The Great Universe Debate

[SpacedX]

1 hour ago, Great Boos Up said:

Weirdly I want to ask more questions on the quantum small scale than the giant mechanics of relationships of atoms that form our universe.

Perhaps @leicsmaccovered this ?

 

The ultimate challenge lies in the grand unified theory - the standard model and general relativity, or reconciling the quantum with the classical field theory. The deterministic and the probabilistic We will only be able to really understand the evolution of the universe when we have a definitive theory of quantum gravity. Einstein and his successors have been searching for this for over a century.

 

I am confident that as long as sentient beings inhabit this earth such unification will continue to elude us. Perhaps there are things that we are not supposed to know or indeed are capable of knowing. 

 

[CollinsLCFC]

Does anybody have any good podcasts on the universe that are worth listening to? Help get me through the days at work.

[Buce]

7 minutes ago, CollinsLCFC said:

Does anybody have any good podcasts on the universe that are worth listening to? Help get me through the days at work.

 

 

[Captain...]

The infinite monkey cage isn't specifically on the universe but covers it amongst other topics such as quantum physics and evolutionary theory.

 

It's Brian Cox with comedian Robin Ince helping to explain advanced scientific topics to layman with a few jokes thrown in for good measure.

[Collymore]

Trying to think of the universe by size and time is pointless, especially with a conventional mindset.

 

The universe doesn't have size, time doesn't matter. You are the universe just as much as it is you and your kettle is.

 

We need to start to understand entanglement /non locality and realise that what we've been taught in conventional physics is a barrier to what is coming our way. 

 

I personally believe the answer is inside all of us but we're distracted by society (alcohol, TV, 9-5 work, mateiralstic culture, Rudkin etc) I was lucky to have about 5 seconds recently during meditation where I was pretty much in tune with the universe. It was both frightening and amazing at the same time.  

Edited 20 October 2017 by Collymore

[joachim1965]

It's all a simulation.

[Buce]

19 minutes ago, joachim1965 said:

It's all a simulation.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/22/what-if-were-living-in-a-computer-simulation-the-matrix-elon-musk

[Guest seanfox778]

I think of the universe as a kind of liquid we can’t comprehend, like how you get flowing rivers under the sea. In my head it makes more sense for a planet to be suspended in some kind of liquid than just floating about. So when the universe gets bigger it’s because some entity has left the space tap on. The stars and crazy designed things in space are just fancy bubbles.

[Countryfox]

45 minutes ago, seanfox778 said:

I think of the universe as a kind of liquid ..

 

If it's on tap I'll ask for a pint of it when I'm in the pub later ...      I should imagine it'll be quite hoppy and the taste will be out of this world.

[Guest seanfox778]

29 minutes ago, Countryfox said:

 

If it's on tap I'll ask for a pint of it when I'm in the pub later ...      I should imagine it'll be quite hoppy and the taste will be out of this world.

Then we can all live happily in your belly. You'd feel quite powerful carrying the universe around with you all the time so enjoy it.

[Great Boos Up]

22 hours ago, Line-X said:

The ultimate challenge lies in the grand unified theory - the standard model and general relativity, or reconciling the quantum with the classical field theory. The deterministic and the probabilistic We will only be able to really understand the evolution of the universe when we have a definitive theory of quantum gravity. Einstein and his successors have been searching for this for over a century.

 

I am confident that as long as sentient beings inhabit this earth such unification will continue to elude us. Perhaps there are things that we are not supposed to know or indeed are capable of knowing. 

 

I am so disappointed with your reply. You in particular you have pitched an open mind to science and at times enforced the perception that science discovery is the way forward with an open mind. CERN is discovering new forces within the particle soup every year. The Higgs boson being the most recently significant to combine quantum and classical theories.

Not supposed to know or capable of knowing?

Maybe you had a bad day.

[SpacedX]

6 minutes ago, Great Boos Up said:

I am so disappointed with your reply. You in particular you have pitched an open mind to science and at times enforced the perception that science discovery is the way forward with an open mind. CERN is discovering new forces within the particle soup every year. The Higgs boson being the most recently significant to combine quantum and classical theories.

Not supposed to know or capable of knowing?

Maybe you had a bad day.

That's precisely why I said "perhaps". A pessimistic view indeed and not one I necessarily hold.

[Great Boos Up]

8 minutes ago, Line-X said:

That's precisely why I said "perhaps". A pessimistic view indeed and not one I necessarily hold.

Good!

[whoareyaaa]

How did the universe get here though? 

