I thought some people might enjoy understanding a bit more about where we all live without the typical scientists annoying habit of making everything sound way more complicated than it really is. I’ll edit this post as and when (if anyone cares). Anything that can add or expand on this or correct a mistake is more than welcome. Can this be made sticky just because?

First a few facts to try to convey the huge scope of our universe. Light moves at 186,000 miles per second and takes over 100,000 years to cross our galaxy. That should give you an idea of the size of some galaxies. There is on average, 1 supernova every century per galaxy and in the visible universe there are an average of six supernovae every second. That’s how big the universe is.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that the universe must be in motion, which caused a huge divide in the scientific community between the steady state believers (who believed that although the universe is expanding, new matter is constantly being created in the gaps, making it eternal) and the motionists (can’t remember the word so I’ll make one up). Steven Hawking then proved steady state theory wrong by coming up with an equation for the big bang (that’s basically just the general relativity equations in reverse) that suggests the universe started life as a gravitational singularity (black hole), and with the help of the inflationary part of equation (inflation is needed to lock in the uniformity of the universe, but it‘s not known what caused it), it even accurately predicts the rough dispersion of matter throughout the universe (galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters). Religion, and the pope especially, jumped on the discovery as evidence of a creator. The pope even tried to tell him that it was okay to study everything after the big bang but not the big bang itself because that was the work of god.

closed universe (spherical) - Positively curved (curves inward towards itself). A universe that is above the critical mass needed for the gravitational curvature of the universe to eventually collapse it back to whence it came. The shape of a closed universe is like the surface of the Earth. If your were to travel far enough in a “straight” line, you would eventually end up back were you started.

open universe (saddle shaped) - Negatively curved (curves outward away from itself). A universe that is below the critical mass needed for it collapse. An open universe will eventually tare itself apart it in what’s known as the big rip. The dark energy in the universe (which makes up about 90% of the whole universe btw & out of the rest about 90% of matter is dark matter. To quote someone that I can’t remember “the bits we see are just the icing on the cake. It’s the parts we’re not aware of that really make up existence.”) will continue to accelerate the expansion of the universe out into infinity. Current observation suggests that our universe is open.

flat universe (flatish) - Neutrally curved (still curves locally due to gravity but is flat overall). A universe that has a mass that’s EXACTLY the amount needed for it to keep a roughly uniform shape (not size) for ever. This universe dies with a whimper, over trillions of ions as everything slowly (relevantly slowly) gets further and farther apart. Our universe is extremely close to this, though it’s thought to be just over. In fact the odds of it being as close as it is (it needs to be that close for it to be stable enough for us to exist btw) are lots and lots (can’t remember how many) of trillions to one. This led to the entropic principle that the universe is the way it is because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to ask, how come? I spose the uncertainly principle makes this universe impossible because it will have to go one way or the other eventually.

Determining which category our universe falls into involves measuring the current rate of expansion. The further away an object in the distant universe is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The speed is found by measuring the Doppler shift. If an object is moving away from us, the light waves get stretched making it appear red, and if it’s moving towards us, the waves get squashed making it appear blue.

If the Hawking equations are correct, it should be pointed out that even if closed, they disprove the theory of a bouncing universe. Besides even if it did bounce, the uncertainty principle, if completely true would mean that randomness is built into the universe, so you would get a different universe every time, unless the many worlds theory is correct in which case everything that can happen does happen and the uncertainty principle is simply about which direction you take. Depends how you interpret the uncertainty principle really. Some religious people have also used the uncertainty principle as evidence of room for god to manoeuvre. Although a closed, bouncing, deterministic universe does make a hell of a lot of sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

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Nothing with mass can ever reach the light barrier, because it would require infinite energy to get there, which is impossible. The faster an object is moving, the more energy it takes to get it to accelerate. And this isn’t a linier scale. If you see it on a graph, it starts off gentle, then curves sharper and sharper until it hits infinity at light speed. The speed of light is always 186,000 miles per second from your perspective (in a vacuum that is, it’s been slowed down to about 30 mph in a lab). In other words it always moves 186,000 mps faster than you. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, time from your perspective would slow down to half its "resting” speed making time in the rest of the universe speed up relative to you, to double its normal rate. That’s the special theory of relativity, and that’s why light seems to always move at the same speed.

At the big bang, the 4 forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity) were combined as one super force. This is known as super symmetry. Something happened to gravity to make it hugely weaker when they separated. A small magnet can overpower the gravitational attraction of the entire Earth. String theory attempts to bridge the gap between particle physics and general relativity (they seem to contradict each other) and explain the apparent weakness of gravity. Basically it says that there are between 9 and 11 dimensions, some higher, some lower, and gravity seems weaker than the other forces from our perspective because it’s being spread throughout the other dimensions. It also may explain the uncertainty principle as unknown variables from lower dimensions.

Time is not how we perceive it. It’s like that question so many people ask: "What was there before the big bang"? There was no before the big bang! What we perceive as time (and space), started at the big bang, because the three spatial dimensions and the one time dimension were all condensed to a singularity. Someone in higher dimensional space (if it exists) would see our universe as static, and they would have their own dimension that they perceive as time. Our universe has no beginning or end as such, because we will always have had been here, so to someone outside of our four dimensional universe, we would be eternal.

Gravity is a curvature of the four dimensions (called space-time). Imagine a birds eye view of a two dimensional surface. Now imagine that surface has some give. If you were to put an object on the surface, it would warp the fabric, but from your two dimensional perspective, you wouldn’t be able to see this directly. It would still look flat even with a square grid pattern on the fabric. The heavier the object, the more it would distort the fabric, and if it was too heavy, it would tear a hole in it. Now if you were to roll a marble across it, it would curve around the object (the heavier the object, the sharper the curve) in the centre and fall towards it. Objects in orbit aren’t curling through space because that’s impossible. Instead they’re moving in a straight line through curved space-time. It doesn’t look curved to us because we only have a three dimensional view.

Black holes are what happens when there’s gravity, with nothing to provide a resisting force against it. The nuclear forces of all the atoms on the Earth stop it collapsing for example. Stars have a lot of mass, so need nuclear fusion to hold them up. When a stars fuel runs out, it either forms a white dwarf held up by itself, a neutron star held up by an electromagnetic field, or for the biggest stars, black holes held up by nothing. The gravitational curve inside the event horizon of a black hole is so strong that it curves space back in on itself. No matter which direction you try to go, you will always be facing the singularity at the centre. Time alters relative to gravity in a similar way to velocity. The stronger the gravitation field, the slower time moves within it. At the singularity, time is frozen.

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. The strength of gravity is directly proportional to the mass of the object and inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that object. That just means that, if you halve the distance, the strength of the gravitational wave is multiplied by four/if you double the distance, the strength is divided by four.

Black holes are all the same size (kind of); infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. The event horizon, which is generally regarded as the edge, is the point of no return, where space curves back into itself. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how a universe can arise from “nothing”.

There are three types of black hole. If quantum theory is right then there’s mini black holes, which scientists at CERN are going to try to create (July this year) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21527, stellar black holes formed from the cores of massive stars and super massive black holes that form in the centre of spiral galaxies like our Galaxy, the Milky way, and Andromeda, our nearest neighbour. They’re the engines that power the galaxies and make them spin. Everything orbits around the centre of gravity in the same way as a star system. The Milky Way even has two dwarf galaxies orbiting it like moons. The universe doesn’t have a centre or an edge because it’s not a three dimensional object. Everywhere is in the centre from its own perspective.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are by far the biggest galaxies in our local group, which has about fifty. All the galaxies obit the centre of gravity between the big two because heavier objects fall inwards relative to the others because of their stronger pull. Galaxy clusters are made up of lots of groups. The Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course and will merge in about 3.5 billion years. The Milky Way’s big, and Andromeda’s about twice the size, so when they merge it will easily be the biggest galaxy in this part of the universe. The radiation during this time will be detectable all the way on the other side of the universe. We can see quasars, which are bright early galaxies, all the way on the other side. They’re from the early universe because the light has taken so long to get here.

Star Systems:

When - Fusion occurs when a protostars fiction creates enough heat to overpower the weak nuclear force of the hydrogen atoms that it’s made of. The central part of the nebula generates more frictional heat because of the centrifugal law. When an object is spinning, the central part will need to move faster to have the same amount of energy, because it hasn’t got as far to go, so will have to spin faster to move at the same speed. Nebulae are kick started into motion when the gravitational waves of an exploding/imploding star pass through them. It was proven that our solar system was started by the death of a very close star when local meteorites were found to have elements inside, of the same age as the solar system, and that can only be formed in super nova.

How - When a star becomes nuclear, it pulls in a lot of the nearby gas and throws some into orbit creating a disc shape. The gravity of the orbiting debris isn’t strong enough at this point to create planets but it creates an electromagnetic field through the friction of collisions. This process is called accretion. Dust particles accrete into dust balls and rain drops accrete around dust particles in the air for example. When they reach the size of a mountain, gravity has an effect, pulling in more matter which causes the gravity to increase, which pulls in more matter, and so on. Most planets don’t survive. The Moon was a Mars size planet that crashed into Earth. Some of it makes up the planets crust and the rest is the Moon. Without the tight centre of gravity that we both orbit created by the Moons proximity, we would be all over the place with no defined seasons and a chaotic climate. The distance from the Sun determines the temperature of the forming planet which determines what the planet will be made of. Heavier elements fall into the middle, with the lighter ones at the edge. Mercury is highly dense and metallic, Venus, Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt are made of rock, then the gas giants, and the Kuiper belt at the edge, made from ice (including Pluto) that was forced out from where it was formed. All the water on the planet comes from impacts from these types of comets. Water couldn’t have condensed here because Earth is inside the frost line, which is between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, where it’s too hot for hydrogen and oxygen to form ice.

Why - When a protostar starts fusing hydrogen into helium, energy is realised ((Energy = Mass * light speed squared) E=mc2) because one helium atom weighs slightly less than two hydrogen atoms and the remainder of the mass is realised as energy in the form of heat, light and other radiation carried across the solar system by the solar wind. A lot of what the Sun throws out is deadly, but we’re protected by the Earths magnetic field that’s generated by the molten metallic core. This can be seen as northern and southern lights at the magnetic poles. It’s thought that Mars once had water and maybe life. It’s about half the size of Earth and around a third of the mass. The core didn’t have as much heat and it solidified. Mars lost it’s force field and was scorched by solar radiation, killing the planet.

/*Idiom
The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us).

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies. One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really weird so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better. The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical conundrums quantum mechanics brings up.
*/

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now evolution kicks in. What if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photosynthesis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was, and so on, until you us.

The origin of life and the odds of it happening are still not entirely known. The building block are contained in comets, but at attempts to artificially trigger life have never succeeded, although amino acids have been artificially produced. Some people have suggested that a lightning strike is the probable trigger, and inconclusive evidence has been produced to support the idea.

To find out how common life/intelligent life is, we need to know:

What percentage of star systems are stable enough for life to form on one of it’s planets or moons?

Answer: Very few systems are as stable as ours (thanks to Jupiter being big enough to gravitationally attract asteroids and comets, but not big enough to disturb the other planets orbits. Also if Saturn had been bigger we would have been in trouble, because two Jupiter sized planet would create very unstable gravitational conditions). However, a system doesn’t have to be as stable as ours to support life.

What percentage of planets that can support life, actually do support life?

Answer: ?

What percentage of planets that support life are stable enough and are in systems that are stable enough for complex life to form?

Answer: Probably a relatively low number. We’re very lucky that Jupiter is here and isn’t too small or too big, and that Saturn isn’t any bigger. We’re also very lucky that Thea hit the Earth and created the moon out of some of the rubble to give us a stable axis.

In what percentage of life forms is being intelligent a major advantage?

Answer: As far as we know, 33.3r%. A mass extinction caused by a meteorite lead to the rise of the dinosaurs, who existed for a very long time whilst being really stupid and not getting any cleverer. Then another meteorite lead to the rise of mammals with opposable thumbs. Suddenly a creature could manipulate it’s environment in a way never before possible. Suddenly intelligence became a huge advantage, and there’s no stopping natural selection/survival of the fittest/evolution.

…Or God did it.

You could probably incorporate a lot to do with the red shift/blue shift theories too, when it comes to an ever-expanding universe, soon to "collapse" on itself.

I understood most of this correctly, good read man, thanks.

Very interesting. thx

I'm just curious now, what do you do for a living, are you a student? Or does your work concern all that stuff?

Very nice read, greatly appreciated and many thanks for your effort!

Please do not feel restricted to make only one single post like this one. I'd love to see more of them.

