Samoth

[fistfullofsteel]

If everything in the universe dies out and there is nothing but blackness and space. Does the universe still exist? They said on science show that in trillions and trillions of years all the stars are going to stop existing. Me confused. I heard and read about anti-matter. I don't know much about it.

 

[samoth]

See: Anthropic Principle. I don't remember if it's the weak or strong AP.

 

[samoth]

If everything in the universe dies out and there is nothing but blackness and space. Does the universe still exist? They said on science show that in trillions and trillions of years all the stars are going to stop existing. Me confused. I heard and read about anti-matter. I don't know much about it.

To answer this question another way, it depends on how you define "die", "exist", and all that semantical muggawugga. Do you think anything can exist if we are not here to comprehend its existance? What if there's no intelligent life anywhere to comprehend its existance? Does a proton die (assuming 10^33 ~ infinity)?

 

[fistfullofsteel]

See: Anthropic Principle. I don't remember if it's the weak or strong AP.

dude come on, that stuff is over my head. what's the cliff notes on it? i can't understand 99.99999% of the stuff newton wrote nevermind whatever you're talking about.

 

[Stefka]

To answer this question another way, it depends on how you define "die", "exist", and all that semantical muggawugga. Do you think anything can exist if we are not here to comprehend its existance? What if there's no intelligent life anywhere to comprehend its existance? Does a proton die (assuming 10^33 ~ infinity)?

Let us assume that something can continue to "exist" even when there is nothing there to witness said existence . . .

 

[samoth]

dude come on, that stuff is over my head. what's the cliff notes on it? i can't understand 99.99999% of the stuff newton wrote nevermind whatever you're talking about.

Nah, the anthropic principles aren't, like, math stuff. They're, like, cosmological philosophy ideas used in physics and astronomy.

Lemme look up a good def.

 

[jack sparrow]

Let us assume that something can continue to "exist" even when there is nothing there to witness said existence . . .

Let us assume that soon you will put a sock in it.

 

[samoth]

Holy crap, the Wiki page is, like, 20 pages long. Sheesh.

Basically, the anthropic principle states that the universe is the way it is because we are here to percieve it.

 

[eddymerckx]

Let us assume that something can continue to "exist" even when there is nothing there to witness said existence . . .

like student loans

 

[fistfullofsteel]

To answer this question another way, it depends on how you define "die", "exist", and all that semantical muggawugga. Do you think anything can exist if we are not here to comprehend its existance? What if there's no intelligent life anywhere to comprehend its existance? Does a proton die (assuming 10^33 ~ infinity)?

i have no clue, that's why i'm asking you. I've been thinking about it but i know my level of thinking isn't on the level of astro and physics peeps. to me it feels like real abstract thinking or a level of thinking i can't get to. it's like trying to get my basketball game on michael jordon's or any other nba player's level.

 

[samoth]

Let us assume that something can continue to "exist" even when there is nothing there to witness said existence . . .

Define "something". (See the problem discussing this cosmo astro stuff? lol, it's all dependent on language, interpretation, and semantics.)

 

[fistfullofsteel]

Holy crap, the Wiki page is, like, 20 pages long. Sheesh.

Basically, the anthropic principle states that the universe is the way it is because we are here to percieve it.

i was expecting something more profound.

doesn't everything seem to work in cycles in the grand scheme of things, so there really is no end?

 

[Stefka]

Define "something". (See the problem discussing this cosmo astro stuff? lol, it's all dependent on language, interpretation, and semantics.)

You should go to law school. You'd do well there.

 

[eddymerckx]

You should go to law school. You'd do well there.

samoth is too smart for law school--he would take a ucc class and his head would explode

 

[Stefka]

samoth is too smart for law school--he would take a ucc class and his head would explode

So me hating the UCC makes me smart?
Seriously, doesn't it just make you want to cry sometimes?

 

[samoth]

i have no clue, that's why i'm asking you. I've been thinking about it but i know my level of thinking isn't on the level of astro and physics peeps. to me it feels like real abstract thinking or a level of thinking i can't get to. it's like trying to get my basketball game on michael jordon's or any other nba player's level.

The problem is it's rather hard, if not impossible, to put it concisely one way or another because the languages differ. Everything will die: stars, planets, planetary life, ..., bacteria, ..., chemical bonds, ..., [insert small thing]. But how small do we go? How do we define existance? Herein lies the problems and seeming paradoxical nature of the question. Moreover, assuming that the universe will "die out" is presupposing a number of things about the birth, nature of, composition of, behavior of, etc, of the universe itself.