[Izzy]

1 hour ago, whoareyaaa said:

How did the universe get here though? 

On a bus 

 

Fvck knows. Maybe it’s always been here? 

Edited 22 October 2017 by Izzy Muzzett

[Carl the Llama]

Just stumbled upon this brain melting article and naturally I thought of this thread:

 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/first-observation-of-antimatters-spectrum-looks-like-regular-matter/

 

One sentence in particular intrigues me:

Quote

 

Antimatter, mathematically, is the same thing as an ordinary particle traveling backwards in time.

 

Could this mean that the reason we have such difficulty finding antimatter in our universe is because rather than cancelling each-other out in a big explosion as postulated, the two things actually 'exist' in tandem? 

That is to say that while we experience life 'forwards' on the temporal plane, from a theoretical outside perspective we would be seen to simultaneously exist as both matter beings moving forwards and anti-matter beings travelling backwards in time.  That would suggest that the universe doesn't really exist but rather we are the illusion of something existing experiencing itself from within one specific mathematical plane contained within a non-existent void of cancelled-out matter and anti-matter.  

 

Probably not or else I imagine the big boffins at CERN would have already thought of it by now but still it's interesting to think about.

[Izzy]

8 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

Just stumbled upon this brain melting article and naturally I thought of this thread:

 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/first-observation-of-antimatters-spectrum-looks-like-regular-matter/

 

One sentence in particular intrigues me:

Could this mean that the reason we have such difficulty finding antimatter in our universe is because rather than cancelling each-other out in a big explosion as postulated, the two things actually 'exist' in tandem? 

That is to say that while we experience life 'forwards' on the temporal plane, from a theoretical outside perspective we would be seen to simultaneously exist as both matter beings moving forwards and anti-matter beings travelling backwards in time.  That would suggest that the universe doesn't really exist but rather we are the illusion of something existing experiencing itself from within one specific mathematical plane contained within a non-existent void of cancelled-out matter and anti-matter.  

 

Probably not or else I imagine the big boffins at CERN would have already thought of it by now but still it's interesting to think about.

How can you have no money left at the end of the month to buy tyres for your car?

 

You seem like a fookin genius to me 

[Carl the Llama]

5 minutes ago, Izzy Muzzett said:

How can you have no money left at the end of the month to buy tyres for your car?

 

You seem like a fookin genius to me 

You're too kind.  I can buy the tyres, did even, I'm just going to need to plan food very carefully for the rest of the month and indeed next month if anybody's getting presents for Christmas. Doesn't help that my older sister's birthday's just been and I kinda had to get her something to save a little face after already failing to secure a gift for my other sister for the 2nd year running, this time because it came during my jobless spell.

 

And to answer your question since it's something I think about a lot and therefore have a somewhat detailed answer for:  Since adolescence I've been a permanent nervous wreck around people but I yearn to be a well-adjusted individual which leads me to constantly belittle myself for being impossibly socially awkward (as in when I don't have something distracting me my head constantly fills with memories of awkward situations or dumb things I've done in front of people and all I can think is what a cvnt I am, often even vocalising that point to myself if say I'm driving my car alone).  This in turn leads to a lack of personal application in my free time because the second I've finished 'work' (be that an actual job or attending lectures in my uni days) I just try to switch off completely and chase meaningless videos/games/chats/spliffs to distract me from thinking about how awkward I am.  I realise on the face of it it doesn't sound that bad and indeed other people definitely have more important problems but for me it's completely paralysing.  This means that I never get any coursework or self-improvement done.  It also doesn't help that in spending a long period of my life constantly chasing new interests to try and fit in I've ended up with a complete lack of self-determination which adds to the self-hate, in fact these days the only interest I'm certain of having is City, the rest is just coping mechanisms or attempts to fit in.  I have definitely wasted my potential and ironically drifted away from friends because of this constant flight from anxiety about not being good enough at being social which lies at the core of my neuroses but as long as I'm not troubling other people or full on homeless I'm weirdly ok/complacent about that, that's why I blew up the other month when I was in true personal peril but now that I have some meagre income again it's 'cool' as long as I have internet, games and the occasional spliff if money permits to distract me from the barrage of self-deprecating thoughts and my increasingly depressing existence.  It's like despite being in my late 20's now, I'm stuck in a permanent state of amplified adolescent insecurity holding me back from ever achieving anything meaningful.