It wasn’t a lot of effort really because I just copied and pasted what I’d already said before and added a couple a bits. I should be a modder

I don’t work in this area or study it officially. In other words I study what I find interesting and take it in easily because I enjoy the subject. Scientists tend to be quite close minded and focus on one particular aspect, and get proved wrong a lot. They also seem to think in an overly analytical way which means they tend to not be very good at explaining things in plain English. I just wanted to write a basic description that someone with zero knowledge on the subject could understand. There’s a few things at least that I’m going to add.

Added some new stuff that people might be interested in. It's all in the last six paragraphs.

wal wrote:

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now what if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photos phthisis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was.

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Abiogenesis had become the thorn in the side of evolutionists. From Darwin (1800's) upto when the theory of evolution gained popularity (1950's), no one knew (or could have imagined) just how complicated the living cell is. No one knew that a single human DNA molecule held as much information as a one million page encyclopedia. A single living cell is as complicated as a General Motors manufacturing plant.

After decades of research, origins of life scientists are actually further from an explanation than closer. The more they learn, the more they understand how much they don't know.

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start. For example, highschool textbooks still have the famous "Miller-Urey Experiment" which has proven to be junk science at best.

I'm not even preaching "Intelligent Design" here. I'm simply pointing out what origins of life scientists have concluded themselves- abiogenesis is immensely more complicated than originally assumed.

I'll show just how complicated later...

pbmax wrote:

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Evolution is extremely simple. Biogenesis isn't. But it's a big universe with a lot of time for things to happen.

Soon there'll be a new telescope in orbit with the ability to detect Earth sized planets. If the atmosphere of a planet has a lot has a lot of oxygen then we'll know that photosynthesis and therefore life is present. It could be as common as stars.

Black holes were originally thought to be so unlikely, that they probably never happen. Now we know that there are about 100 million just in our galaxy, and one of them (the one in the middle) is very, very big. Just because something is hard to understand, doesn't mean it's uncommon.

The notion that evolution explains the origin of life is a huge misconception. It explains how the first life form beget everything else, but it does nothing to explain how that first life form came about.

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

I think the crux of the issue is not that evolution is a theory or that the textbooks are outdated. Rather it's a general concern that children might interpret evolution as "the origin of life", like you did, and therefore conclude that it's proof that their is no God or more accurately no God the likes of that depicted in whatever flavor of religion you happen to subscribe to.

As far as scientific understanding is concerned, there's a wealth of things we don't know that should prove far simpler to understand than the origins of life.

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms? Or a treatment for cancer that doesn't involve injecting poison into the body?

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas. I don't imagine we're up for the task of answering big questions like "Where did we come from?" in any meaningful way. It's like trying to shoot a target painted on the moon with a bow and arrow. It's a lot easier if your on the moon.

That said, real scientists are aiming for targets they can hit because they're aware of how complex the universe is. In fact, accounting for that complexity by verifying every new theory and discovery against everything else before it's committed to textbooks and accepted as general knowledge is what makes science credible.

I haven't been to school in quite some time so I haven't had the luxury of reviewing science textbooks to see what's being taught now days but I doubt biogenesis is covered.

pbmax wrote:

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start.

You can’t claim that evolution is flawed because we don’t know how biogenesis happens yet. Nothing in your post remotely suggests anything about the concept of evolution. I remember you saying in another topic that some things that are considered facts, aren’t remotely true. I suggest you do some open minded research to find out exactly why those things are considered remotely true. Than compare that evidence with the lack of evidence for God or any religion. Like Rich said, evolution makes no attempt to explain the origins of life, just what happened after the formation of life. It’s the same as the fact that the big bang is not a theory about how the universe came to be. It’s what happened just after the start of the universe. Evolution does explain exactly how a single celled organism gave rise to all the life we see today. It’s just that an individual who has some kind of advantage, will on average have more offspring than an individual without an advantage. This makes every generation better than the last, because those advantages are passed down to their offspring. Like I said, simple.

rich_is_bored wrote:

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

Totally

rich_is_bored wrote:

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms?

That’s called genetic manipulation

rich_is_bored wrote:

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. Black holes are all the same size; infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how the universe can arise from “nothing”. Hmm, I’m going to add this bit to the original post when I can be bothered. If you take this idea logically forward it does seem to lead itself to the closed/bouncing universe scenario. What determines the mass of a singularity? The mass of the object that collapsed! The official mass of the universe is extremely close to making it closed, and may have been slightly miscalculated. Maybe Hawking got it wrong when he said that the universe couldn’t bounce, and maybe a universe has to be marginally over the closed threshold because at that point it can’t create more matter because it’s run out of energy to do it at exactly like moment, because it’s the same matter that collapsed to give it that energy in the first place. STOP RANTING!

rich_is_bored wrote:

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas.

Inventing the wheel was astounding. There isn’t a word for what we’ve done.

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

The basic version of it is quite easy to understand: The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us). If anyone's interested look up Bell's inequality

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

If anyone wants what are kinda considered the gold standard in teaching physics, look up the Feynman Lectures. They were done in the 1960's and the audience were 1st year uni students but they're still very good (apparently, I've only listened to a couple myself

).

idiom wrote:

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

I know, I was just being petulant because I find it so much harder to grasp the concepts of the very small compared to the completely intuitive laws of the very large. I wasn’t going to go into this but I’ve never understood how the Heisenberg principle means that the universe has a random element. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it, because enough people who are better educated then me swear by it. I just don’t see where the huge leap came from that just because we can’t measure the exact velocity and position of a particle at the same time, somehow it doesn’t have an exact velocity and position. Is it something to do with Schrodingers cat? Could you explain that please?

idiom wrote:

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

Absolutely. It’s not a bad thing. If they weren’t like that, the rest of us wouldn’t have anywhere near the understanding we have now. They have to be like that to get answers. I just think that a lot (not all) of scientists aren’t very articulate when trying to explain things to people who don’t understand what it’s based on.

Back to what I was saying before: If you think about it, the closed/bouncing universe does make more sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

Maybe they made a mistake when they calculated the movement of galaxies. The further away an object is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The further away you look, the further back in time you are seeing. So if galaxies that are further away are moving away faster than the closer ones, then the further back in time you look, the faster they’re moving, meaning the expansion is slowing down not speeding up. I hope they remembered to take this into account. It would be hilarious if they didn’t.

Edit: I’ve just done some calculations and we’re fucked. The universe is about to implode. RUN!

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies

One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really wierd so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better

The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical condundrums quantum mechanics brings up.

And you're right about some scientists not being very good at explaining things. I've had some aweful lecturers in the past

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

G’day m8

I’ve heard that two slit experiment before, but never described that well, cheers. I still don’t really get it, but no one does. If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics, as someone who I can’t remember said. Is the uncertainty principle a product of our inability to comprehend the universe properly, or an actual property of the universe itself? From what you said, I take it that basically; light is in wave form until it comes into contact with something, then it becomes an electron? Wouldn’t that imply that the electrons react with space-time to create a wave that carries them, making the wave and the particle separate entities? I can’t stop thinking in general relativity terms

I agree with Einstein. The universe does not play dice. The uncertainty principle must be to do with the measurements themselves. To measure an object, you have to interact with it in some way, thereby influencing the object itself and obscuring the measurement. I still don’t see how it means something can be in two places at once. My brain hurts, I need a smoke.

idiom wrote:

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

Really? Obviously it wouldn't be completely spherical, because it's curved by mass. The more massive, the greater the angle of the curve, but I've never heard the dodecahedron version

I’ve added quite a bit including some very important things about the nature of gravity that I forgot to mention. It stars from the; If the Hawking equations are correct…paragraph onwards. I’m quite pleased with it now

Light doesn't become electrons, I was just saying you can do the same experiment with light beams or electron beams and you get the same qualitative results. As in they both diffract like waves but both can also be thought of as particles. Single photons can be detected (with say photomultipliers) and experiments on the photoelectric effect for instance show the particle nature of electrons. How can something be a wave and a particle at the same time? Think of it as being a discrete packet of a wave. Although really, this is only a model of quantum mechanics, there are also other mathematical formulations that give the same results such as Heisenberg's matrix formulation and (I think Feynman's) path integral formulation. They all however have the same property of have 'superpositions of states'.

The uncertainty principle as far as we know is a product of the universe itself.

You're right that to measure an object you have to interact with it and it does disturb the system. I just did a quick wiki search. Maybe you'll be interested in this. Bell's inequality and the EPR paradox are good experiments that have been done to give strong evidence in favour of the things really being in a superposition of states. To show the universe really is completely deterministic you'll have to come up with a theory that gets around those results.

I meant photons, not electrons :roll:

Thanks for the links and for trying to explain. I still don't get how scientists can say with any certainty that nothing is certain and the universe is random though.

To truly understand requires properly learning quantum mechanics sorry

I’ve been reading bits and pieces on it, and there are some weird and very interesting things in it. Like how two electrons (yes electrons this time) can occupy the same space at the same time as long as they have different polarisations. Or how a an electron can be released from a system before it’s arrived, which some have taken to mean it travels back in time. Positrons actually move properly back through time until they hit an electron and release a photon :shock:

Also electrons have to be certain distance from the nucleus, and if there’s no room then one will take a looser orbit, making it easier to remove. These materials are called metals, and that’s why they conduct electricity.

Although the uncertainty principle might be proven wrong soon. Or at least redefined. If the hadron collider at CERN is powerful enough to create mini black holes then that will be good evidence for extra dimensions, as in string theory, which is a deterministic theory. It says that the hidden variables are coming from the extra dimensions. So of course this could be a closed, bouncing, deterministic, eleven dimensional universe :wink:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

idiom wrote:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

I don't have a deep understanding of string theory, I just know the basics. If you keep breaking things down into what they're made of, eventually there will come a point when you can't go any further. At this point everything is made up of tiny strands, or strings of energy. Some are loose, some cross over and others are loops. I think this determines if they are matter energy of space-time. They're like strings on a violin in that they can resonate, and the pitch determines the element for example. Higher pitch = light element/lower pitch = heavier element I think. It's deterministic because the strings would react with each other, not randomly. But you would have to be able to measure velocities and positions in all dimensions simultaneously. It is a beautiful explanation of the universe, and it does make sense, mathematically I mean. Not that I understand the equations but people seem to think that it works.

I think it is rational theory,everything has its own structure.

wal wrote:

idiom wrote:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

I don't have a deep understanding of string theory, I just know the basics. If you keep breaking things down into what they're made of, eventually there will come a point when you can't go any further. At this point everything is made up of tiny strands, or strings of energy.

I thought one of the rules of quantum physics is that it's impossible to determine the exact location of something, and know it's relative velocity at the same time. Does this apply to string theory as well?

The only problem that I see is that the theory keeps getting revised (which is good - the more revised to make more sense the better), but it is still only a theory. Strings are so small there literally isn't any way of seeing them, in order to prove their existence.

Phobos wrote:

I thought one of the rules of quantum physics is that it's impossible to determine the exact location of something, and know it's relative velocity at the same time. Does this apply to string theory as well?

That's what we're getting at. One of the principles of string theory is that the uncertainty principle arises because we have a four dimension view of something that exists partially outside of our perception, so we therefore can't know exactly what it's doing on a very small scale.

Phobos wrote:

The only problem that I see is that the theory keeps getting revised (which is good - the more revised to make more sense the better), but it is still only a theory. Strings are so small there literally isn't any way of seeing them, in order to prove their existence.

Yea it's just a theory, which is why I didn't go into it much in my original post, I wanted it to be factual. Having said that, there are people who dedicate their whole professional lives to it. Their are actually people with the job title; String Theorist. I'm sure that they believe that it's just a matter of time before it's widely accepted. Your right that there's been a few versions. String theory, M theory, Super string theory, but the fact that it just wont go away is probably a sign that the principle is right. If something works that well then it's probably true. When the general theory of relativity came out, no one, including Einstein believed in it completely, because it predicted some really stupid things, like a universe that's not static and space that can fold back into itself, or areas of space where time completely stops. Obviously the theory was at least slightly wrong

Strings don't have to be seen for us to know they're there. They could be observed indirectly in the future.

I can't sleep so I thought I'd rant for a bit. If Hostile's aloud to keep resurrecting his thread then so am I!

When matter falls into a black hole, the mass of the black hole is reduced! Here's why.

Gravity shortens distances. A singularity is a point in space-time where all distances are zero. That includes time. A singularity is necessarily infinitely unstable due the fact that it can't exist for any length of time. The further away in space from the singularity, the more time passes. Matter falling into a black hole moves through space-time until it's at the exact point in space and time that the black hole formed. It's then released as gamma ray bursts.

When mass enters, it reduces the mass of the black hole until the overall balance of stuff that came out originally matches the value of the stuff that's gone back in. You don't get something for nothing. The information is preserved in its simplest form. The value remains and everything else is lost.

If everything within an environment is reversed then everything stays exactly the same unless viewed from an external frame of reference because the only variables possible in any situation are relative to everything else. From our perspective gravity curves inwards at relatively short distances and curves outward at long distances. As the distance increases, the effect of gravity is spread over a wider volume. The action/reaction of this is that the inverse pull (push from our perspective) increases. As it curves one way, it curves an equal value the other. The big rip is the big bang viewed from the other side. A diffuse amount of matter and energy in a huge amount of space is exactly the same as concentrated matter and energy in an infinitely small amount of space. Bang!

Our arrow of time comes from the fact that we remember the past and not the future. There isn't a moving time line. If you think that the sense of being in the present is a property of time, it's not. We have that in every moment of our lives. It's always now. In reality, everything exists at once. Nothing's happened and nothing will happen because everything is happening now. From our perspective, mass uses and slows down the expansion. A relativity slower expansion makes things gravitate towards that point. A black hole is so massive that it contracts the universe over a certain amount of space-time, making it possible to move back through time to the point when it formed.

Did that make sense? This is all my prediction btw.

I'm a pessimist. The universe will implode and turn into a giant disco ball. See, I've come to realize that, regardless of what we think or know about the world or universe, it doesn't matter. Religion is a clogged toilet, science is a book without pictures, aliens are out there, etc. There's a reason why religious people never talk about dinosaurs (because their versions of the Bible and how life was started on Earth are so mixed up that you could take a large, behemoth crap and they'd find it Holy and Righteous, with a cherry on top, and apple sauce), or why scientists never bring up the fact that we've been created by giant Native Americans. They never think outside the bun, see? I'll do some basic math for you.

At McDonald's, Cheeseburgers have six grams of saturated fat, while at Taco Bell, Cinnamon Twists have zero. Zero. 0. Zero grams of saturated fat - Zero plus six is six. Six plus six is sixty six. Sixty six plus six is... Agh! The number of the beast! Do you see the pattern? God is out there hanging out with his atheist friends and scientologists, in his own galaxy, playing Pong and other stupidass old games that get too much credit for things they didn't achieve while we, "Humans", are trapped in a prison until we either kill ourselves, kill eachother, or die of "natural causes". What are "natural" causes? What is "Natural"? When a deer gets shot by a human, that's unnatural. When a deer gets obliter-JesusChrist-ated into a cataclysmic orgasm of blood, bone splinters, and burnt meat by a falling satalite, that isn't unnatural, you know? That's nature! That's the way it's meant to be.

Humans, you see (I can't see, I need glasses), are fools.
When we look up at the sky and into the universe and onto the fat, white butt cheeks that people call the "Moon", we never really grasp the fact that we're useless and inferior. There are probably aliens out there that can breathe fire, shoot lasers, drop atomic bombs, build railroad tracks, demolish skyscrapers, spawn vortexes, and manufacture lava lamps just by biting a toe-nail (assuming, of course, that, since humans feel that they're sooo superior and that everything is like them, they have toe-nails). Aliens are out there, but we won't grasp that. Scientists are too caught up with the Big Bang theory or curing cancer. The Big Bang is simple - Boom. Oh, and the cure for cancer is also simple - Death. That's the destiny of man, anyway. Postponing it isn't going to make things any better, since most people who'd be cured of cancer will never achieve anything. Mostly because movie stars are, apparently, the only important thing in the world. Afterall, acting is unbelievably difficult. Musicians, artists, crafters - They're the footman soldiers while actors are the knights. Flamethrowers versus piles of dry, dead leaves, twigs, and grass. Somebody shoot me, I can't stress this enough.

The universe, people, is amazing. It's big, and that's it. The reason nobody is excited is because, no matter how much you dream of it, you won't get to explore it. Is it envy or jealousy? No! It's boredom. It's a big black space and a bunch of stars and galaxies and nebulae and old, forgotten pornography magazines that God left sitting around. Once you grasp the entirety of the universe, it's nothing but a joke. Build a house and fancy how proud you are of it and live in it for a little while. That feeling of excitement and pride dies out, and that's why God, Jesus, Moses, and the A-team, and Spongebob all left to another planet. You know what that "planet" was? Pluto. Stupid scientists.

I'm an optimist. I've come to the conclusion that you are my nemesis. You clearly smoke at least as much as I do but you seem to be a glass is half full kind of person. "It's half way there so that's good enough", whereas if you were a glass is half empty kind of a person you would say "there's as much space in there as liquid, this could be so much better". When I look up at the sky I pretty much think the same as you do. It's mostly just space. I've never even looked though a telescope. It's when I imagine the stuff that I know's out there that it becomes beautiful.

I should clarify a few facts because that post was not really for the layman. Gamma ray bursts always proceed the birth of a new black hole. That's fact. Scientists don't know what happens to the information that falls into a black hole. Mass slows down time and time completely stops at a singularity. That's also fact. So it's pretty fucking obvious that as you move towards the singularity, you are moving back through space-time to the point at which no time has passed since the black holes formation. You're then passed through the eye of a needle and broken down into the simplest form of matter/energy, which just happens to be gamma rays. No-one has put two and two together. Scientists are idiots. Too much education. They've had there imaginations beaten out of them.

I should really get some sleep. You would not believe the week I've had :evil:

Oh and this is probably the best talk anyone will ever see. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

That's actually a great topic and though I wouldn't want to turn this into a science fiction topic here is a quote I want to throw in :

Quote:

A short survey about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This survey deals with potential intelligent life. That exludes primitive microbial life forms which may well be discovered within our own solar system.

The Probability of Civilizations in the Universe
From the Atlas of the Universe we can see that our visible universe - which spans over 14 billion light years - contains an estimated 30 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars, or 30 billion trillion stars. Within that astronomical number of stars it seems mathematically inconceivable that there wouldn't be many other civilizations somewhere.
( For details see An Atlas to the Universe )

However, it is also obvious that we will never be able to communicate over such an enormous length of time, and any intelligent signals over such an immense space would diminish practically to zero before reaching us - for it would be swallowed up by millions of intervening galaxies.

Our own galaxy - the Milky Way - contains 200 billion stars, but it is still to large for effective communications, because its size - 90 000 light years - would require 180 000 years for a two way communication.

\

The Probability of finding other Civilizations
For practical reasons we have to confine our search for other civilizations to our immediate neighborhood. If we reduce our search to an area of 12,5 light years the number of stars shrinks dramatically to about 33 stars, out of which most are red dwarfs. That leaves about 6-7 normal stars. It would be highly unlikely to find intelligent life within such a small number.

A 50 light years large neighborhood contains about 2000 stars, with 80% red dwarfs - still a relatively small number.

The mathematical probability of finding alien life improves if we extend our search over 250 light years radius, within which we find an estimated 260 000 stars. Should we ever receive any intelligent signal it would most likely come from this small part of the Orion arm which constitutes part of the Milky Way.

However, we have to keep in mind that at this distance communications would be mostly a one way street. Because if we receive a signal from 250 light years away it would require another 250 years to answer and a return answer would not come back before 500 years!

Further obstacles to find other civilizations

A further complication can be demonstrated by the following consideration - let's call it the eggshell theory.

The thickness of an expanding eggshell in this theory would represent the space-timespan within which a scientific civilization would be able to broadcast its signals to other worlds before its own civilization expired.

Let's assume some distant planet had developed an advanced scientific civilization. It would be extremely unlikely that such a civilzation would have developed exactly at the same time as our own here on earth. It could have occured - let's say - two million years ago. ( If we take into account that the formation of our own solar sytem occured around 5,000 million years ago a 2 million year difference would be miniscule ).

Let's further assume that the lifespan of a scientific civilization would be 100 000 years - a very generous assumption. We only have to look at the fragile state of human affairs here on earth. Is it very likely that mankind will survive for more than a few thousand years after the onset of the nuclear age? ( If we consider the risks of nuclear war, the long term effects of global warming and a myriad of other problems it seems problematic that our scientific civilization will survive for more than 100 000 years).

That would not neccessarily be different on an another planet. If such an alien civilization had broadcast its existence for all of 100 000 years, but starting two million years ago, the timespan - or the thickness of the eggshell - would have radiated out from the originating planet at the speed of light. It would mean this electronic wave (the eggshell) would have hit our earth two million years ago but it would have lasted for only 100 000 years. So we would have missed it since at that time only primitive hominids roamed the African continent, barely having invented primitive stone tools.

Similarly, our own electronic projection - starting less than one hundred years ago - would hit another planet millions of years after its civilization had expired, or alternatively, long before it evolved. In that case no communication would be possible because we would attempt to communicate with each other millions of years apart. The probability that an expanding eggshell from one civilization would intersect another civilzation exactly at the right time when the receiving civilization would be able to detect such signals would certainly be 'astronomically' small, that is, almost non-existent.

On the other hand, if we assume a much more optimistic estimate - let's say a potential civilization would have evolved - 'progressed' - over several million years, then another possibility arises. The late Dr. Carl Sagan pointed out that such an extremely advanced civilization might have no interest whatsoever in our primitive human species. The gap would be too immense and such aliens would conceivably look at us, as we look at lower forms of life, such as insects for example. Or they might just ignore us as so underdeveloped that communication with us would be a waste of their time.

A more optimistic scenario

It has to be conceded that if the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (SETI) should find any intelligent signal in the future the above theories would have to be revised!
For more optimistic persons see Setiathome. Setiathome is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Anyone can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Should we detect any intelligent signals from outer space that certainly would be very exiting because it would expand our understanding of alien life forms enormously.
However, the fact remains that communication would - for all practical reasons - still be a one way street because our answer would not receive a response from a potential alien world for several hundred years !

I personally believe that if our civilization ever establishes contact with another one it will be in a rather "technically evolutionized form". Meaning that our synthethic lifeforms being a result of the technical evolution on earth (robots,cyborgs,androids,drones,probes and whatever science will come up with) will meet their alien counterpart. So more or less artificial life will meet artificial life as they are the only "lifeform" having the capacity to travel and "live" long enough withstanding physical conditions such as high temperature differences, gravitiy fields and radiation to overcome those huge distances. I believe it would be amazingly interesting to witness such a meeting since I can imagine every artificial lifeform being equipped with a giant digital encyclopedia having filed and archived the entire history of the life on their own planets. I know that this might not sound as exciting as "real" biological aliens trying to contact as (in peace or at war) but for me it is by far the most logical one. Maybe you think different

I've been gone for a bit due to real life being nothing but a real pain in the arse lately, to put it nicely. That and I haven't got easy access to a pc at the moment.

I agree that two way comunication doesn't seem very likely due to the universes built in speed limit. It takes over a second just to get to the bloody moon! Still, a confirmed signal would be huge. If it can happen twice in one galaxy then it's everywhere. Unless there's somthing special about the Milky-way which doesn't seem plausable.

There are a few scientists who think that a kind of gateway anywhere could be possible if the fabric of space-time were pulled apart. Me thinks they've got more qualifications than knowlage. Seems to happen a lot.

Others think that Einstein's worm hole equations from general reletivity could do the trick, despite the fact that they would be hugly unstable and have quite a strong gravitational tide. There's actaully a funny quirk in general reletivity that allows proper backward time travel if wormholes are real. I might go into it when I edit the original post again. I'll cut a few thigs as well so it doesn't drag on. I just want to cut through all the bullshit and say in plain English how and way things work the way they do.

I thought some people might enjoy understanding a bit more about where we all live without the typical scientists annoying habit of making everything sound way more complicated than it really is. I’ll edit this post as and when (if anyone cares). Anything that can add or expand on this or correct a mistake is more than welcome. Can this be made sticky just because?

First a few facts to try to convey the huge scope of our universe. Light moves at 186,000 miles per second and takes over 100,000 years to cross our galaxy. That should give you an idea of the size of some galaxies. There is on average, 1 supernova every century per galaxy and in the visible universe there are an average of six supernovae every second. That’s how big the universe is.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that the universe must be in motion, which caused a huge divide in the scientific community between the steady state believers (who believed that although the universe is expanding, new matter is constantly being created in the gaps, making it eternal) and the motionists (can’t remember the word so I’ll make one up). Steven Hawking then proved steady state theory wrong by coming up with an equation for the big bang (that’s basically just the general relativity equations in reverse) that suggests the universe started life as a gravitational singularity (black hole), and with the help of the inflationary part of equation (inflation is needed to lock in the uniformity of the universe, but it‘s not known what caused it), it even accurately predicts the rough dispersion of matter throughout the universe (galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters). Religion, and the pope especially, jumped on the discovery as evidence of a creator. The pope even tried to tell him that it was okay to study everything after the big bang but not the big bang itself because that was the work of god.

closed universe (spherical) - Positively curved (curves inward towards itself). A universe that is above the critical mass needed for the gravitational curvature of the universe to eventually collapse it back to whence it came. The shape of a closed universe is like the surface of the Earth. If your were to travel far enough in a “straight” line, you would eventually end up back were you started.

open universe (saddle shaped) - Negatively curved (curves outward away from itself). A universe that is below the critical mass needed for it collapse. An open universe will eventually tare itself apart it in what’s known as the big rip. The dark energy in the universe (which makes up about 90% of the whole universe btw & out of the rest about 90% of matter is dark matter. To quote someone that I can’t remember “the bits we see are just the icing on the cake. It’s the parts we’re not aware of that really make up existence.”) will continue to accelerate the expansion of the universe out into infinity. Current observation suggests that our universe is open.

flat universe (flatish) - Neutrally curved (still curves locally due to gravity but is flat overall). A universe that has a mass that’s EXACTLY the amount needed for it to keep a roughly uniform shape (not size) for ever. This universe dies with a whimper, over trillions of ions as everything slowly (relevantly slowly) gets further and farther apart. Our universe is extremely close to this, though it’s thought to be just over. In fact the odds of it being as close as it is (it needs to be that close for it to be stable enough for us to exist btw) are lots and lots (can’t remember how many) of trillions to one. This led to the entropic principle that the universe is the way it is because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to ask, how come? I spose the uncertainly principle makes this universe impossible because it will have to go one way or the other eventually.

Determining which category our universe falls into involves measuring the current rate of expansion. The further away an object in the distant universe is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The speed is found by measuring the Doppler shift. If an object is moving away from us, the light waves get stretched making it appear red, and if it’s moving towards us, the waves get squashed making it appear blue.

If the Hawking equations are correct, it should be pointed out that even if closed, they disprove the theory of a bouncing universe. Besides even if it did bounce, the uncertainty principle, if completely true would mean that randomness is built into the universe, so you would get a different universe every time, unless the many worlds theory is correct in which case everything that can happen does happen and the uncertainty principle is simply about which direction you take. Depends how you interpret the uncertainty principle really. Some religious people have also used the uncertainty principle as evidence of room for god to manoeuvre. Although a closed, bouncing, deterministic universe does make a hell of a lot of sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

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Nothing with mass can ever reach the light barrier, because it would require infinite energy to get there, which is impossible. The faster an object is moving, the more energy it takes to get it to accelerate. And this isn’t a linier scale. If you see it on a graph, it starts off gentle, then curves sharper and sharper until it hits infinity at light speed. The speed of light is always 186,000 miles per second from your perspective (in a vacuum that is, it’s been slowed down to about 30 mph in a lab). In other words it always moves 186,000 mps faster than you. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, time from your perspective would slow down to half its "resting” speed making time in the rest of the universe speed up relative to you, to double its normal rate. That’s the special theory of relativity, and that’s why light seems to always move at the same speed.

At the big bang, the 4 forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity) were combined as one super force. This is known as super symmetry. Something happened to gravity to make it hugely weaker when they separated. A small magnet can overpower the gravitational attraction of the entire Earth. String theory attempts to bridge the gap between particle physics and general relativity (they seem to contradict each other) and explain the apparent weakness of gravity. Basically it says that there are between 9 and 11 dimensions, some higher, some lower, and gravity seems weaker than the other forces from our perspective because it’s being spread throughout the other dimensions. It also may explain the uncertainty principle as unknown variables from lower dimensions.

Time is not how we perceive it. It’s like that question so many people ask: "What was there before the big bang"? There was no before the big bang! What we perceive as time (and space), started at the big bang, because the three spatial dimensions and the one time dimension were all condensed to a singularity. Someone in higher dimensional space (if it exists) would see our universe as static, and they would have their own dimension that they perceive as time. Our universe has no beginning or end as such, because we will always have had been here, so to someone outside of our four dimensional universe, we would be eternal.

Gravity is a curvature of the four dimensions (called space-time). Imagine a birds eye view of a two dimensional surface. Now imagine that surface has some give. If you were to put an object on the surface, it would warp the fabric, but from your two dimensional perspective, you wouldn’t be able to see this directly. It would still look flat even with a square grid pattern on the fabric. The heavier the object, the more it would distort the fabric, and if it was too heavy, it would tear a hole in it. Now if you were to roll a marble across it, it would curve around the object (the heavier the object, the sharper the curve) in the centre and fall towards it. Objects in orbit aren’t curling through space because that’s impossible. Instead they’re moving in a straight line through curved space-time. It doesn’t look curved to us because we only have a three dimensional view.

Black holes are what happens when there’s gravity, with nothing to provide a resisting force against it. The nuclear forces of all the atoms on the Earth stop it collapsing for example. Stars have a lot of mass, so need nuclear fusion to hold them up. When a stars fuel runs out, it either forms a white dwarf held up by itself, a neutron star held up by an electromagnetic field, or for the biggest stars, black holes held up by nothing. The gravitational curve inside the event horizon of a black hole is so strong that it curves space back in on itself. No matter which direction you try to go, you will always be facing the singularity at the centre. Time alters relative to gravity in a similar way to velocity. The stronger the gravitation field, the slower time moves within it. At the singularity, time is frozen.

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. The strength of gravity is directly proportional to the mass of the object and inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that object. That just means that, if you halve the distance, the strength of the gravitational wave is multiplied by four/if you double the distance, the strength is divided by four.

Black holes are all the same size (kind of); infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. The event horizon, which is generally regarded as the edge, is the point of no return, where space curves back into itself. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how a universe can arise from “nothing”.

There are three types of black hole. If quantum theory is right then there’s mini black holes, which scientists at CERN are going to try to create (July this year) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21527, stellar black holes formed from the cores of massive stars and super massive black holes that form in the centre of spiral galaxies like our Galaxy, the Milky way, and Andromeda, our nearest neighbour. They’re the engines that power the galaxies and make them spin. Everything orbits around the centre of gravity in the same way as a star system. The Milky Way even has two dwarf galaxies orbiting it like moons. The universe doesn’t have a centre or an edge because it’s not a three dimensional object. Everywhere is in the centre from its own perspective.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are by far the biggest galaxies in our local group, which has about fifty. All the galaxies obit the centre of gravity between the big two because heavier objects fall inwards relative to the others because of their stronger pull. Galaxy clusters are made up of lots of groups. The Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course and will merge in about 3.5 billion years. The Milky Way’s big, and Andromeda’s about twice the size, so when they merge it will easily be the biggest galaxy in this part of the universe. The radiation during this time will be detectable all the way on the other side of the universe. We can see quasars, which are bright early galaxies, all the way on the other side. They’re from the early universe because the light has taken so long to get here.

Star Systems:

When - Fusion occurs when a protostars fiction creates enough heat to overpower the weak nuclear force of the hydrogen atoms that it’s made of. The central part of the nebula generates more frictional heat because of the centrifugal law. When an object is spinning, the central part will need to move faster to have the same amount of energy, because it hasn’t got as far to go, so will have to spin faster to move at the same speed. Nebulae are kick started into motion when the gravitational waves of an exploding/imploding star pass through them. It was proven that our solar system was started by the death of a very close star when local meteorites were found to have elements inside, of the same age as the solar system, and that can only be formed in super nova.

How - When a star becomes nuclear, it pulls in a lot of the nearby gas and throws some into orbit creating a disc shape. The gravity of the orbiting debris isn’t strong enough at this point to create planets but it creates an electromagnetic field through the friction of collisions. This process is called accretion. Dust particles accrete into dust balls and rain drops accrete around dust particles in the air for example. When they reach the size of a mountain, gravity has an effect, pulling in more matter which causes the gravity to increase, which pulls in more matter, and so on. Most planets don’t survive. The Moon was a Mars size planet that crashed into Earth. Some of it makes up the planets crust and the rest is the Moon. Without the tight centre of gravity that we both orbit created by the Moons proximity, we would be all over the place with no defined seasons and a chaotic climate. The distance from the Sun determines the temperature of the forming planet which determines what the planet will be made of. Heavier elements fall into the middle, with the lighter ones at the edge. Mercury is highly dense and metallic, Venus, Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt are made of rock, then the gas giants, and the Kuiper belt at the edge, made from ice (including Pluto) that was forced out from where it was formed. All the water on the planet comes from impacts from these types of comets. Water couldn’t have condensed here because Earth is inside the frost line, which is between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, where it’s too hot for hydrogen and oxygen to form ice.

Why - When a protostar starts fusing hydrogen into helium, energy is realised ((Energy = Mass * light speed squared) E=mc2) because one helium atom weighs slightly less than two hydrogen atoms and the remainder of the mass is realised as energy in the form of heat, light and other radiation carried across the solar system by the solar wind. A lot of what the Sun throws out is deadly, but we’re protected by the Earths magnetic field that’s generated by the molten metallic core. This can be seen as northern and southern lights at the magnetic poles. It’s thought that Mars once had water and maybe life. It’s about half the size of Earth and around a third of the mass. The core didn’t have as much heat and it solidified. Mars lost it’s force field and was scorched by solar radiation, killing the planet.

/*Idiom
The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us).

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies. One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really weird so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better. The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical conundrums quantum mechanics brings up.
*/

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now evolution kicks in. What if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photosynthesis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was, and so on, until you us.

The origin of life and the odds of it happening are still not entirely known. The building block are contained in comets, but at attempts to artificially trigger life have never succeeded, although amino acids have been artificially produced. Some people have suggested that a lightning strike is the probable trigger, and inconclusive evidence has been produced to support the idea.

To find out how common life/intelligent life is, we need to know:

What percentage of star systems are stable enough for life to form on one of it’s planets or moons?

Answer: Very few systems are as stable as ours (thanks to Jupiter being big enough to gravitationally attract asteroids and comets, but not big enough to disturb the other planets orbits. Also if Saturn had been bigger we would have been in trouble, because two Jupiter sized planet would create very unstable gravitational conditions). However, a system doesn’t have to be as stable as ours to support life.

What percentage of planets that can support life, actually do support life?

Answer: ?

What percentage of planets that support life are stable enough and are in systems that are stable enough for complex life to form?

Answer: Probably a relatively low number. We’re very lucky that Jupiter is here and isn’t too small or too big, and that Saturn isn’t any bigger. We’re also very lucky that Thea hit the Earth and created the moon out of some of the rubble to give us a stable axis.

In what percentage of life forms is being intelligent a major advantage?

Answer: As far as we know, 33.3r%. A mass extinction caused by a meteorite lead to the rise of the dinosaurs, who existed for a very long time whilst being really stupid and not getting any cleverer. Then another meteorite lead to the rise of mammals with opposable thumbs. Suddenly a creature could manipulate it’s environment in a way never before possible. Suddenly intelligence became a huge advantage, and there’s no stopping natural selection/survival of the fittest/evolution.

…Or God did it.

You could probably incorporate a lot to do with the red shift/blue shift theories too, when it comes to an ever-expanding universe, soon to "collapse" on itself.

I understood most of this correctly, good read man, thanks.

Very interesting. thx

I'm just curious now, what do you do for a living, are you a student? Or does your work concern all that stuff?

Very nice read, greatly appreciated and many thanks for your effort!

Please do not feel restricted to make only one single post like this one. I'd love to see more of them.

It wasn’t a lot of effort really because I just copied and pasted what I’d already said before and added a couple a bits. I should be a modder

I don’t work in this area or study it officially. In other words I study what I find interesting and take it in easily because I enjoy the subject. Scientists tend to be quite close minded and focus on one particular aspect, and get proved wrong a lot. They also seem to think in an overly analytical way which means they tend to not be very good at explaining things in plain English. I just wanted to write a basic description that someone with zero knowledge on the subject could understand. There’s a few things at least that I’m going to add.

Added some new stuff that people might be interested in. It's all in the last six paragraphs.

wal wrote:

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now what if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photos phthisis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was.

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Abiogenesis had become the thorn in the side of evolutionists. From Darwin (1800's) upto when the theory of evolution gained popularity (1950's), no one knew (or could have imagined) just how complicated the living cell is. No one knew that a single human DNA molecule held as much information as a one million page encyclopedia. A single living cell is as complicated as a General Motors manufacturing plant.

After decades of research, origins of life scientists are actually further from an explanation than closer. The more they learn, the more they understand how much they don't know.

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start. For example, highschool textbooks still have the famous "Miller-Urey Experiment" which has proven to be junk science at best.

I'm not even preaching "Intelligent Design" here. I'm simply pointing out what origins of life scientists have concluded themselves- abiogenesis is immensely more complicated than originally assumed.

I'll show just how complicated later...

pbmax wrote:

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Evolution is extremely simple. Biogenesis isn't. But it's a big universe with a lot of time for things to happen.

