said:

See when the universe was a dense wee ball that exploded.... Where was the ball?

The observable Universe is the portion of the Universe where the light from it has had time to reach us. The edge of the observable Universe is 93 billion light years away. The light we see is called the cosmic background radiation. (Link to an image off it. )

But the Universe is only 13 billion years old, so how can we see 93 billion light years away? The Universe has expanded a lot. There is simply more space in space. As it expanded it cooled down to the Universe we see toady. Now lets run this backwards. Start pushing everything in that 93 billion light year radius into a smaller and smaller space as time runs back. The Universe gets hotter and hotter. Till about 300 000 years from the Big Bang, about 13 billion years ago, all of the observable Universe was so tightly packed into such a small space it was a super hot dense plasma. A plasma means that electrons do not orbit protons as they are too hot. In this state any light photon is immediately absorbed then re emitted so light is not travelling anywhere. 

The hot dense state was everywhere. 

And now start running the clock forward.... it expands and cools enough that photons are no longer absorbed immediately, suddenly light can travel. And this happens at the same second across everywhere. This light is very high frequency as its emitted by super hot electrons. This light is the Cosmic Background Radiation.

But as the Universe expands it stretches out the high frequency light so it appears to be cooler and cooler till its just microwave. And this is why the background radiation is a steady hum of microwave radiation from all points on the edge of the observable Universe.

 

[Stellaboz]

What does it expand into if there's nothing there to begin with? Does non existence just turn into existence?

[dorlomin]

18 minutes ago, Stellaboz said:

What does it expand into if there's nothing there to begin with? Does non existence just turn into existence?

We have an intuition of how the Universe works based on us being basically an over sized monkey, have the intuition that there is always more space. If you are in a room, there is a house with space around it. If you are in a house, there is a town or fields around it. If you are in a town there is a country around it etc etc etc. We always feel there should be more space. So we intuitively feel that there is more space outside of Space. 

But we know our way of intuiting about the Universe breaks down when we move down to the small scale of quantum effects or up to the masses where relativity become important. Our intuitive "Newtonian" world breaks down and we need maths to start understanding things. 

As we get to masses as great as the Sun we can see light traveling in what appears to be curves around it as spacetime becomes bent, this is why in solar eclipses, stars close to the Sun are in the wrong position. As gravity gets very intense and we start approaching the border of blackholes our current maths of space breaks down again, just like our intuitive Newtonian world did. Some people suggest the maths works that time becomes 3 dimensional and space only 1 inside black holes. But our current theories do not work here and we need to build better ones. 

Now we go back to pushing the observable Universe into smaller and smaller early Universe. The density keeps rising astronomically until its so dense that it behave like a black hole. As we compress it we heat up the Universe to billions of degrees and the forces start becoming the same thing. Electromagnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces all unify into the same set of laws. We reproduce these heats momentarily in colliders like the LHC so can check the maths works. 

It becomes so hot and so dense that like in black holes "space" stops being a thing. As does time. There is nothing outside of it, because its not a room in a house. It is everything, it is the Universe, the one (uni) (verse) everything. 

This is why cosmologists say there was no space and no time before the Big Bang. At those temperatures and densities everything appears to be the same. And we turn on time, we get "inflation" a sudden expansion of everything simultaneously  to be trillion of times bigger in something like a billionth of a second. The Big Bang. The laws of physics start appearing as things cool enough for the forces to separate. 

The 4 dimensions of time and space only exist in the Universe. The Universe creates more of them. It just created more time dimension as you read this. So it also creates more space dimension. And we get expansion of the Universe.

There is one sort of caveat to this. If the Universe is infinite, then the dense of mass that the observable Universe was pushed into, was also infinitely big. But thinking about that messes with my head. 

[dorlomin]

 

Scottish rocket from a Scottish space port is going to space. Payload should be from Surrey Satellites. They are aiming for a late 2022 launch date. 

[Silvio Tattiescone]

I've heard a lot of folk in Sutherland aren't that enamoured by the whole thing 

[welshbairn]

6 hours ago, Newbornbairn said:

I've heard a lot of folk in Sutherland aren't that enamoured by the whole thing 

I've heard it's just that Danish Billionaire who owns half the Highlands and has invested in another spaceport in the Shetlands.

[tamthebam]

46 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

I've heard it's just that Danish Billionaire who owns half the Highlands and has invested in another spaceport in the Shetlands.

Ironically a Scottish billionaire couldn't buy land in Denmark because they restrict that kind of thing 

Anyway seeing a rocket blast off at night might be quite spectacular.