One interesting way to look at things is through the second law of thermodynamics. You know, the one with that wierd word: "entropy", meaning "disorder". To wit: entropy always increases. Or, in other words, you can't win (old thermo joke). Of interest here is the basis of the most theoretical of physics, that of the initial spacetime singularity (the big bang) and its relation to the Weyl curvature hypothesis and a necessary time-asymmetric quantized theory of gravity. In other words, this shit is, like, all-encompassing. They just don't tell you that 'cause they don't know much and it's connected to so many other topics/concepts/ideas/laws/everything, lol.

 

[samoth]

And it we're to assume the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis to be true, we know that white holes cannot exist. Cool, eh?

 

[eddymerckx]

So me hating the UCC makes me smart?
Seriously, doesn't it just make you want to cry sometimes?

yep, but then again i practice tax law (and have an LL.M. in Taxation), so......

 

[fistfullofsteel]

The problem is it's rather hard, if not impossible, to put it concisely one way or another because the languages differ. Everything will die: stars, planets, planetary life, ..., bacteria, ..., chemical bonds, ..., [insert small thing]. But how small do we go? How do we define existance? Herein lies the problems and seeming paradoxical nature of the question. Moreover, assuming that the universe will "die out" is presupposing a number of things about the birth, nature of, composition of, behavior of, etc, of the universe itself.

One interesting way to look at things is through the second law of thermodynamics. You know, the one with that wierd word: "entropy", meaning "disorder". To wit: entropy always increases. Or, in other words, you can't win (old thermo joke). Of interest here is the basis of the most theoretical of physics, that of the initial spacetime singularity (the big bang) and its relation to the Weyl curvature hypothesis and a necessary time-asymmetric quantized theory of gravity. In other words, this shit is, like, all-encompassing. They just don't tell you that 'cause they don't know much and it's connected to so many other topics/concepts/ideas/laws/everything, lol.

ok, write it in english this time.

 

[Stefka]

And it we're to assume the Weyl Curvature Hypothesis to be true, we know that white holes cannot exist. Cool, eh?

I have no idea what the hell you're talking about, but I'm still swooning.

 

[samoth]

ok, write it in english this time.

Uhh... umm, if you ignore the second paragraph, does it make sense?

 

[samoth]

I have no idea what the hell you're talking about, but I'm still swooning.

Really, I don't, either. Ask me next semester after I get further into GR and tensor analysis, lol.

 

[eddymerckx]

Uhh... umm, if you ignore the second paragraph, does it make sense?

is there anything we actually understand? i mean somthing that is not dependant on something else that may or may not be true?

 

[sigourney_beaver]

this Weyl guy drove a 7 series BMW

 

[samoth]

is there anything we actually understand? i mean somthing that is not dependant on something else that may or may not be true?

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to say that for every answer given only FFOS's OP, one could have a completely different yet equally valid response, so there exists no single credited response.

However, his wording about the universe dying out gives some hints. There's the presupposition that the universe is forever expanding, which tells us about the second law of TD, the hubble constant and the matter composition of the universe, and other stuff. In this case, I think it's considered the universe will suffer a heat-death at infinity, where heat here is used by its strict definition, and heat-death means the universe will approach uniform absolute zero.

 

[samoth]

this Weyl guy drove a 7 series BMW

Close. Dude was a mathematician specializing in geometry or something. He probably worked off of Riemann's shit. The Weyl and Riemann curvature tensors are components of Einstein's field equation.

WEYL =

 

[eddymerckx]

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to say that for every answer given only FFOS's OP, one could have a completely different yet equally valid response, so there exists no single credited response.

However, his wording about the universe dying out gives some hints. There's the presupposition that the universe is forever expanding, which tells us about the second law of TD, the hubble constant and the matter composition of the universe, and other stuff. In this case, I think it's considered the universe will suffer a heat-death at infinity, where heat here is used by its strict definition, and heat-death means the universe will approach uniform absolute zero.

so complete death is cold. that is the one thing we know--unless the universe contracts, and death would be hot?

 

[fistfullofsteel]

Yeah, I guess I'm trying to say that for every answer given only FFOS's OP, one could have a completely different yet equally valid response, so there exists no single credited response.

However, his wording about the universe dying out gives some hints. There's the presupposition that the universe is forever expanding, which tells us about the second law of TD, the hubble constant and the matter composition of the universe, and other stuff. In this case, I think it's considered the universe will suffer a heat-death at infinity, where heat here is used by its strict definition, and heat-death means the universe will approach uniform absolute zero.

so then what? at absolute zero don't particles of matter have no motion? scarey spookey stuff.

 

[samoth]

so complete death is cold. that is the one thing we know--unless the universe contracts, and death would be hot?

Well, yeah. But I don't know where the hell the second law of thermo's gonna go. Hawking tells of shattered glasses on the floor falling back up to the table forming one piece. But how would such a temporal reversal affect human... uh... everything? (lol, that's something fun to think about)

 

[eddymerckx]

know i know why i needed a nutshell when i read "The Universe in a Nutshell"

 

[samoth]

so then what? at absolute zero don't particles of matter have no motion? scarey spookey stuff.

It's one of those calculus things. See, the temperature approaches absolute zero, but it's not allowed to actually achieve it for various reasons. Likewise, you can have an expanding universe, but it can never reach infinity, likewise a contracting universe can never reach infinity the other way. In the former case, I think it reaches a limit, but it's been a while, and I don't remember. This is stuff the Friedman equations show.

 

[Stefka]

It's one of those calculus things. See, the temperature approaches absolute zero, but it's not allowed to actually achieve it for various reasons. Likewise, you can have an expanding universe, but it can never reach infinity, likewise a contracting universe can never reach infinity the other way. In the former case, I think it reaches a limit, but it's been a while, and I don't remember. This is stuff the Friedman equations show.

Just like Zeno said.

 

[eddymerckx]

i wonder if we knew and understood everything about the way the universe works down to the smallest detail, would we still try and mess with it, and mess it all up

 

[samoth]

Just like Zeno said.

Gah! Okay, Redguru.

 

[fistfullofsteel]

It's one of those calculus things. See, the temperature approaches absolute zero, but it's not allowed to actually achieve it for various reasons. Likewise, you can have an expanding universe, but it can never reach infinity, likewise a contracting universe can never reach infinity the other way. In the former case, I think it reaches a limit, but it's been a while, and I don't remember. This is stuff the Friedman equations show.

ok so all the black stuff, the empty space, is that part of the universe? can that stop existing? what exactly is nothingness?

 

[eddymerckx]

ok so all the black stuff, the empty space, is that part of the universe? can that stop existing? what exactly is nothingness?[/QUOTE]

our foreign and domestic policy

 

[samoth]

ok so all the black stuff, the empty space, is that part of the universe? can that stop existing? what exactly is nothingness?

Well, black... it's just what we call a color of the EM spectrum. When we point a satellite or telescope up somewhere and see black, assuming it's an optical telescope, the black is something blocking the stuff behind it... usually stellar dust or what have you. It's not actually "black" when you look at other wavelengths of light, e.g., a radio telescope or something. Nathan would totally know more than this subject than I.

Technically, a true vacuum cannot exist. See, there's these cool quantum mechanical laws that allow virtual particles to pop into existance out of nowhere. They can "borrow" energy from the universe, as long as they exist for a very short period of time and give the energy back to the universe. BUT! These virtual particles can interact with real particles, thus enabling us to see those little trouble makers. So a true vacuum -- a piece of spacetime completely devoid of matter and energy -- cannot exist. So... umm, I suppose, technically, nothingness does not exist on the smallest level due to quantum mechanical uncertainties and probablilities that rule supreme in this area of physics.

Yeah, I'm totally not helping here, am I?

 

[samoth]

On that note, maybe this might be an intersting read:


Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? — Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, provides an answer at the Scientific American website.


Are virtual particles really constantly popping in and out of existence? Or are they merely a mathematical bookkeeping device for quantum mechanics?


Gordon Kane, director of the Michigan Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, provides this answer.


Virtual particles are indeed real particles. Quantum theory predicts that every particle spends some time as a combination of other particles in all possible ways. These predictions are very well understood and tested.

Quantum mechanics allows, and indeed requires, temporary violations of conservation of energy, so one particle can become a pair of heavier particles (the so-called virtual particles), which quickly rejoin into the original particle as if they had never been there. If that were all that occurred we would still be confident that it was a real effect because it is an intrinsic part of quantum mechanics, which is extremely well tested, and is a complete and tightly woven theory--if any part of it were wrong the whole structure would collapse.