Soon there'll be a new telescope in orbit with the ability to detect Earth sized planets. If the atmosphere of a planet has a lot has a lot of oxygen then we'll know that photosynthesis and therefore life is present. It could be as common as stars.

Black holes were originally thought to be so unlikely, that they probably never happen. Now we know that there are about 100 million just in our galaxy, and one of them (the one in the middle) is very, very big. Just because something is hard to understand, doesn't mean it's uncommon.

The notion that evolution explains the origin of life is a huge misconception. It explains how the first life form beget everything else, but it does nothing to explain how that first life form came about.

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

I think the crux of the issue is not that evolution is a theory or that the textbooks are outdated. Rather it's a general concern that children might interpret evolution as "the origin of life", like you did, and therefore conclude that it's proof that their is no God or more accurately no God the likes of that depicted in whatever flavor of religion you happen to subscribe to.

As far as scientific understanding is concerned, there's a wealth of things we don't know that should prove far simpler to understand than the origins of life.

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms? Or a treatment for cancer that doesn't involve injecting poison into the body?

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas. I don't imagine we're up for the task of answering big questions like "Where did we come from?" in any meaningful way. It's like trying to shoot a target painted on the moon with a bow and arrow. It's a lot easier if your on the moon.

That said, real scientists are aiming for targets they can hit because they're aware of how complex the universe is. In fact, accounting for that complexity by verifying every new theory and discovery against everything else before it's committed to textbooks and accepted as general knowledge is what makes science credible.

I haven't been to school in quite some time so I haven't had the luxury of reviewing science textbooks to see what's being taught now days but I doubt biogenesis is covered.

pbmax wrote:

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start.

You can’t claim that evolution is flawed because we don’t know how biogenesis happens yet. Nothing in your post remotely suggests anything about the concept of evolution. I remember you saying in another topic that some things that are considered facts, aren’t remotely true. I suggest you do some open minded research to find out exactly why those things are considered remotely true. Than compare that evidence with the lack of evidence for God or any religion. Like Rich said, evolution makes no attempt to explain the origins of life, just what happened after the formation of life. It’s the same as the fact that the big bang is not a theory about how the universe came to be. It’s what happened just after the start of the universe. Evolution does explain exactly how a single celled organism gave rise to all the life we see today. It’s just that an individual who has some kind of advantage, will on average have more offspring than an individual without an advantage. This makes every generation better than the last, because those advantages are passed down to their offspring. Like I said, simple.

rich_is_bored wrote:

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

Totally

rich_is_bored wrote:

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms?

That’s called genetic manipulation

rich_is_bored wrote:

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. Black holes are all the same size; infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how the universe can arise from “nothing”. Hmm, I’m going to add this bit to the original post when I can be bothered. If you take this idea logically forward it does seem to lead itself to the closed/bouncing universe scenario. What determines the mass of a singularity? The mass of the object that collapsed! The official mass of the universe is extremely close to making it closed, and may have been slightly miscalculated. Maybe Hawking got it wrong when he said that the universe couldn’t bounce, and maybe a universe has to be marginally over the closed threshold because at that point it can’t create more matter because it’s run out of energy to do it at exactly like moment, because it’s the same matter that collapsed to give it that energy in the first place. STOP RANTING!

rich_is_bored wrote:

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas.

Inventing the wheel was astounding. There isn’t a word for what we’ve done.

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

The basic version of it is quite easy to understand: The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us). If anyone's interested look up Bell's inequality

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

If anyone wants what are kinda considered the gold standard in teaching physics, look up the Feynman Lectures. They were done in the 1960's and the audience were 1st year uni students but they're still very good (apparently, I've only listened to a couple myself

).

idiom wrote:

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

I know, I was just being petulant because I find it so much harder to grasp the concepts of the very small compared to the completely intuitive laws of the very large. I wasn’t going to go into this but I’ve never understood how the Heisenberg principle means that the universe has a random element. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it, because enough people who are better educated then me swear by it. I just don’t see where the huge leap came from that just because we can’t measure the exact velocity and position of a particle at the same time, somehow it doesn’t have an exact velocity and position. Is it something to do with Schrodingers cat? Could you explain that please?

idiom wrote:

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

Absolutely. It’s not a bad thing. If they weren’t like that, the rest of us wouldn’t have anywhere near the understanding we have now. They have to be like that to get answers. I just think that a lot (not all) of scientists aren’t very articulate when trying to explain things to people who don’t understand what it’s based on.

Back to what I was saying before: If you think about it, the closed/bouncing universe does make more sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

Maybe they made a mistake when they calculated the movement of galaxies. The further away an object is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The further away you look, the further back in time you are seeing. So if galaxies that are further away are moving away faster than the closer ones, then the further back in time you look, the faster they’re moving, meaning the expansion is slowing down not speeding up. I hope they remembered to take this into account. It would be hilarious if they didn’t.

Edit: I’ve just done some calculations and we’re fucked. The universe is about to implode. RUN!

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies

One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really wierd so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better

The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical condundrums quantum mechanics brings up.

And you're right about some scientists not being very good at explaining things. I've had some aweful lecturers in the past

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

G’day m8

I’ve heard that two slit experiment before, but never described that well, cheers. I still don’t really get it, but no one does. If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics, as someone who I can’t remember said. Is the uncertainty principle a product of our inability to comprehend the universe properly, or an actual property of the universe itself? From what you said, I take it that basically; light is in wave form until it comes into contact with something, then it becomes an electron? Wouldn’t that imply that the electrons react with space-time to create a wave that carries them, making the wave and the particle separate entities? I can’t stop thinking in general relativity terms

I agree with Einstein. The universe does not play dice. The uncertainty principle must be to do with the measurements themselves. To measure an object, you have to interact with it in some way, thereby influencing the object itself and obscuring the measurement. I still don’t see how it means something can be in two places at once. My brain hurts, I need a smoke.

idiom wrote:

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

Really? Obviously it wouldn't be completely spherical, because it's curved by mass. The more massive, the greater the angle of the curve, but I've never heard the dodecahedron version

I’ve added quite a bit including some very important things about the nature of gravity that I forgot to mention. It stars from the; If the Hawking equations are correct…paragraph onwards. I’m quite pleased with it now

Light doesn't become electrons, I was just saying you can do the same experiment with light beams or electron beams and you get the same qualitative results. As in they both diffract like waves but both can also be thought of as particles. Single photons can be detected (with say photomultipliers) and experiments on the photoelectric effect for instance show the particle nature of electrons. How can something be a wave and a particle at the same time? Think of it as being a discrete packet of a wave. Although really, this is only a model of quantum mechanics, there are also other mathematical formulations that give the same results such as Heisenberg's matrix formulation and (I think Feynman's) path integral formulation. They all however have the same property of have 'superpositions of states'.

The uncertainty principle as far as we know is a product of the universe itself.

You're right that to measure an object you have to interact with it and it does disturb the system. I just did a quick wiki search. Maybe you'll be interested in this. Bell's inequality and the EPR paradox are good experiments that have been done to give strong evidence in favour of the things really being in a superposition of states. To show the universe really is completely deterministic you'll have to come up with a theory that gets around those results.

I meant photons, not electrons :roll:

Thanks for the links and for trying to explain. I still don't get how scientists can say with any certainty that nothing is certain and the universe is random though.

To truly understand requires properly learning quantum mechanics sorry

I’ve been reading bits and pieces on it, and there are some weird and very interesting things in it. Like how two electrons (yes electrons this time) can occupy the same space at the same time as long as they have different polarisations. Or how a an electron can be released from a system before it’s arrived, which some have taken to mean it travels back in time. Positrons actually move properly back through time until they hit an electron and release a photon :shock:

Also electrons have to be certain distance from the nucleus, and if there’s no room then one will take a looser orbit, making it easier to remove. These materials are called metals, and that’s why they conduct electricity.

Although the uncertainty principle might be proven wrong soon. Or at least redefined. If the hadron collider at CERN is powerful enough to create mini black holes then that will be good evidence for extra dimensions, as in string theory, which is a deterministic theory. It says that the hidden variables are coming from the extra dimensions. So of course this could be a closed, bouncing, deterministic, eleven dimensional universe :wink:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

I thought some people might enjoy understanding a bit more about where we all live without the typical scientists annoying habit of making everything sound way more complicated than it really is. I’ll edit this post as and when (if anyone cares). Anything that can add or expand on this or correct a mistake is more than welcome. Can this be made sticky just because?

First a few facts to try to convey the huge scope of our universe. Light moves at 186,000 miles per second and takes over 100,000 years to cross our galaxy. That should give you an idea of the size of some galaxies. There is on average, 1 supernova every century per galaxy and in the visible universe there are an average of six supernovae every second. That’s how big the universe is.

Einstein’s general theory of relativity suggests that the universe must be in motion, which caused a huge divide in the scientific community between the steady state believers (who believed that although the universe is expanding, new matter is constantly being created in the gaps, making it eternal) and the motionists (can’t remember the word so I’ll make one up). Steven Hawking then proved steady state theory wrong by coming up with an equation for the big bang (that’s basically just the general relativity equations in reverse) that suggests the universe started life as a gravitational singularity (black hole), and with the help of the inflationary part of equation (inflation is needed to lock in the uniformity of the universe, but it‘s not known what caused it), it even accurately predicts the rough dispersion of matter throughout the universe (galaxies, galaxy groups and galaxy clusters). Religion, and the pope especially, jumped on the discovery as evidence of a creator. The pope even tried to tell him that it was okay to study everything after the big bang but not the big bang itself because that was the work of god.

closed universe (spherical) - Positively curved (curves inward towards itself). A universe that is above the critical mass needed for the gravitational curvature of the universe to eventually collapse it back to whence it came. The shape of a closed universe is like the surface of the Earth. If your were to travel far enough in a “straight” line, you would eventually end up back were you started.

open universe (saddle shaped) - Negatively curved (curves outward away from itself). A universe that is below the critical mass needed for it collapse. An open universe will eventually tare itself apart it in what’s known as the big rip. The dark energy in the universe (which makes up about 90% of the whole universe btw & out of the rest about 90% of matter is dark matter. To quote someone that I can’t remember “the bits we see are just the icing on the cake. It’s the parts we’re not aware of that really make up existence.”) will continue to accelerate the expansion of the universe out into infinity. Current observation suggests that our universe is open.

flat universe (flatish) - Neutrally curved (still curves locally due to gravity but is flat overall). A universe that has a mass that’s EXACTLY the amount needed for it to keep a roughly uniform shape (not size) for ever. This universe dies with a whimper, over trillions of ions as everything slowly (relevantly slowly) gets further and farther apart. Our universe is extremely close to this, though it’s thought to be just over. In fact the odds of it being as close as it is (it needs to be that close for it to be stable enough for us to exist btw) are lots and lots (can’t remember how many) of trillions to one. This led to the entropic principle that the universe is the way it is because if it weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to ask, how come? I spose the uncertainly principle makes this universe impossible because it will have to go one way or the other eventually.

Determining which category our universe falls into involves measuring the current rate of expansion. The further away an object in the distant universe is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The speed is found by measuring the Doppler shift. If an object is moving away from us, the light waves get stretched making it appear red, and if it’s moving towards us, the waves get squashed making it appear blue.

If the Hawking equations are correct, it should be pointed out that even if closed, they disprove the theory of a bouncing universe. Besides even if it did bounce, the uncertainty principle, if completely true would mean that randomness is built into the universe, so you would get a different universe every time, unless the many worlds theory is correct in which case everything that can happen does happen and the uncertainty principle is simply about which direction you take. Depends how you interpret the uncertainty principle really. Some religious people have also used the uncertainty principle as evidence of room for god to manoeuvre. Although a closed, bouncing, deterministic universe does make a hell of a lot of sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

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Nothing with mass can ever reach the light barrier, because it would require infinite energy to get there, which is impossible. The faster an object is moving, the more energy it takes to get it to accelerate. And this isn’t a linier scale. If you see it on a graph, it starts off gentle, then curves sharper and sharper until it hits infinity at light speed. The speed of light is always 186,000 miles per second from your perspective (in a vacuum that is, it’s been slowed down to about 30 mph in a lab). In other words it always moves 186,000 mps faster than you. If you were travelling at half the speed of light, time from your perspective would slow down to half its "resting” speed making time in the rest of the universe speed up relative to you, to double its normal rate. That’s the special theory of relativity, and that’s why light seems to always move at the same speed.

At the big bang, the 4 forces (electromagnetic, weak nuclear, strong nuclear and gravity) were combined as one super force. This is known as super symmetry. Something happened to gravity to make it hugely weaker when they separated. A small magnet can overpower the gravitational attraction of the entire Earth. String theory attempts to bridge the gap between particle physics and general relativity (they seem to contradict each other) and explain the apparent weakness of gravity. Basically it says that there are between 9 and 11 dimensions, some higher, some lower, and gravity seems weaker than the other forces from our perspective because it’s being spread throughout the other dimensions. It also may explain the uncertainty principle as unknown variables from lower dimensions.

