The big bang!!!

I'm quite comfortable comprehending infinite space as (a) I really can't do much about it (b) it really doesn't affect my every day life (c) I have more pressing things to worry about.... hmmm... tea or coffee?
 
Foxholer said:
Indeed. We are limited by our own imaginations - and egos, interspersed with instances of brilliant realisations. And when the status quo is challenged, it has a habit of oppressing those that challenge it, as if the very foundations of their faith is being challenged.
Click to expand...

Lots of people (some of them in an earlier thread) say god doesn't exisit because there is no proof, yet large chunks of current high end physics are equally lacking in proof. Both are acts of Faith and therefore should have equal merit.
 
Foxholer said:
Indeed. We are limited by our own imaginations - and egos, interspersed with instances of brilliant realisations. And when the status quo is challenged, it has a habit of oppressing those that challenge it, as if the very foundations of their faith is being challenged.
Click to expand...

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone

:cool:
 
coolhand said:
Lots of people (some of them in an earlier thread) say god doesn't exisit because there is no proof, yet large chunks of current high end physics are equally lacking in proof. Both are acts of Faith and therefore should have equal merit.
Click to expand...

It's one thing to speculate that tea leaves sink to the bottom of a tea cup without proving it... it's another to say that there's a 50ft pink balloon animal breakdancing at the bottom of the street... oh hang on it's gone now, it was definitely there I saw it :mmm:
 
I'm a big fan of Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxyand the other works of the late Douglas Adams

Look up the bit about the "Total Perspective Vortex"

Fragger
 
coolhand said:
Lots of people (some of them in an earlier thread) say god doesn't exisit because there is no proof, yet large chunks of current high end physics are equally lacking in proof. Both are acts of Faith and therefore should have equal merit.
Click to expand...

The main difference between the two is that one is written by the greatest brains in the history of human civilization and the other is written on papyrus by a bunch of early academics who thought the earth was flat and that it was okay to chuck stones at people in public until they died. Equal merit? I don't think so somehow.....
 
drive4show said:
I can't get my brain round this whole infinity thing. You could travel forever and ever and ever and ever. And you're nowhere near the end!!

How does that work then? :mmm:
Click to expand...

If you find that hard to get your head around - here's a wee variation on infinity that is equally if not more head screwing...

You could travel as fast as you can forever and ever and ever and ever but you will not be getting any closer to the end (infinity) - not one millimetre closer'

In 'fact' the 'end' is getting further away from you so I wouldn't bother starting.
 
It all depends how fast you are travelling. If you manage to travel at the speed of light then, in theory, you can get anywhere in the universe almost instantly as time is relative to speed.
 
Andy808 said:
It all depends how fast you are travelling. If you manage to travel at the speed of light then, in theory, you can get anywhere in the universe almost instantly as time is relative to speed.
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Not directly.

If you travel at the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s) you still only travel the same distance as the light.

What you are talking about is time dilation. I.E the closer something gets to the speed of light the slower for them time becomes.

As an example. Imagine the crew of a space craft travelling near the speed of light away from Earth. For people on the space craft only a minute goes by, whereas on Earth, months or even years could have passed.
 
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Gareth said:
As an example. Imagine the crew of a space craft travelling near the speed of light away from Earth. For people on the space craft only a minute goes by, whereas on Earth, months or even years could have passed.
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Eh? If the people travel away from earth at the speed of light for 1 day then 1 day has past. No more no less. For them it would LOOK like time had stood still (relative to earth if they looked back at it) but their watches would still register that they had travelled for 1 day. Time doesn't change, only the perception of it... no one suddenly ages whilst others don't. You don't go away for a day and your relatives suddenly age by 20yrs... although I have wished this on the mother-in-law :mad:
 
Talking of time the physicist Plank calculated that time began 10 to the minus 47 second ie 1 +47 zeros before the the 'big bang'. His argument being that time could have no meaning any earlier. Therefore infinity before,infinity after.
As it has now been discovered that that the universe is accelerating rather than merely expanding the steady state theory seems unlikely.
Could we harness dark energy to get golf balls to go further? Answers on the back of an envelope please.
 