[SweeperDee]

Big announcement from the new telescope about the centre of our galaxy coming soon. Hopefully a clearer picture of the black hole. Can’t wait, fucking love it.

[coprolite]

On 26/04/2022 at 17:16, oaksoft said:

Whoever answers that will be invited to meet the King of Sweden to pick up their medal.

I like the idea that the only reason all of this sort of stuff looks weird is because we are only viewing it in 4 dimensions (3 for distance and the 4th for time). Just like the sphere behaving "weirdly" when passing through 2 spatial dimensions (starts as a point, grows to a line and then shrinks to a spot again before disappearing) but is perfectly normal when viewed in 3 dimensions.

I think we might simply be missing some extra dimensions and those extra dimensions will explain not only the Big Bang but also things like the oddness of quantum mechanics and gravity. It might even explain death and the purpose to life itself (if there is one). If so, then whatever or whoever created our world, made it physically impossible for us to fully see the working parts (quantum mechanics) and to break free of the world we live in (because we can't travel the distances required to do so due to the speed of light limit). I really like the cleverness of that potential gotcha.

No idea how many other scientists think the same way but pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking along these lines.

That first bit sounds like some sort of projection theory. You need to be in a higher dimension to observe lower dimensions, but you can only see the outside of those dimensions. 

The second bit sounds too anthropocentric for my liking. 

We can't see quantum level phenomena because we've not had any evolutionary pressure to. We eat macroscopic food and worried about macroscopic rivals and predators, so we have developed sensory equipment and the appropriate conceptual ability to deal with that scale. 

[dorlomin]

1 hour ago, SweeperDee said:

Big announcement from the new telescope about the centre of our galaxy coming soon. Hopefully a clearer picture of the black hole. Can’t wait, fucking love it.
 

 

 

 

 

[welshbairn]

1 hour ago, SweeperDee said:

Big announcement from the new telescope about the centre of our galaxy coming soon. Hopefully a clearer picture of the black hole. Can’t wait, fucking love it.

Impressive as it is, it's not a new telescope, it's a collaboration between 8 radio telescopes on Earth. I don't know for sure but I don't think the new James Webb telescope would be much good at this, it mainly operates in the infrared which is great for looking back really far back in time, but maybe not so good at getting data from around a black hole a mere 25 thousand light years away.

[Arch Stanton]

On 11/04/2022 at 17:01, Lurkst said:

My guess, D20...

[coprolite]

6 minutes ago, oaksoft said:

We can certainly observe quantum phenomena. For example, we can observe electrons exhibiting wave or particle behaviour depending on what we measure.

The problem is that you can't see the electron itself. To see things you need to bombard it with some form of "light" and the electron is so small that the second you do that, it flies off somewhere else after being whacked by the energy from the light photon. That isn't an evolutionary thing. It's rooted in Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. In our 4-D universe, nothing can fully track the progress of a quantum particle as it moves with any real precision. It's not possible. Unless Heisenberg is wrong. In which case there's a Nobel Prize for anyone who can prove it.

The whole thing is fascinating.

ETA. I am almost certain that an electron can't fully track another electron either so it's not a problem of the size of the observer.

Given that nobody has ever seen an electron, it's astonishing what we have achieved as a species with things like electronics which works on quantum principles.

I said we couldn't see quantum phenomena, not that we couldn't indirectly observe them. 

The uncertainty principle relates to the nature of quantum "particles", in that you can only detect any properties by interacting with them, and any interaction changes their properties.

You talk about "tracking" electrons. That's analogous thinking. I. E. That implies that they are things that move around spacetime in ways that are like the way things move around at a macroscopic level. But they don't. An electron isn't anywhere until it interacts with other particles. It is one place, then another and between those places its path is probalistic not real in our space. That doesn't make intuitive sense, because our brains can't really cope with quantum mechanics. 

[dorlomin]

The Uncertainty Principle is an emergent property of Quantum Field Theory. Its explained to students as being that to observe an electron you need a a photon to hit it and that changes its momentum and position so you can only know one of those properties definitively. High school physics tends to stop telling the story of our understanding of the quantum world around the point that de Broglie creates the dual wave particle nature of the photon and Heisenberg creates the Uncertainty Principle. It leaves students with a classical world view of particles as tiny snooker balls with very weird behaviour. 