Time is not how we perceive it. It’s like that question so many people ask: "What was there before the big bang"? There was no before the big bang! What we perceive as time (and space), started at the big bang, because the three spatial dimensions and the one time dimension were all condensed to a singularity. Someone in higher dimensional space (if it exists) would see our universe as static, and they would have their own dimension that they perceive as time. Our universe has no beginning or end as such, because we will always have had been here, so to someone outside of our four dimensional universe, we would be eternal.

Gravity is a curvature of the four dimensions (called space-time). Imagine a birds eye view of a two dimensional surface. Now imagine that surface has some give. If you were to put an object on the surface, it would warp the fabric, but from your two dimensional perspective, you wouldn’t be able to see this directly. It would still look flat even with a square grid pattern on the fabric. The heavier the object, the more it would distort the fabric, and if it was too heavy, it would tear a hole in it. Now if you were to roll a marble across it, it would curve around the object (the heavier the object, the sharper the curve) in the centre and fall towards it. Objects in orbit aren’t curling through space because that’s impossible. Instead they’re moving in a straight line through curved space-time. It doesn’t look curved to us because we only have a three dimensional view.

Black holes are what happens when there’s gravity, with nothing to provide a resisting force against it. The nuclear forces of all the atoms on the Earth stop it collapsing for example. Stars have a lot of mass, so need nuclear fusion to hold them up. When a stars fuel runs out, it either forms a white dwarf held up by itself, a neutron star held up by an electromagnetic field, or for the biggest stars, black holes held up by nothing. The gravitational curve inside the event horizon of a black hole is so strong that it curves space back in on itself. No matter which direction you try to go, you will always be facing the singularity at the centre. Time alters relative to gravity in a similar way to velocity. The stronger the gravitation field, the slower time moves within it. At the singularity, time is frozen.

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. The strength of gravity is directly proportional to the mass of the object and inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that object. That just means that, if you halve the distance, the strength of the gravitational wave is multiplied by four/if you double the distance, the strength is divided by four.

Black holes are all the same size (kind of); infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. The event horizon, which is generally regarded as the edge, is the point of no return, where space curves back into itself. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how a universe can arise from “nothing”.

There are three types of black hole. If quantum theory is right then there’s mini black holes, which scientists at CERN are going to try to create (July this year) viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21527, stellar black holes formed from the cores of massive stars and super massive black holes that form in the centre of spiral galaxies like our Galaxy, the Milky way, and Andromeda, our nearest neighbour. They’re the engines that power the galaxies and make them spin. Everything orbits around the centre of gravity in the same way as a star system. The Milky Way even has two dwarf galaxies orbiting it like moons. The universe doesn’t have a centre or an edge because it’s not a three dimensional object. Everywhere is in the centre from its own perspective.

The Milky Way and Andromeda are by far the biggest galaxies in our local group, which has about fifty. All the galaxies obit the centre of gravity between the big two because heavier objects fall inwards relative to the others because of their stronger pull. Galaxy clusters are made up of lots of groups. The Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course and will merge in about 3.5 billion years. The Milky Way’s big, and Andromeda’s about twice the size, so when they merge it will easily be the biggest galaxy in this part of the universe. The radiation during this time will be detectable all the way on the other side of the universe. We can see quasars, which are bright early galaxies, all the way on the other side. They’re from the early universe because the light has taken so long to get here.

Star Systems:

When - Fusion occurs when a protostars fiction creates enough heat to overpower the weak nuclear force of the hydrogen atoms that it’s made of. The central part of the nebula generates more frictional heat because of the centrifugal law. When an object is spinning, the central part will need to move faster to have the same amount of energy, because it hasn’t got as far to go, so will have to spin faster to move at the same speed. Nebulae are kick started into motion when the gravitational waves of an exploding/imploding star pass through them. It was proven that our solar system was started by the death of a very close star when local meteorites were found to have elements inside, of the same age as the solar system, and that can only be formed in super nova.

How - When a star becomes nuclear, it pulls in a lot of the nearby gas and throws some into orbit creating a disc shape. The gravity of the orbiting debris isn’t strong enough at this point to create planets but it creates an electromagnetic field through the friction of collisions. This process is called accretion. Dust particles accrete into dust balls and rain drops accrete around dust particles in the air for example. When they reach the size of a mountain, gravity has an effect, pulling in more matter which causes the gravity to increase, which pulls in more matter, and so on. Most planets don’t survive. The Moon was a Mars size planet that crashed into Earth. Some of it makes up the planets crust and the rest is the Moon. Without the tight centre of gravity that we both orbit created by the Moons proximity, we would be all over the place with no defined seasons and a chaotic climate. The distance from the Sun determines the temperature of the forming planet which determines what the planet will be made of. Heavier elements fall into the middle, with the lighter ones at the edge. Mercury is highly dense and metallic, Venus, Earth and Mars and the asteroid belt are made of rock, then the gas giants, and the Kuiper belt at the edge, made from ice (including Pluto) that was forced out from where it was formed. All the water on the planet comes from impacts from these types of comets. Water couldn’t have condensed here because Earth is inside the frost line, which is between the asteroid belt and Jupiter, where it’s too hot for hydrogen and oxygen to form ice.

Why - When a protostar starts fusing hydrogen into helium, energy is realised ((Energy = Mass * light speed squared) E=mc2) because one helium atom weighs slightly less than two hydrogen atoms and the remainder of the mass is realised as energy in the form of heat, light and other radiation carried across the solar system by the solar wind. A lot of what the Sun throws out is deadly, but we’re protected by the Earths magnetic field that’s generated by the molten metallic core. This can be seen as northern and southern lights at the magnetic poles. It’s thought that Mars once had water and maybe life. It’s about half the size of Earth and around a third of the mass. The core didn’t have as much heat and it solidified. Mars lost it’s force field and was scorched by solar radiation, killing the planet.

/*Idiom
The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us).

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies. One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really weird so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better. The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical conundrums quantum mechanics brings up.
*/

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now evolution kicks in. What if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photosynthesis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was, and so on, until you us.

The origin of life and the odds of it happening are still not entirely known. The building block are contained in comets, but at attempts to artificially trigger life have never succeeded, although amino acids have been artificially produced. Some people have suggested that a lightning strike is the probable trigger, and inconclusive evidence has been produced to support the idea.

To find out how common life/intelligent life is, we need to know:

What percentage of star systems are stable enough for life to form on one of it’s planets or moons?

Answer: Very few systems are as stable as ours (thanks to Jupiter being big enough to gravitationally attract asteroids and comets, but not big enough to disturb the other planets orbits. Also if Saturn had been bigger we would have been in trouble, because two Jupiter sized planet would create very unstable gravitational conditions). However, a system doesn’t have to be as stable as ours to support life.

What percentage of planets that can support life, actually do support life?

Answer: ?

What percentage of planets that support life are stable enough and are in systems that are stable enough for complex life to form?

Answer: Probably a relatively low number. We’re very lucky that Jupiter is here and isn’t too small or too big, and that Saturn isn’t any bigger. We’re also very lucky that Thea hit the Earth and created the moon out of some of the rubble to give us a stable axis.

In what percentage of life forms is being intelligent a major advantage?

Answer: As far as we know, 33.3r%. A mass extinction caused by a meteorite lead to the rise of the dinosaurs, who existed for a very long time whilst being really stupid and not getting any cleverer. Then another meteorite lead to the rise of mammals with opposable thumbs. Suddenly a creature could manipulate it’s environment in a way never before possible. Suddenly intelligence became a huge advantage, and there’s no stopping natural selection/survival of the fittest/evolution.

…Or God did it.

You could probably incorporate a lot to do with the red shift/blue shift theories too, when it comes to an ever-expanding universe, soon to "collapse" on itself.

I understood most of this correctly, good read man, thanks.

Very interesting. thx

I'm just curious now, what do you do for a living, are you a student? Or does your work concern all that stuff?

Very nice read, greatly appreciated and many thanks for your effort!

Please do not feel restricted to make only one single post like this one. I'd love to see more of them.

It wasn’t a lot of effort really because I just copied and pasted what I’d already said before and added a couple a bits. I should be a modder

I don’t work in this area or study it officially. In other words I study what I find interesting and take it in easily because I enjoy the subject. Scientists tend to be quite close minded and focus on one particular aspect, and get proved wrong a lot. They also seem to think in an overly analytical way which means they tend to not be very good at explaining things in plain English. I just wanted to write a basic description that someone with zero knowledge on the subject could understand. There’s a few things at least that I’m going to add.

Added some new stuff that people might be interested in. It's all in the last six paragraphs.

wal wrote:

Evolution is extremely simple. In a universe that’s 14 billion years old and currently 100s of billions (American billions) of light years across and getting so much bigger every second that it boggles the mind, it’s not a huge leap to think that somewhere by shear fluke something (amino acid) would interact with its surroundings in way that by pure chance would create something else that is nearly an exact copy of it. Now, if it’s an nearly an exact copy then it too has the capacity to absorb the matter of its surrounding to create a copy of itself. Now what if it creates 100 copies and 50 of those can utilise photos phthisis to extend their life spans. They will have more offspring than the others, meaning the next generation will be better at using their surroundings than the previous one was.

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Abiogenesis had become the thorn in the side of evolutionists. From Darwin (1800's) upto when the theory of evolution gained popularity (1950's), no one knew (or could have imagined) just how complicated the living cell is. No one knew that a single human DNA molecule held as much information as a one million page encyclopedia. A single living cell is as complicated as a General Motors manufacturing plant.

After decades of research, origins of life scientists are actually further from an explanation than closer. The more they learn, the more they understand how much they don't know.

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start. For example, highschool textbooks still have the famous "Miller-Urey Experiment" which has proven to be junk science at best.

I'm not even preaching "Intelligent Design" here. I'm simply pointing out what origins of life scientists have concluded themselves- abiogenesis is immensely more complicated than originally assumed.

I'll show just how complicated later...

pbmax wrote:

You need to do a little more research in this area. Evolution is not extremely simple, its just the opposite.

Evolution is extremely simple. Biogenesis isn't. But it's a big universe with a lot of time for things to happen.

Soon there'll be a new telescope in orbit with the ability to detect Earth sized planets. If the atmosphere of a planet has a lot has a lot of oxygen then we'll know that photosynthesis and therefore life is present. It could be as common as stars.

Black holes were originally thought to be so unlikely, that they probably never happen. Now we know that there are about 100 million just in our galaxy, and one of them (the one in the middle) is very, very big. Just because something is hard to understand, doesn't mean it's uncommon.

The notion that evolution explains the origin of life is a huge misconception. It explains how the first life form beget everything else, but it does nothing to explain how that first life form came about.

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

I think the crux of the issue is not that evolution is a theory or that the textbooks are outdated. Rather it's a general concern that children might interpret evolution as "the origin of life", like you did, and therefore conclude that it's proof that their is no God or more accurately no God the likes of that depicted in whatever flavor of religion you happen to subscribe to.

As far as scientific understanding is concerned, there's a wealth of things we don't know that should prove far simpler to understand than the origins of life.

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms? Or a treatment for cancer that doesn't involve injecting poison into the body?

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas. I don't imagine we're up for the task of answering big questions like "Where did we come from?" in any meaningful way. It's like trying to shoot a target painted on the moon with a bow and arrow. It's a lot easier if your on the moon.

That said, real scientists are aiming for targets they can hit because they're aware of how complex the universe is. In fact, accounting for that complexity by verifying every new theory and discovery against everything else before it's committed to textbooks and accepted as general knowledge is what makes science credible.

I haven't been to school in quite some time so I haven't had the luxury of reviewing science textbooks to see what's being taught now days but I doubt biogenesis is covered.

pbmax wrote:

Its a huge problem that has yet to make an impact in the general population with a layman's knowledge due to the fact that evolution has had a big head start.

You can’t claim that evolution is flawed because we don’t know how biogenesis happens yet. Nothing in your post remotely suggests anything about the concept of evolution. I remember you saying in another topic that some things that are considered facts, aren’t remotely true. I suggest you do some open minded research to find out exactly why those things are considered remotely true. Than compare that evidence with the lack of evidence for God or any religion. Like Rich said, evolution makes no attempt to explain the origins of life, just what happened after the formation of life. It’s the same as the fact that the big bang is not a theory about how the universe came to be. It’s what happened just after the start of the universe. Evolution does explain exactly how a single celled organism gave rise to all the life we see today. It’s just that an individual who has some kind of advantage, will on average have more offspring than an individual without an advantage. This makes every generation better than the last, because those advantages are passed down to their offspring. Like I said, simple.

rich_is_bored wrote:

It's that lack of understanding that drives people to oppose teaching evolution in schools, which if you think about it is ironic because had these people paid attention in school themselves they probably wouldn't be opposed to it. The fact that they are is a testament to how the concept escaped them and furthermore how silly it is to think their children will be any different.