JustOne said:
Eh? If the people travel away from earth at the speed of light for 1 day then 1 day has past. No more no less. For them it would LOOK like time had stood still (relative to earth if they looked back at it) but their watches would still register that they had travelled for 1 day. Time doesn't change, only the perception of it... no one suddenly ages whilst others don't. You don't go away for a day and your relatives suddenly age by 20yrs... although I have wished this on the mother-in-law :mad:
Click to expand...

Now we're moving into special theory of relativity.

Have a look at a theory called the Twin Paradox. I've stolen this from one of my astronomy sites as it explains it better than I ever could.

Consider a space ship traveling from Earth to the nearest star system outside of our solar system: a distance d = 4 light years away, at a speed v = 0.8c (i.e., 80 percent of the speed of light).

(To make the numbers easy, the ship is assumed to attain its full speed immediately upon departure—actually it would take close to a year accelerating at 1 g to get up to speed.)

The Earth-based mission control reasons about the journey this way: the round trip will take t = 2d/v = 10 years in Earth time (i.e. everybody on Earth will be 10 years older when the ship returns). The amount of time as measured on the ship's clocks and the aging of the travelers during their trip will be reduced by the factor , the reciprocal of the Lorentz factor. In this case ε = 0.6 and the travelers will have aged only 0.6 × 10 = 6 years when they return.

The ship's crew members also calculate the particulars of their trip from their perspective. They know that the distant star system and the Earth are moving relative to the ship at speed v during the trip. In their rest frame the distance between the Earth and the star system is εd = 0.6d = 2.4 light years (length contraction), for both the outward and return journeys. Each half of the journey takes 2.4/v = 3 years, and the round trip takes 2 × 3 = 6 years. Their calculations show that they will arrive home having aged 6 years. The travelers' final calculation is in complete agreement with the calculations of those on Earth, though they experience the trip quite differently from those who stay at home.

If twins are born on the day the ship leaves, and one goes on the journey while the other stays on Earth, they will meet again when the traveler is 6 years old and the stay-at-home twin is 10 years old. The calculation illustrates the usage of the phenomenon of length contraction and the experimentally verified phenomenon of time dilation to describe and calculate consequences and predictions of Einstein's special theory of relativity.
 
SwingsitlikeHogan said:
If you find that hard to get your head around - here's a wee variation on infinity that is equally if not more head screwing...

You could travel as fast as you can forever and ever and ever and ever but you will not be getting any closer to the end (infinity) - not one millimetre closer'

In 'fact' the 'end' is getting further away from you so I wouldn't bother starting.
Click to expand...

interesting, what is the Universe expanding into?
 
Gareth said:
Now we're moving into special theory of relativity.
Click to expand...

Yes, despite reading a lot about it I believe it harder to understand (and grasp) than the concept of the big bang and the universe in general, I am aware of my 'ignorance' in this area as it is very counter intuitive, it's almost as difficult as why someone would choose to hit a fade when clearly the path of the club is an arc from the inside and the ball is ideally hit whilst the path is descending ;)

This (from wikipedia) really makes an interesting concept that really verges on the sci-fi..

In 1911, Paul Langevinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Langevin gave a "striking example" by describing the story of a traveler making a trip at a Lorentz factorhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_factor of γ = 100. The traveler remains in a projectile for one year of his time, and then reverses direction. Upon return, the traveler will find that he has aged two years, while 200 years have passed on Earth. During the trip, both the traveler and Earth keep sending signals to each other at a constant rate, which places Langevin's story among the Doppler shift versions of the twin paradox. The relativistic effects upon the signal rates are used to account for the different aging rates. The asymmetry that occurred because only the traveler underwent acceleration, is used to explain why there is any difference at all, because "any change of velocity, or any acceleration has an absolute meaning"
Click to expand...

Which I find an astonishing claim (don't know if it was speculative or the numbers are indeed correct) but it truly is a mind boggling notion and surely one that we should explore further... I'm sure there would be a heap of volunteers that would like to be on this planet 200yrs from now rather than today!!!
 
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