But while the virtual particles are briefly part of our world they can interact with other particles, and that leads to a number of tests of the quantum-mechanical predictions about virtual particles. The first test was understood in the late 1940s. In a hydrogen atom an electron and a proton are bound together by photons (the quanta of the electromagnetic field). Every photon will spend some time as a virtual electron plus its antiparticle, the virtual positron, since this is allowed by quantum mechanics as described above. The hydrogen atom has two energy levels that coincidentally seem to have the same energy. But when the atom is in one of those levels it interacts differently with the virtual electron and positron than when it is in the other, so their energies are shifted a tiny bit because of those interactions. That shift was measured by Willis Lamb and the Lamb shift was born, for which a Nobel Prize was eventually awarded.

Quarks are particles much like electrons, but different in that they also interact via the strong force. Two of the lighter quarks, the so-called "up" and "down" quarks, bind together to make up protons and neutrons. The "top" quark is the heaviest of the six types of quarks. In the early 1990s it had been predicted to exist but had not been directly seen in any experiment. At the LEP collider at the European particle physics laboratory CERN, millions of Z bosons--the particles that mediate neutral weak interactions--were produced and their mass was very accurately measured. The Standard Model of particle physics predicts the mass of the Z boson, but the measured value differed a little. This small difference could be explained in terms of the time the Z spent as a virtual top quark if such a top quark had a certain mass. When the top quark mass was directly measured a few years later at the Tevatron collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, the value agreed with that obtained from the virtual particle analysis, providing a dramatic test of our understanding of virtual particles.

Another very good test some readers may want to look up, which we do not have space to describe here, is the Casimir effect, where forces between metal plates in empty space are modified by the presence of virtual particles.

Thus virtual particles are indeed real and have observable effects that physicists have devised ways of measuring. Their properties and consequences are well established and well understood consequences of quantum mechanics.

 

[eddymerckx]

Well, black... it's just what we call a color of the EM spectrum. When we point a satellite or telescope up somewhere and see black, assuming it's an optical telescope, the black is something blocking the stuff behind it... usually stellar dust or what have you. It's not actually "black" when you look at other wavelengths of light, e.g., a radio telescope or something. Nathan would totally know more than this subject than I.

Technically, a true vacuum cannot exist. See, there's these cool quantum mechanical laws that allow virtual particles to pop into existance out of nowhere. They can "borrow" energy from the universe, as long as they exist for a very short period of time and give the energy back to the universe. BUT! These virtual particles can interact with real particles, thus enabling us to see those little trouble makers. So a true vacuum -- a piece of spacetime completely devoid of matter and energy -- cannot exist. So... umm, I suppose, technically, nothingness does not exist on the smallest level due to quantum mechanical uncertainties and probablilities that rule supreme in this area of physics.

Yeah, I'm totally not helping here, am I?

okay --i just got a charlie horse in the my brain--i need to find a jerry springer episode fast brfore the damage is perm.

 

[fistfullofsteel]

Well, black... it's just what we call a color of the EM spectrum. When we point a satellite or telescope up somewhere and see black, assuming it's an optical telescope, the black is something blocking the stuff behind it... usually stellar dust or what have you. It's not actually "black" when you look at other wavelengths of light, e.g., a radio telescope or something. Nathan would totally know more than this subject than I.

Technically, a true vacuum cannot exist. See, there's these cool quantum mechanical laws that allow virtual particles to pop into existance out of nowhere. They can "borrow" energy from the universe, as long as they exist for a very short period of time and give the energy back to the universe. BUT! These virtual particles can interact with real particles, thus enabling us to see those little trouble makers. So a true vacuum -- a piece of spacetime completely devoid of matter and energy -- cannot exist. So... umm, I suppose, technically, nothingness does not exist on the smallest level due to quantum mechanical uncertainties and probablilities that rule supreme in this area of physics.

Yeah, I'm totally not helping here, am I?

that's what i was thinking. definitely helping. so then the universe can't stop existing then, even if all the lights out.

 

[jack sparrow]

I like dirt and pick up trucks.

 

[puddlemonkey]

I like dirt and pick up trucks.

Nice cover up



But I ain't buyin'

 

[Lestat]

lotta geeks up in here