Survey on Astrophysics

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It is amazing how the 2009 Star Trek film relates to Astrophysics. I think that only those who are Astrophysically informed will take full advantage of this film! It is supposed to be the first chronological film. Based in the time before T.O.S.

HelixStein

Yeah, my idiosyncrasies are numerous, I suspect they are related to some improperly formed brain connections, particularly those involving my amygdala, as I don't exhibit appropriate fear/panic responses. I am aware of activation of that part of my brain, which is abnormal, as the amygdala generally overrides the constant updating of awareness.

I'm very detached from my emotions as well, not sure how much of that is common to autistic individuals, or how much is due to the abnormal connection structure. I do know my normal internal monologue is less verbal based than it should be, I "see" words when trying to spell them, or the impression of shapes similar to the way I interpret voices, only originating from the point I define my self as being located within. It's a big part of my odd post structure, the aesthetic appeal is patterned to be as close to the shape of the thoughts in my mind as possible.


I think string models have some aspects of truth to them, but that it isn't properly interpreted, nor rigorously defineable as to which form is the right form for describing our Universe.

The ekpyrotic concept is interesting, but it simply displaces the issue of initial cause to one asking where the branes themselves came from.

Yes, I also have numerous idiosyncrasies. I am the complete opposite for the fear/panic and emotions. I am rather timid. Especially with people and balls. I am learning to supress my emotions. Sort of like Mr. Spock. You right, the ekpyrotic concept is clever, but it sort of leaves us with numerous other questions, one of which is where did the branes come from. Humans, A.S and neurotypical all the same, like to know the origin of things. When certain things are inconclusive, humans often make up there own reasons, hence religion. One question that people asked me when we covered astronomy last year in science, is, if the big bang did happen, then where did the 'fireball' come from?

By the way, where did the fireball come from in the big bang theory.

HelixStein

I have a lot of views on this, and have written hundreds of pages of ideas on the topic.
sometimes it goes on for 10 to 40 pages and then i have a "well, that makes the last umpteen pages wrong"

But what i've come down to so far leaves the following impression in my mind.

The universe is spherical.. well, considering the time-dimension of space time it's more conical. (a sphere expanding at 71 km per megaparsec per second)
I don't mean by that that the universe is contained INSIDE the expanding sphere, rather that our 3 spacial dimensions are the surface of the sphere, and that the interior (called a ball in geometry) represents the past, though it no longer "exists"
When we envision the sphere, where the three dimensions of space exist on every point, we have to add another one in our minds unless we can envision in 4d.

we can see North/South, and East/West.. but there is also an Up/down and that up/down doesn't go into or out from the sphere.

To understand the universe and it's coordinates we have to use spherical coordinates.

Now, here's where it gets tricky.. This isn't like a normal sphere. it has special properties because of it's 4d nature.
Every arch is part of an "equator" and every point is a "pole".

That is why the universe is relativistic.
No matter where we are, our observation point is as if we are at the equator. So, something pi/2 radians from us in any direction would be a pole. We cannot see that far mind you. Nor will we ever be able to.

if you went 1m south of the north pole (on earth), and walked in a circle around the pole, you would travel 1 degree of longitude very fast. But at the equator, you'd be walking that 1 degree very very slowly.

Something similar happens on this universal sphere, just much more difficult to imagine or explain.
From the observation point of a equatorial position, we see someone (the observed) nearer the pole, who walks in what our perspective shows as a proper arch or geodesic, from our perspective it will take the same amount of time to walk around the pole there, as it would to go around the entire universe where we are. Reason being, a radian distance is a radian distance, no matter where one is.
To the observed party, they would be traveling the same distance that we would if we traveled around the universe. We just perceive it as less, because we perceive them as closer to the pole, and further from the equator. Though to them the trip would still be one trip around the equator.

The next part is this... And this is what defines the poles. We are in orbit around this 4d sphere. That is why time and space are intertwined, and why the speed of light is specifically c, as that is the orbital speed of the universe at it's surface.
Time slows with mass, because we "dent" the surface, and go closer to the centre, thus lowering the necessary orbital speed.
(I have theory on this, but i'm no where near being in a place where i can describe it adequately)

Lastly... all studies have shown that the universe is flat, within 2%.
That can only be based on the observable universe, which cannot make up anywhere near what the entire universe is. The very nature of this 4d sphere set in the 5d manifold, would prevent the view-ability of the entirety of it.
It's not for the same reason we can't see to China, that's because light doesn't bend fast enough to travel around the earth, instead it travels away from it.
It has to do with Cosmological Horizons. If light has not had time to travel that far, then we cannot see it.
It's more complicated than that... but i'll leave it at that for now.

So, if our universe is flat within 2%.. let's give it to 1%.
so, (0.01) in x, y and z that's ((0.01)^3 ) = 0.000001 or (0.0001 %)
That would imply that we see only (at max) 0.0001 % of the real universe. This does have to be slightly adjusted do to the age of the universe though, but the effect is less than an order of magnitude.

When you take a look at the geometry of a 4d sphere, apply math, knowing the value c = 300,000 km/s, and knowing the cosmological expansion of 71 km/MPc/s the 46 billion light year radius we can observe is on the right order of magnitude.
You do need to consider the real speed of light in radians per time unit, not in our km or miles.

my calculations were like 20 to 30 pages so i'm not going to reproduce it here, and i have to achieve a certain state of mind before i can understand it myself.

I feel like i'm missing saying some important part, but I just got taken back out of my scientific frame of mind by a horrible coughing fit due to this dang cold, so I'll wait for any questions.

Oh, and the simple answer to the original question was closed, and spherical.

PS... If we were able to view the 4d sphere, the "sphere" of what we can see in the universe, would be more like a cube on the surface of the 4d sphere. Time and universal age would warp it from perfection... it would look somewhere between sphere and cube.

Interestingly, I also like the term hypercone to describe it, due to the orientation of the temporal axis, and the different shape of each slice as you move along it.

If you take a cone and slice it perpendicular to the axis, you produce a sphere.



Also: http://www.clowder.net/hop/Dandelin/Dandelin.html


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I do disagree with something you said, Exclavius, the past is still "over there" towards the entropic minimum, and the future is "the other way" along the axis, the surface we call the present is not the outer boundary of the Universe, it is merely the hyperplane of points that are simultaneous relative to the most recent update cycle of our awareness.

I exist a few minutes from now, after I've finished this post. You "already" exist at the moment in time when you read this, though I wrote it upstream towards the past from your present plane of simultaneity.

The moment when you read this, existed when you were reading the prior paragraph, your consciousness simply hadn't updated itself into the state where you would be able to claim awareness of THIS moment yet. We are scribbles drawn through the 4 dimensional structure of the Universe, oriented due to the entropy requirements that a space capable of generating self-aware observers must have.

Current theories don't explain the initial event, I'm with Smolin, and a few others suggesting that the initial event was another Universe producing a black hole.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news ... wormholes/

Though again, that still raises the problem of what produced the initial Universe that eventually led to our own.

The entire idea we have that causality should extend the same way outside of the Universe though, that is misguided at best. Causality is a property OF the Universe, and the type of dimensionality it possesses. Guesses about extra-universal dimensionality are untestable currently.

I said i forgot something....

Here it is, as best as i can explain it.

When we look back in time we see the same relativistic "crunching" of space that we see when we view things nearer the poles.

It was your uncertainty about the inflationary period that made me think of it.

We can look back in time, indirectly through various methods, but we cannot look forward in time... I think ... I stress the word think here, that we would see an a bulging in space when we looked forward, if it were possible.
It would not actually be larger... just be so, relativistically.

The universe would look like a hypercylinder if we were able to extract ourselves from it, and put ourselves into the 5d manifold which holds the 4d space time. We cannot, so due to it's relativistic nature, we can only envision it as a hypercone.

That is if we could view it.. because i do tend to lean towards the belief that the universe is a black hole in another universe... Only it has 1 fewer dimension. ie, 4d sphere/cone/cylinder in a 5d manifold. We cannot perceive that 5th dimension directly.
A black hole in our universe produces a lower dimensional universe, acting with different properties.
I do not believe matter, or any alternative can form with 2 space and 1 time dimension. I suspect they degenerate to triviality at this point. But the 5d manifold which holds our 4d space time, could well be a black hole in a 6d manifold.

A side on how the dimension drop happens is:
time stops in a black hole... So the time dimension is lost ... though actually converted into what we call space/time curvature.
one space dimension, and it doesn't matter which, because they are congruent, replaces time... this is ONLY possible because of relativity.

The corollary of all this is that the universe would not have a beginning.
What we can calculate as the "age of the universe" would be the time since we were at what is now our cosmological horizon... If we could view a pole, it would appear infinitely dense, though not a black hole.. rather a white hole.
As we look "back in time" we see that same infinite density, which we perceive as the big bang... the expansion out of a former black/white hole.

it takes two factors acting in tandem to cause the inflationary period to be so.... dramatic.
a) the relativistic "crunching of space"
b) the gravitational effects that "crunch" space time even more.
once we have expanded out of what would be the "event horizon" of the relative singularity, the inflationary period ends.

I hinge the past and future "not existing" anymore only one one thing...
I believe in true free will, if the future already exists, then there is no free will.
I don't take it as a given, only I believe it. If there is no free will, and i mean true free will, then the future can, and likely does, already exist.
Another way to put it.. is if the universe is truly deterministic, in every conceivable way, then past, future and present co-exist.

I was discussing that in PM with another member, he provided some articles which claim free will is falsified.

The thing was, they do this by stating that they can not find a mechanism to explain it, so the apparent sensation of free will is some sort of evolutionary ploy to get us to think we have a say in our actions, which is supposed to make it easier to get by or whatnot.

One article mentions this:

Which is funny because I'm specifically developing a modification of relativity which produces behavior at small enough scales that would appear to violate causality from our perspective, but satisfies the Bell Inequalities in a manner similar to the Bohm model. It doesn't rely upon the hidden variable pilot wave though, only the extended temporal structure of the particles, which are only partially observable due to our much narrower temporal spread.

That behavior in a quantum model of consciousness would allow free will and determinism to co-exist in a coarse grained Wheeler type cosmology. One where all possible outcomes are real, but where certain types of "fine grained" differences (like quantum coin tosses) can be contained within a single Universe in the manifold.

perhaps the "crunching" of the past is transforming time into a "mirror" through which we can see/predict the future/
what we see as expansion is the "thinning" of time relative to our point of view which is why objects appear to accelerate the further away they are from us
but since every one of us or any object or point of view is at a bottomless gravity well or at the center of a time lens every thing in the universe is at the center at the same time(your model shows that too) and every "point" in the center of the cosmic explosion or the big band which exist beyond what we perceives as the temporal axis as an eternal now /
BTW
when looking for properties,sentiments and behaviors shared by many AS it looks like that this perception of a multi centered universe can account for lots of them as many aspies as a rule tend toward the egalitarian and stay away from the hierarchical.
also from rants gathered from all over this forum i get the impression that AS social skills are 4D and as such are based on lot of params the 3D NT are not aware of,i think it is no coincidence the Einstein was a pacifist and humanitarian because it's only take coupla few dimension more to see how insensible and crazy most of the human race is/
when u experience life at 4D u can see the pain and injustice generated from a 3D dynamics where everyone spend his life fighting for a location nearer to the center or the top,it so stupid because in a sense every atom is at the center of the universe .
i am considered fearless and suicidal by my surrounding as i always doing the, and choosing the wrong things to do
somehow at the end most of the times it turn out that my crazy choices led me to much better and interesting places than the one achived by the sane one

I absolutely cannot wait until I take Physics as a subject so I can comprehend fully this discussion. All my knowledge is from the books at the school library, that only goes up to High School Physics. Quite elementary! Another question involving Astronomy is, where is the new satalite (Named after a NASA worker) that is going to be put into orbit next year, going to be placed???

HelixStein

According to Steinhardt and Turok who proposed the ekpyrotic theory, the branes did not "come" from anywhere. They are/were/will be always there.

ruveyn

Uh, Exclavius, you do know you can't have an absolute definition of simultaneity for all observers, right?

A simple adjustment of trajectory and enough velocity is all it would take for me to observe portions of the past and future from your frame of reference as simultaneous in my frame.


As for the branes not needing a cause, that is actually my point about the Universe. It exists in it's entirety, containing what we know of time, and the related causal structure. It did not need a cause, it is logically consistent, so it must exist.

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/ ... index.html

That is lower level college course type material, and should take you well beyond the books at the school library. Don't neglect the public library either, I've had occasions where I showed up when they opened, and wouldn't leave until they asked me to go so they could lock the doors.


Btw: http://www.jwst.nasa.gov/

James Webb Space Telescope, he ran NASA in the 60's.

It's something that got some aspies, other are very sensitives. For me I am sensitive, but I got great difficulties to make sense of what I'm feeling.


Why do you want to get rid of emotions? Emotions can be a great thing. You should read Hubert Reeve, physics and emotional experiences from the spiritual connection to the Universe, then again I don't know what value is the english translations, if it exist.

About math, don't worry a 100% in algebra is quite good, and worth more that a 80% in arithmetic. Higher math is not about been good in arithmetic, you can use a calculator after all.