 

Another messed up thing about it is I kinda resent my family for their parts in reinforcing all this innate negativity, be it my older sister who never had anything to do with me growing up (so she kinda gets a pass for having a negligible effect as far as I'm concerned), my twin who shat on everything I took pride in back when I was already being bullied enough in school but doing well with my grades, or my parents for never picking up on the extent of my social problems or bullying (then blaming me years later for not spelling it out to them - this despite my twin gleefully telling them about me having no friends on many, many occasions) but happily laying out thousands of pounds on my twin sister to go to an English school when we were in Belgium so she could do A-levels instead of the European Bac to make her life easier just because she couldn't be bothered to deal with the difficulty of learning another language at the already very good private school my Dad's job provided us for free (though that didn't stop her using what French she'd already learned from her brief time at the free school to coast a comparatively simple French A-level for free grades, smart gaming of the system there really).  Because of that she's now a very successful doctor who is actually really nice to me these days which is painful in its own right considering how bad she used to make me feel for even the smallest achievement and how she basically made sure that I never had a respite from being made to feel shit by other people, I've no doubt a lot of my self-loathing was learned from the way she and my bullies at school treated me. Yet despite all that resentment and them all being very successful in their own right I still feel obliged to get them nice things every year at great personal cost ie. the not eating much next month so they can have Christmas presents.  They are family after all.

 

In their defence my parents have recently offered on the back of my recent breakdown to fund another attempt at education to make finding good paying work easier.  On the face of it I'd love that because I can't stand this cycle of constantly working my ass off for minimum wage for someone who has no intention of helping my development because they just want someone to do their work for the lowest price they can offer then eventually falling out with that employer for that reason then finding a new place and starting at the bottom again but I honestly have no idea what I would want to do (lack of self-determination) and I already know it would be futile anyway while I'm still the socially maladjusted, self-defeating and self-distracting mess with no application that I am.  That's why I went for the Nero job because they sold it as a place where you get proper training and can rise through the ranks quickly, I guess we'll see where I am in a few months, if there's been no movement I might have to give that offer more serious contemplation.

 

Before anybody suggests therapy which is the obvious solution: I tried that at Uni and I just couldn't get my words across properly, constantly falling back on the instinct to understate the severity of my anxiety and make out like everything's fine under the watchful gaze of another person.  I'm apparently very good at that pretence and I have no reason to believe that instinct has gone, in fact I have every reason to know that it's still very much there.

 

But this isn't really the thread for this kind of discussion, we already have the depression thread.  Besides: I suspect my previous comment makes no sense to someone who actually knows how the science of it works, I just have a gift for saying things that sound like they might be intelligent if given long enough to plan it out (ie. in a message board setting instead of clumsily fumbling words out of my mouth in front of actual people, in many ways this place has been my 'therapist' for the past however many years my 2 accounts span for precisely the reason that I can take the time to really think about how to formulate the ideas I want to convey like I'm doing now).

[Carl the Llama]

And yeah I'm realising now you probably weren't asking for my life story  

[The Doctor]

1 hour ago, Carl the Llama said:

Just stumbled upon this brain melting article and naturally I thought of this thread:

 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/first-observation-of-antimatters-spectrum-looks-like-regular-matter/

 

One sentence in particular intrigues me:

Could this mean that the reason we have such difficulty finding antimatter in our universe is because rather than cancelling each-other out in a big explosion as postulated, the two things actually 'exist' in tandem? 

That is to say that while we experience life 'forwards' on the temporal plane, from a theoretical outside perspective we would be seen to simultaneously exist as both matter beings moving forwards and anti-matter beings travelling backwards in time.  That would suggest that the universe doesn't really exist but rather we are the illusion of something existing experiencing itself from within one specific mathematical plane contained within a non-existent void of cancelled-out matter and anti-matter.  

 

Probably not or else I imagine the big boffins at CERN would have already thought of it by now but still it's interesting to think about.

What it means by that is in reference to spin and the Dirac equation - if you solve the Dirac equation you get two answers, one with negative energy, one with positive, in broadly similar ways as x^2=4 solves to x=2 and x=-2. So being inverse of each other, if you were to consider the inverse of one (I.e. It being backwards), it would be indistinguishable from the other functioning normally. 

[Carl the Llama]

5 minutes ago, The Doctor said:

What it means by that is in reference to spin and the Dirac equation - if you solve the Dirac equation you get two answers, one with negative energy, one with positive, in broadly similar ways as x^2=4 solves to x=2 and x=-2. So being inverse of each other, if you were to consider the inverse of one (I.e. It being backwards), it would be indistinguishable from the other functioning normally. 