Totally

rich_is_bored wrote:

Look at medicine. Where are the drugs that treat the root cause of a problem instead of the symptoms?

That’s called genetic manipulation

rich_is_bored wrote:

Or how about space exploration? Why haven't we found a way to escape Earth's gravity without the need for huge rockets or external fuel tanks? Isn't gravity supposed to be the weakest force?

Gravity may be the weakest force by a long, long way, but there can be a lot of it and it has a huge range, unlike the nuclear forces. Remember, when you try to leave Earths orbit, you have to first overpower the gravitational attraction of all the mass on the planet. Think how much everything on the surface weighs, than remember that it’s solid, so times that by a huge number. It’s a miracle we’re not squished. Black holes are all the same size; infinitely small. The area of effect is just the gravitational waves created by the singularity, determined by its mass. This helps explain the fact that although something can be by our standards non-existent (the universe before the big bang), a singularity can have vastly different values (as low as a mini black hole or as high as the universe). That’s how the universe can arise from “nothing”. Hmm, I’m going to add this bit to the original post when I can be bothered. If you take this idea logically forward it does seem to lead itself to the closed/bouncing universe scenario. What determines the mass of a singularity? The mass of the object that collapsed! The official mass of the universe is extremely close to making it closed, and may have been slightly miscalculated. Maybe Hawking got it wrong when he said that the universe couldn’t bounce, and maybe a universe has to be marginally over the closed threshold because at that point it can’t create more matter because it’s run out of energy to do it at exactly like moment, because it’s the same matter that collapsed to give it that energy in the first place. STOP RANTING!

rich_is_bored wrote:

For a civilization as advanced as we let on, we seem to fall short in quite a few areas.

Inventing the wheel was astounding. There isn’t a word for what we’ve done.

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

The basic version of it is quite easy to understand: The fundamental uncertainty in measuring the position and momentum/velocity of a particle are inversely proportional. So if you measured exactly how fast a particle is going, you'd have no idea where it was. This isn't just an uncertainty of the experimental apparatus that you might be able to get around with a bigger budget and more time for instance, it's the inherent uncertainty in nature itself. This is an incredibly cool idea and completely turned on it's head the physics community's hidden assumption ever since Newton came up with classical mechanics that the universe is completely deterministic. Mind you, there are still a few physicists out there (like Gerard t'Hooft) that still think the universe should be completely deterministic and try to come up with theories that are. Btw there is proper experimental evidence that the universe is inherently fuzzy and doesn't contain 'hidden variables' (ie you may think maybe if you completely measure the velocity of a particle it really is in one particular position and for some reason the laws of nature prevent us from seeing this and it looks fuzzy to us). If anyone's interested look up Bell's inequality

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

If anyone wants what are kinda considered the gold standard in teaching physics, look up the Feynman Lectures. They were done in the 1960's and the audience were 1st year uni students but they're still very good (apparently, I've only listened to a couple myself

).

idiom wrote:

Particle physics and stuff like the uncertainty principal are not silly. They're incredibly interesting and mind stretching things. The uncertainty principle is a core part of basic quantum theory, which I might add has been verified in countless experiments. So it really is a very good description of how nature works.

I know, I was just being petulant because I find it so much harder to grasp the concepts of the very small compared to the completely intuitive laws of the very large. I wasn’t going to go into this but I’ve never understood how the Heisenberg principle means that the universe has a random element. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it, because enough people who are better educated then me swear by it. I just don’t see where the huge leap came from that just because we can’t measure the exact velocity and position of a particle at the same time, somehow it doesn’t have an exact velocity and position. Is it something to do with Schrodingers cat? Could you explain that please?

idiom wrote:

And you know there's a reason why scientists are often very 'analytical' as you say. Their whole careers are spent trying to understand nature which is often very subtle and doesn't necessarily make common sense. So they have to be as rigorous as possible. They're constantly asking themselves what is really happening, not just make an analogy that sounds similar to what's happening and make it easier to understand to lay people. You cannot make concrete predictions on analogies. So making analogies often goes against a scientist's core instincts.

Absolutely. It’s not a bad thing. If they weren’t like that, the rest of us wouldn’t have anywhere near the understanding we have now. They have to be like that to get answers. I just think that a lot (not all) of scientists aren’t very articulate when trying to explain things to people who don’t understand what it’s based on.

Back to what I was saying before: If you think about it, the closed/bouncing universe does make more sense. It would mean the three spatial dimensions would be spherical and so would time. If you were to travel far enough in any direction of space or time, you would end up where/when you started. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you move away from a point in space or time, you move an equal distance towards it in the opposite direction.

Maybe they made a mistake when they calculated the movement of galaxies. The further away an object is, the faster it’s moving away from us. The further away you look, the further back in time you are seeing. So if galaxies that are further away are moving away faster than the closer ones, then the further back in time you look, the faster they’re moving, meaning the expansion is slowing down not speeding up. I hope they remembered to take this into account. It would be hilarious if they didn’t.

Edit: I’ve just done some calculations and we’re fucked. The universe is about to implode. RUN!

The uncertainty principal is really just a consequence of the axioms of quantum mechanics, where the fuzziness really lies

One of the most famous experiments that really highlight quantum mechanics and why we need it is the double slit experiment. Say you shine some light on two very fine slits, because light can be thought of as a wave, the light diffracts around the slits and creates a diffraction pattern, much like waves on a beach will bend around corners and stuff. Now scientists also tried this experiment with a beam of electrons and to their great surprise the electron beam, which was thought to be made out of particles also created a diffraction pattern. This was really wierd so the scientists turned the electron beam down so only 1 electron would pass through the double slits every second or something so the electrons couldn't influence eachother. They still got a diffraction pattern, which meant the electron was somehow diffracting with 'itself' which meant it was somehow going through both slits at the same time. Now the diffraction pattern looked a bit different from the ones you get from sounds waves for instance because when the electrons hit the wall after the slits they were detected as single particles. It's the buildup of lots of the electrons that showed the diffraction pattern, which suggested the electrons had some sort of 'probability wave' that gets diffracted. It's hard to really explain in words, pictures are a lot better

The scientists also discovered if they put a detector on one of the slits so they could tell which slit the electron went through they stopped getting a diffraction pattern and the electron beam acted like a normal beam of particles. So this basically meant the actual measurement of the electrons somehow influenced whether they'd look like a wave or a particle.

This basically lead to Schrodinger's wave formulation of quantum mechanics where subatomic particles can be thought of as wave functions which describe the probability of measuring that particle in different points in space. So instead of a particle being in a definite place, it's in a 'superposition' of places at any one time. If you measure where a particle is, it's wave function will 'collapse' to become a smaller one. Schrodinger's Cat is a little thought experiment by the physicist so expand upon this premise by imagining a Cat being in a superposition of several states, some being alive and some being dead. The problem with this thought experiment is that it wouldn't work, the box and air molecules themselves would interact with the molecules of the cat and 'measure' what is happening so the cat's wave function would collapse. But it is a good way of illustrating the philosophical condundrums quantum mechanics brings up.

And you're right about some scientists not being very good at explaining things. I've had some aweful lecturers in the past

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

G’day m8

I’ve heard that two slit experiment before, but never described that well, cheers. I still don’t really get it, but no one does. If you think you understand quantum mechanics, then you don’t understand quantum mechanics, as someone who I can’t remember said. Is the uncertainty principle a product of our inability to comprehend the universe properly, or an actual property of the universe itself? From what you said, I take it that basically; light is in wave form until it comes into contact with something, then it becomes an electron? Wouldn’t that imply that the electrons react with space-time to create a wave that carries them, making the wave and the particle separate entities? I can’t stop thinking in general relativity terms

I agree with Einstein. The universe does not play dice. The uncertainty principle must be to do with the measurements themselves. To measure an object, you have to interact with it in some way, thereby influencing the object itself and obscuring the measurement. I still don’t see how it means something can be in two places at once. My brain hurts, I need a smoke.

idiom wrote:

Btw, about the closed universe thing, it might not even be spherical. I've read about cosmologists working on models where the universe has wierd shapes like dodecahedrons

Really? Obviously it wouldn't be completely spherical, because it's curved by mass. The more massive, the greater the angle of the curve, but I've never heard the dodecahedron version

I’ve added quite a bit including some very important things about the nature of gravity that I forgot to mention. It stars from the; If the Hawking equations are correct…paragraph onwards. I’m quite pleased with it now

Light doesn't become electrons, I was just saying you can do the same experiment with light beams or electron beams and you get the same qualitative results. As in they both diffract like waves but both can also be thought of as particles. Single photons can be detected (with say photomultipliers) and experiments on the photoelectric effect for instance show the particle nature of electrons. How can something be a wave and a particle at the same time? Think of it as being a discrete packet of a wave. Although really, this is only a model of quantum mechanics, there are also other mathematical formulations that give the same results such as Heisenberg's matrix formulation and (I think Feynman's) path integral formulation. They all however have the same property of have 'superpositions of states'.

The uncertainty principle as far as we know is a product of the universe itself.

You're right that to measure an object you have to interact with it and it does disturb the system. I just did a quick wiki search. Maybe you'll be interested in this. Bell's inequality and the EPR paradox are good experiments that have been done to give strong evidence in favour of the things really being in a superposition of states. To show the universe really is completely deterministic you'll have to come up with a theory that gets around those results.

I meant photons, not electrons :roll:

Thanks for the links and for trying to explain. I still don't get how scientists can say with any certainty that nothing is certain and the universe is random though.

To truly understand requires properly learning quantum mechanics sorry

I’ve been reading bits and pieces on it, and there are some weird and very interesting things in it. Like how two electrons (yes electrons this time) can occupy the same space at the same time as long as they have different polarisations. Or how a an electron can be released from a system before it’s arrived, which some have taken to mean it travels back in time. Positrons actually move properly back through time until they hit an electron and release a photon :shock:

Also electrons have to be certain distance from the nucleus, and if there’s no room then one will take a looser orbit, making it easier to remove. These materials are called metals, and that’s why they conduct electricity.

Although the uncertainty principle might be proven wrong soon. Or at least redefined. If the hadron collider at CERN is powerful enough to create mini black holes then that will be good evidence for extra dimensions, as in string theory, which is a deterministic theory. It says that the hidden variables are coming from the extra dimensions. So of course this could be a closed, bouncing, deterministic, eleven dimensional universe :wink:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

idiom wrote:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

I don't have a deep understanding of string theory, I just know the basics. If you keep breaking things down into what they're made of, eventually there will come a point when you can't go any further. At this point everything is made up of tiny strands, or strings of energy. Some are loose, some cross over and others are loops. I think this determines if they are matter energy of space-time. They're like strings on a violin in that they can resonate, and the pitch determines the element for example. Higher pitch = light element/lower pitch = heavier element I think. It's deterministic because the strings would react with each other, not randomly. But you would have to be able to measure velocities and positions in all dimensions simultaneously. It is a beautiful explanation of the universe, and it does make sense, mathematically I mean. Not that I understand the equations but people seem to think that it works.

I think it is rational theory,everything has its own structure.

wal wrote:

idiom wrote:

Where did you hear that String Theory is deterministic? I don't know much about it myself.

I don't have a deep understanding of string theory, I just know the basics. If you keep breaking things down into what they're made of, eventually there will come a point when you can't go any further. At this point everything is made up of tiny strands, or strings of energy.

I thought one of the rules of quantum physics is that it's impossible to determine the exact location of something, and know it's relative velocity at the same time. Does this apply to string theory as well?

The only problem that I see is that the theory keeps getting revised (which is good - the more revised to make more sense the better), but it is still only a theory. Strings are so small there literally isn't any way of seeing them, in order to prove their existence.

Phobos wrote:

I thought one of the rules of quantum physics is that it's impossible to determine the exact location of something, and know it's relative velocity at the same time. Does this apply to string theory as well?

That's what we're getting at. One of the principles of string theory is that the uncertainty principle arises because we have a four dimension view of something that exists partially outside of our perception, so we therefore can't know exactly what it's doing on a very small scale.

Phobos wrote:

The only problem that I see is that the theory keeps getting revised (which is good - the more revised to make more sense the better), but it is still only a theory. Strings are so small there literally isn't any way of seeing them, in order to prove their existence.