The two big descriptions of the sub atomic behaviour of matter and light at the time were the Heisenberg Equation and the Schrodinger Equation. These equations describe probability waves. Just probabilities of where a particle will be. This was then expanded on by people like Dirac and we get to a picture of the Universe composing of a series of fields, where each particle type and force carrier has a field of its own. The photon is the force carrier in the Electromagnetic Field and the electron is nothing but a probability wave in the Electron Field. 

This is Quantum Field Theory. Arguably the most precise theory in science. The predictions from it have been bourn out to incredible degree of precision. It was able to predict the existence of antimatter before we discovered it, it is used to form the building blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. It was a step on the road to the Higgs Field and the particle of that name that won a Nobel a few years back. 

But to start thinking about everything in the Universe being simple probability waves on a series of fields and to think about what all that means is a huge leap. Its the sort of thing you might need weeks or months of study to approach from a couple of angles. Everything in the Universe is nothing but probability waves across a series of quantum fields. You, as a human are nothing but repeating patterns of waves in those fields, that is all that the chemistry that makes up the biology that creates the psychology that makes you horney for big tits is. Its just repeating patterns  probability waves. Patterns that have self organised to perpetuate their repetition, i.e. evolution. 

But we can understand and predict all this to incredible degrees of precision due to maths. Personally I find the way maths works both with itself internally and with the physics of the Universe to be the creepiest, weirdest most "f**k me this has to be a set up or something". The point is that the words are just analogies of the maths. So you can work a bit on the words to build up toy models of the Universe in your head, but to really grasp whats happening you have to wade balls deep into the maths. 

My point here is that our understanding of the physics of the Universe is much deeper and much more complex than school and pop science. Its a different paradigm, thinking in much more abstract forms. But its incredibly useful to your everyday life,. This is how we invented lasers and semiconductors.

In terms of QFT (Quantum Field Theory) I will post some PBS SpaceTime, It goes into more detail with far better explanations. Just dont expect to understand it on one viewing. Its a major shift in thinking about what "stuff" is, including us. 

 

Edited May 12, 2022 by dorlomin

[Silvio Tattiescone]

13 minutes ago, dorlomin said:

The Uncertainty Principle is an emergent property of Quantum Field Theory. Its explained to students as being that to observe an electron you need a a photon to hit it and that changes its momentum and position so you can only know one of those properties definitively. High school physics tends to stop telling the story of our understanding of the quantum world around the point that de Broglie creates the dual wave particle nature of the photon and Heisenberg creates the Uncertainty Principle. It leaves students with a classical world view of particles as tiny snooker balls with very weird behaviour. 

The two big descriptions of the sub atomic behaviour of matter and light at the time were the Heisenberg Equation and the Schrodinger Equation. These equations describe probability waves. Just probabilities of where a particle will be. This was then expanded on by people like Dirac and we get to a picture of the Universe composing of a series of fields, where each particle type and force carrier has a field of its own. The photon is the force carrier in the Electromagnetic Field and the electron is nothing but a probability wave in the Electron Field. 

This is Quantum Field Theory. Arguably the most precise theory in science. The predictions from it have been bourn out to incredible degree of precision. It was able to predict the existence of antimatter before we discovered it, it is used to form the building blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. It was a step on the road to the Higgs Field and the particle of that name that won a Nobel a few years back. 

But to start thinking about everything in the Universe being simple probability waves on a series of fields and to think about what all that means is a huge leap. Its the sort of thing you might need weeks or months of study to approach from a couple of angles. Everything in the Universe is nothing but probability waves across a series of quantum fields. You, as a human are nothing but repeating patterns of waves in those fields, that is all that the chemistry that makes up the biology that creates the psychology that makes you horney for big tits is. Its just repeating patterns  probability waves. Patterns that have self organised to perpetuate their repetition, i.e. evolution. 

But we can understand and predict all this to incredible degrees of precision due to maths. Personally I find the way maths works both with itself internally and with the physics of the Universe to be the creepiest, weirdest most "f**k me this has to be a set up or something". The point is that the words are just analogies of the maths. So you can work a bit on the words to build up toy models of the Universe in your head, but to really grasp whats happening you have to wade balls deep into the maths. 

My point here is that our understanding of the physics of the Universe is much deeper and much more complex than school and pop science. Its a different paradigm, thinking in much more abstract forms. But its incredibly useful to your everyday life,. This is how we invented lasers and semiconductors.

In terms of QFT (Quantum Field Theory) I will post some PBS SpaceTime, It goes into more detail with far better explanations. Just dont expect to understand it on one viewing. Its a major shift in thinking about what "stuff" is, including us. 

 

Aye but, Airdrie,