30 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

Besides: I suspect my previous comment makes no sense to someone who actually knows how the science of it works

Called it  

 

But yeah cheers for that explanation.  Now if you don't mind please explain why there's no antimatter to be found outside of a few atoms captured by expensive LHC experiments.  

[The Doctor]

11 minutes ago, Carl the Llama said:

Called it  

 

But yeah cheers for that explanation.  Now if you don't mind please explain why there's no antimatter to be found outside of a few atoms captured by expensive LHC experiments.  

Because it's hella unstable in this universe, matter and antimatter mutually annihilate each other to give off gamma rays and some WIMPs. Annoyingly there's a lot of matter knocking around, so unless you've got the technology to temporarily imprison it away from matter it's going to get annihilated very quickly.

[Carl the Llama]

Just now, The Doctor said:

Because it's hella unstable in this universe, matter and antimatter mutually annihilate each other to give off gamma rays and some WIMPs. Annoyingly there's a lot of matter knocking around, so unless you've got the technology to temporarily imprison it away from matter it's going to get annihilated very quickly.

But why is there so much matter knocking around?  Logically there should have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter when the big bang occurred (according to real physicists, not me) so why didn't it all immediately cancel out?  Equally logically by the same 50/50 premise there should be at least some anti-matter out there within a distance detectable by our advanced scientific instruments so why in our years of stargazing and satellite exploration have we still not found any anti-galaxies or even simply anti-planets or anti-meteors?  Could it be that because they emit/reflect the same wavelength light as their matter counterpart that we've actually already found some floating out there in the vacuum of space and we simply don't realise we're looking at it?

[The Doctor]

6 hours ago, Carl the Llama said:

But why is there so much matter knocking around?  Logically there should have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter when the big bang occurred (according to real physicists, not me) so why didn't it all immediately cancel out?  Equally logically by the same 50/50 premise there should be at least some anti-matter out there within a distance detectable by our advanced scientific instruments so why in our years of stargazing and satellite exploration have we still not found any anti-galaxies or even simply anti-planets or anti-meteors?  Could it be that because they emit/reflect the same wavelength light as their matter counterpart that we've actually already found some floating out there in the vacuum of space and we simply don't realise we're looking at it?

There should have been yes, and, as in biology with the chirality of life, the apparent imbalance is one of the great unanswered questions. 

 

Its quite possible, yes, one of our main methods for instance for spotting distant planets is essentially a massive game of spot the difference, looking at drops in brightness of stars from a planet passes in front of it (with the drop in brightness being proportional to the size of the planet), this is looking purely at photons, little packets of energy that, for all intents and purposes, lack a charge, so you couldn't tell if they came from matter or antimatter. Likewise we look for temporary Doppler shifts, slight red and blueshifts in a stars spectrum caused by the effect of a planets gravity on its star, so if elements and anti-elements are indistinguishable in terms of spectra, you wouldn't be able to tell whether it was matter or antimatter from Doppler shifts.

 

Problem would be that we should observe these galaxies being partially or completely destroyed by collisions with matter still, unless they're set well away from normal matter.

Edited 4 November 2017 by The Doctor

[Webbo]

8 hours ago, Carl the Llama said:

Since adolescence I've been a permanent nervous wreck around people but I yearn to be a well-adjusted individual which leads me to constantly belittle myself for being impossibly socially awkward (as in when I don't have something distracting me my head constantly fills with memories of awkward situations or dumb things I've done in front of people and all I can think is what a cvnt I am, often even vocalising that point to myself if say I'm driving my car alone). 

Been there, done that. Still do sometimes, I even remember things I did at school and cringe. I'm very bitter about my Dad, who'd call a kid Webster ffs? His constant negativity towards me made me feel useless, his selfishness meant we never had what other kids had. I never had a bike like the other kids in the street meaning I couldn't join in, I used to go school with the sole hanging off my shoes, patches in my trousers . I t could be a very humiliating experience.

 

The thing is, you've got to forget all that, it doesn't do you any good. Blaming everyone else, even if they are to blame, might make you feel better about yourself but it doesn't change anything. Only you can change your life. You've got to shut out all those negative thoughts. Going back to school is a good idea, when you're in social situations, don't try so hard and if I was you I'd get on a dating site (not tinder). Having a woman in your life works wonders for your confidence.

 

I appreciate you probably didn't want me telling you how to live your life and I can understand that. It just breaks my heart to see people unhappy. I really hope things turn round for you.