Yea it's just a theory, which is why I didn't go into it much in my original post, I wanted it to be factual. Having said that, there are people who dedicate their whole professional lives to it. Their are actually people with the job title; String Theorist. I'm sure that they believe that it's just a matter of time before it's widely accepted. Your right that there's been a few versions. String theory, M theory, Super string theory, but the fact that it just wont go away is probably a sign that the principle is right. If something works that well then it's probably true. When the general theory of relativity came out, no one, including Einstein believed in it completely, because it predicted some really stupid things, like a universe that's not static and space that can fold back into itself, or areas of space where time completely stops. Obviously the theory was at least slightly wrong

Strings don't have to be seen for us to know they're there. They could be observed indirectly in the future.

I can't sleep so I thought I'd rant for a bit. If Hostile's aloud to keep resurrecting his thread then so am I!

When matter falls into a black hole, the mass of the black hole is reduced! Here's why.

Gravity shortens distances. A singularity is a point in space-time where all distances are zero. That includes time. A singularity is necessarily infinitely unstable due the fact that it can't exist for any length of time. The further away in space from the singularity, the more time passes. Matter falling into a black hole moves through space-time until it's at the exact point in space and time that the black hole formed. It's then released as gamma ray bursts.

When mass enters, it reduces the mass of the black hole until the overall balance of stuff that came out originally matches the value of the stuff that's gone back in. You don't get something for nothing. The information is preserved in its simplest form. The value remains and everything else is lost.

If everything within an environment is reversed then everything stays exactly the same unless viewed from an external frame of reference because the only variables possible in any situation are relative to everything else. From our perspective gravity curves inwards at relatively short distances and curves outward at long distances. As the distance increases, the effect of gravity is spread over a wider volume. The action/reaction of this is that the inverse pull (push from our perspective) increases. As it curves one way, it curves an equal value the other. The big rip is the big bang viewed from the other side. A diffuse amount of matter and energy in a huge amount of space is exactly the same as concentrated matter and energy in an infinitely small amount of space. Bang!

Our arrow of time comes from the fact that we remember the past and not the future. There isn't a moving time line. If you think that the sense of being in the present is a property of time, it's not. We have that in every moment of our lives. It's always now. In reality, everything exists at once. Nothing's happened and nothing will happen because everything is happening now. From our perspective, mass uses and slows down the expansion. A relativity slower expansion makes things gravitate towards that point. A black hole is so massive that it contracts the universe over a certain amount of space-time, making it possible to move back through time to the point when it formed.

Did that make sense? This is all my prediction btw.

I'm a pessimist. The universe will implode and turn into a giant disco ball. See, I've come to realize that, regardless of what we think or know about the world or universe, it doesn't matter. Religion is a clogged toilet, science is a book without pictures, aliens are out there, etc. There's a reason why religious people never talk about dinosaurs (because their versions of the Bible and how life was started on Earth are so mixed up that you could take a large, behemoth crap and they'd find it Holy and Righteous, with a cherry on top, and apple sauce), or why scientists never bring up the fact that we've been created by giant Native Americans. They never think outside the bun, see? I'll do some basic math for you.

At McDonald's, Cheeseburgers have six grams of saturated fat, while at Taco Bell, Cinnamon Twists have zero. Zero. 0. Zero grams of saturated fat - Zero plus six is six. Six plus six is sixty six. Sixty six plus six is... Agh! The number of the beast! Do you see the pattern? God is out there hanging out with his atheist friends and scientologists, in his own galaxy, playing Pong and other stupidass old games that get too much credit for things they didn't achieve while we, "Humans", are trapped in a prison until we either kill ourselves, kill eachother, or die of "natural causes". What are "natural" causes? What is "Natural"? When a deer gets shot by a human, that's unnatural. When a deer gets obliter-JesusChrist-ated into a cataclysmic orgasm of blood, bone splinters, and burnt meat by a falling satalite, that isn't unnatural, you know? That's nature! That's the way it's meant to be.

Humans, you see (I can't see, I need glasses), are fools.
When we look up at the sky and into the universe and onto the fat, white butt cheeks that people call the "Moon", we never really grasp the fact that we're useless and inferior. There are probably aliens out there that can breathe fire, shoot lasers, drop atomic bombs, build railroad tracks, demolish skyscrapers, spawn vortexes, and manufacture lava lamps just by biting a toe-nail (assuming, of course, that, since humans feel that they're sooo superior and that everything is like them, they have toe-nails). Aliens are out there, but we won't grasp that. Scientists are too caught up with the Big Bang theory or curing cancer. The Big Bang is simple - Boom. Oh, and the cure for cancer is also simple - Death. That's the destiny of man, anyway. Postponing it isn't going to make things any better, since most people who'd be cured of cancer will never achieve anything. Mostly because movie stars are, apparently, the only important thing in the world. Afterall, acting is unbelievably difficult. Musicians, artists, crafters - They're the footman soldiers while actors are the knights. Flamethrowers versus piles of dry, dead leaves, twigs, and grass. Somebody shoot me, I can't stress this enough.

The universe, people, is amazing. It's big, and that's it. The reason nobody is excited is because, no matter how much you dream of it, you won't get to explore it. Is it envy or jealousy? No! It's boredom. It's a big black space and a bunch of stars and galaxies and nebulae and old, forgotten pornography magazines that God left sitting around. Once you grasp the entirety of the universe, it's nothing but a joke. Build a house and fancy how proud you are of it and live in it for a little while. That feeling of excitement and pride dies out, and that's why God, Jesus, Moses, and the A-team, and Spongebob all left to another planet. You know what that "planet" was? Pluto. Stupid scientists.

I'm an optimist. I've come to the conclusion that you are my nemesis. You clearly smoke at least as much as I do but you seem to be a glass is half full kind of person. "It's half way there so that's good enough", whereas if you were a glass is half empty kind of a person you would say "there's as much space in there as liquid, this could be so much better". When I look up at the sky I pretty much think the same as you do. It's mostly just space. I've never even looked though a telescope. It's when I imagine the stuff that I know's out there that it becomes beautiful.

I should clarify a few facts because that post was not really for the layman. Gamma ray bursts always proceed the birth of a new black hole. That's fact. Scientists don't know what happens to the information that falls into a black hole. Mass slows down time and time completely stops at a singularity. That's also fact. So it's pretty fucking obvious that as you move towards the singularity, you are moving back through space-time to the point at which no time has passed since the black holes formation. You're then passed through the eye of a needle and broken down into the simplest form of matter/energy, which just happens to be gamma rays. No-one has put two and two together. Scientists are idiots. Too much education. They've had there imaginations beaten out of them.

I should really get some sleep. You would not believe the week I've had :evil:

Oh and this is probably the best talk anyone will ever see. http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

That's actually a great topic and though I wouldn't want to turn this into a science fiction topic here is a quote I want to throw in :

Quote:

A short survey about the possibility of extraterrestrial life. This survey deals with potential intelligent life. That exludes primitive microbial life forms which may well be discovered within our own solar system.

The Probability of Civilizations in the Universe
From the Atlas of the Universe we can see that our visible universe - which spans over 14 billion light years - contains an estimated 30 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 stars, or 30 billion trillion stars. Within that astronomical number of stars it seems mathematically inconceivable that there wouldn't be many other civilizations somewhere.
( For details see An Atlas to the Universe )

However, it is also obvious that we will never be able to communicate over such an enormous length of time, and any intelligent signals over such an immense space would diminish practically to zero before reaching us - for it would be swallowed up by millions of intervening galaxies.

Our own galaxy - the Milky Way - contains 200 billion stars, but it is still to large for effective communications, because its size - 90 000 light years - would require 180 000 years for a two way communication.

\

The Probability of finding other Civilizations
For practical reasons we have to confine our search for other civilizations to our immediate neighborhood. If we reduce our search to an area of 12,5 light years the number of stars shrinks dramatically to about 33 stars, out of which most are red dwarfs. That leaves about 6-7 normal stars. It would be highly unlikely to find intelligent life within such a small number.

A 50 light years large neighborhood contains about 2000 stars, with 80% red dwarfs - still a relatively small number.

The mathematical probability of finding alien life improves if we extend our search over 250 light years radius, within which we find an estimated 260 000 stars. Should we ever receive any intelligent signal it would most likely come from this small part of the Orion arm which constitutes part of the Milky Way.

However, we have to keep in mind that at this distance communications would be mostly a one way street. Because if we receive a signal from 250 light years away it would require another 250 years to answer and a return answer would not come back before 500 years!

Further obstacles to find other civilizations

A further complication can be demonstrated by the following consideration - let's call it the eggshell theory.

The thickness of an expanding eggshell in this theory would represent the space-timespan within which a scientific civilization would be able to broadcast its signals to other worlds before its own civilization expired.

Let's assume some distant planet had developed an advanced scientific civilization. It would be extremely unlikely that such a civilzation would have developed exactly at the same time as our own here on earth. It could have occured - let's say - two million years ago. ( If we take into account that the formation of our own solar sytem occured around 5,000 million years ago a 2 million year difference would be miniscule ).

Let's further assume that the lifespan of a scientific civilization would be 100 000 years - a very generous assumption. We only have to look at the fragile state of human affairs here on earth. Is it very likely that mankind will survive for more than a few thousand years after the onset of the nuclear age? ( If we consider the risks of nuclear war, the long term effects of global warming and a myriad of other problems it seems problematic that our scientific civilization will survive for more than 100 000 years).

That would not neccessarily be different on an another planet. If such an alien civilization had broadcast its existence for all of 100 000 years, but starting two million years ago, the timespan - or the thickness of the eggshell - would have radiated out from the originating planet at the speed of light. It would mean this electronic wave (the eggshell) would have hit our earth two million years ago but it would have lasted for only 100 000 years. So we would have missed it since at that time only primitive hominids roamed the African continent, barely having invented primitive stone tools.

Similarly, our own electronic projection - starting less than one hundred years ago - would hit another planet millions of years after its civilization had expired, or alternatively, long before it evolved. In that case no communication would be possible because we would attempt to communicate with each other millions of years apart. The probability that an expanding eggshell from one civilization would intersect another civilzation exactly at the right time when the receiving civilization would be able to detect such signals would certainly be 'astronomically' small, that is, almost non-existent.

On the other hand, if we assume a much more optimistic estimate - let's say a potential civilization would have evolved - 'progressed' - over several million years, then another possibility arises. The late Dr. Carl Sagan pointed out that such an extremely advanced civilization might have no interest whatsoever in our primitive human species. The gap would be too immense and such aliens would conceivably look at us, as we look at lower forms of life, such as insects for example. Or they might just ignore us as so underdeveloped that communication with us would be a waste of their time.

A more optimistic scenario

It has to be conceded that if the "Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (SETI) should find any intelligent signal in the future the above theories would have to be revised!
For more optimistic persons see Setiathome. Setiathome is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Anyone can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

Should we detect any intelligent signals from outer space that certainly would be very exiting because it would expand our understanding of alien life forms enormously.
However, the fact remains that communication would - for all practical reasons - still be a one way street because our answer would not receive a response from a potential alien world for several hundred years !

I personally believe that if our civilization ever establishes contact with another one it will be in a rather "technically evolutionized form". Meaning that our synthethic lifeforms being a result of the technical evolution on earth (robots,cyborgs,androids,drones,probes and whatever science will come up with) will meet their alien counterpart. So more or less artificial life will meet artificial life as they are the only "lifeform" having the capacity to travel and "live" long enough withstanding physical conditions such as high temperature differences, gravitiy fields and radiation to overcome those huge distances. I believe it would be amazingly interesting to witness such a meeting since I can imagine every artificial lifeform being equipped with a giant digital encyclopedia having filed and archived the entire history of the life on their own planets. I know that this might not sound as exciting as "real" biological aliens trying to contact as (in peace or at war) but for me it is by far the most logical one. Maybe you think different

I've been gone for a bit due to real life being nothing but a real pain in the arse lately, to put it nicely. That and I haven't got easy access to a pc at the moment.

I agree that two way comunication doesn't seem very likely due to the universes built in speed limit. It takes over a second just to get to the bloody moon! Still, a confirmed signal would be huge. If it can happen twice in one galaxy then it's everywhere. Unless there's somthing special about the Milky-way which doesn't seem plausable.

There are a few scientists who think that a kind of gateway anywhere could be possible if the fabric of space-time were pulled apart. Me thinks they've got more qualifications than knowlage. Seems to happen a lot.

Others think that Einstein's worm hole equations from general reletivity could do the trick, despite the fact that they would be hugly unstable and have quite a strong gravitational tide. There's actaully a funny quirk in general reletivity that allows proper backward time travel if wormholes are real. I might go into it when I edit the original post again. I'll cut a few thigs as well so it doesn't drag on. I just want to cut through all the bullshit and say in plain English how and way things work the way they do.