Tag Info

6

Let me present a slightly different perspective to Luboš, though I'm saying basically the same thing. From our current location we can define an area of space called the future light cone. This is the region of spacetime that is connected to us by motion at less than or equal to the speed of light. If we draw a spacetime diagram then the lightcone looks ...

5

As for the straight line, yes. All objects will continue moving along geodesics (a straight line in curved-space but sometimes a curved line in straight-space) if there are no external forces acting on them. Unless, by different velocity you mean the direction is not entirely radial to us. In that case, the expansion will cause the object's path to appear to ...

5

The acceleration of the expansion is currently observed to be happening. This observation is one of the pieces of data we use to infer the amount of dark matter. It tells us that there can't be more than a certain amount of dark matter, because that would be incompatible with the observed acceleration.

4

The short answer is yes, the presence of dark matter would act to counter the expansion of the universe. And in fact it does--but not enough to stop the expansion. Dark matter has gravity just like normal matter. In fact, that's pretty much the only reason we know dark mater exists at all: we can observe dark matter's gravitation effects in the rotation ...

4

I am aware that my answer can sound surprising, too simple to be true, but please take a deep breath before downvoting.The answer has little to do with relativity. In SR it is the moving object that gets shorter , but space is stable. In such a universe, even if a body is receding at 2,3,30 c, its light will reach us sometime, and the time is short as it ...

4

The answer is yes. The de Broglie wavelengths of freely propagating particles (i.e. forget the influence of interactions and gravity perturbations, just consider the Universe as a whole) are redshifted by the expansion of the universe. Another way of saying this is that their peculiar momenta with respect to a co-moving local volume decrease as the inverse ...

3

The relative speed between two objects is only restricted within the special theory of relativity. These restrictions are only guaranteed to apply in general relativity – the theory of curved space that you need for the Big Bang theory – if the space surrounding the objects is the flat Minkowski spacetime, or at least can be approximated by the flat ...

3

Simulation implies an author, so this is another attempt at trying to find a creator for the universe, imo. Thus it is metaphysics and not relevant to the subject of physics. Physics as a discipline starts from observations and fits them with mathematical models that have predictive power, having accepted axioms and postulates. The mathematical forms are ...

3

The ball, in fact, is always accelerating downward, even though it is moving up for the first part of its trip. A ball that kept accelerating upward would just fly up out of the atmosphere.

3

The great simulator idea is piffle, see See http://www.daviddeutsch.org.uk/wp-content/ItFromQubit.pdf. A brief summary of the problem. A set S of computational gates is universal if by composing gates in the set S you can do any computation allowed by the laws of physics. Both the classical and quantum theories of computation say that there are many ...

2

The article you quote is about metaphysics: The idea that we might be living in an artificial reality constructed by something higher than ourselves has been a recurring philosophical hypothesis for centuries. Plato's Allegory of the Cave, and cannot really be discussed in a physics framework because it is searching for a Creator. It never ceases to ...

2

The current entropy in the Universe is all stored in photons. The first reference by Qmechanic gives you the precise value. Since the photons of the CMBR do not at present interact with anything, the entropy of the Universe is very close to being a constant. What evolution there is, is all due to non-reversible processes in baryonic matter, but it amounts to ...

2

As Count Iblis pointed out, The Church–Turing–Deutsch principle makes this impossible to decide using the structure of the laws of physics as it will always be compatible with the universe being simulated by a quantum computer. Nevertheless, in this well-known paper the author argues that if we accept some very reasonable assumptions, then is is almost ...

2

I am on record of having the opinion that there is no real argument against us being a simulation in a general sense, however we frequently find people jumping to quick into the simulation pool and stating there new what-ever-it-is proves the universe is a simulation. The example given above sounds like one of them. First off, Quantum Error Correcting Code ...

2

The argument is sound given a few oft-omitted (but not too unreasonable) assumptions. Here is one way it can be formulated. Consider a volume $V$. Suppose it has a (possibly infinite) set of possible configurations; call this set of states $S$. Suppose we are interested in a particular configuration, $c \in S$, to within a certain tolerance. Let $C ... 1 I am sorry to say that I can not agree with previous answers. We believe, but do not know for sure, that light from some galaxies will never reach us. This has nothing to do with the fact that they are moving away from us at more than the speed of light. Rather, it is assumed that these galaxies, like us, are not moving relative to the special frame in ... 1 It's certainly possible, though on current evidence it looks unlikely. The past bound isn't really a bound in the usual sense of the word, but instead it's a singularity. If we solve Einstein's equations for the universe with a few apparently plausible assumptions we find that the universe is described by a scale factor, normally written as$a(t)\$, and as ...

1

Well, i would say no. Why? Because an absolute center of mass would require a uniform covering (coordinate system) over the whole manifold, which, even if it exists, will probably not be on the manifold itself. An analogy would be the center of mass of a spherical surface/manifold. It would be exactly on the center of the sphere (i.e not on the sphere ...

1

If we assume our universe as an isolated system, then its entropy can only increase. It cannot decrease because of the second law of thermodynamics. It cannot stay unchanged because the universe is undergoing all kinds of irreversible processes.

1

The argument rests on the assumed validity of Ergodic theory (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_theory). Quoting it "A central concern of ergodic theory is the behavior of a dynamical system when it is allowed to run for a long time. The first result in this direction is the Poincaré recurrence theorem, which claims that almost all points in any ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible