Is the Universe a quantum fluctuation?

NiftyNiblick said:
"Universe" technically means everything that exists. How can there be space beyond it?
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I get the sense the universe is finite.

If space has positive curvature, everything just wraps back on itself, and if you set off in one direction, trillions of years later you would end up back where you started.

If the universe were infinite and filled with infinitely many stars, the night sky would be as bright as the surface of the sun, because at every line of sight we looked at, an infinite number of stars would regress along that line of sight
 
Cypress said:
I get the sense the universe is finite.

If space has positive curvature, everything just wraps back on itself, and if you set off in one direction, trillions of years later you would end up back where you started.

If the universe were infinite and filled with infinitely many stars, the night sky would be as bright as the surface of the sun, because at every line of sight we looked at, an infinite number of stars would regress along that line of sight
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Good point, perhaps, but I can't personally envision anything without something beyond it, even if it's just empty space.
That doesn't mean that some different configuration of realty doesn't exist, of course.
I just can't imagine it, because in my actual experience, everything has always had something on the other side of it.
 
Cypress said:
Most of the good universities are in the blue states probably for a reason.

It's more a philosophical question than a scientific one: are the physical laws eternal, if so why, if not why do they exist and how did they get created?
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Sadly, it seems the Red States are moving away from public education as part of the Class Wars.

Space-Time began with the Big Bang. It seems these laws were set at or shortly after that event. While other Universes exist, it'd be difficult to calculate how they could create life without certain laws such as gravity. If nothing stuck together, it would be a whole lot of hydrogen and nothing else.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Sadly, it seems the Red States are moving away from public education as part of the Class Wars.

Space-Time began with the Big Bang. It seems these laws were set at or shortly after that event. While other Universes exist, it'd be difficult to calculate how they could create life without certain laws such as gravity. If nothing stuck together, it would be a whole lot of hydrogen and nothing else.
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Tryon and string theory are trying to disprove the big bang and spacetime. Everything is determined by who gets the funding.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Sadly, it seems the Red States are moving away from public education as part of the Class Wars.

Space-Time began with the Big Bang. It seems these laws were set at or shortly after that event. While other Universes exist, it'd be difficult to calculate how they could create life without certain laws such as gravity. If nothing stuck together, it would be a whole lot of hydrogen and nothing else.
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That's the 64 thousand dollar question, why were they set, how did it happen, and why do they seem so finely tuned?
 
Cypress said:
That's the 64 thousand dollar question, why were they set, how did it happen, and why do they seem so finely tuned?
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unknown on the first two and, at this level, unlikely to be answered. As to tuning, if they weren't tuned, we wouldn't be here wondering about it. The only reason we exist is because the laws of the natural universe allow for it.
 
Before the invention of the telescope, what empirical evidence did Copernicus have for a heliocentric system? History and philosophy are very important to physics.
 
NiftyNiblick said:
Good point, perhaps, but I can't personally envision anything without something beyond it, even if it's just empty space.
That doesn't mean that some different configuration of realty doesn't exist, of course.
I just can't imagine it, because in my actual experience, everything has always had something on the other side of it.
Click to expand...

The human brain is not evolved enough to actually visualize three dimensional curved spacetime. Nobody can. You might as well ask a dog to learn the quadratic formula. We can only describe it mathematically.
 
Cypress said:
Most of the good universities are in the blue states probably for a reason.

It's more a philosophical question than a scientific one: are the physical laws eternal, if so why, if not why do they exist and how did they get created?
Click to expand...

The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle falls out of the mathematics of waves and fourier transforms. What do you mean by "eternal laws" or how they were created? Is there anything particularly philosophical about 2+2=4? Does it require some special feature of the eternal universe or is it effectively tautological?
 
goat said:
Before the invention of the telescope, what empirical evidence did Copernicus have for a heliocentric system? History and philosophy are very important to physics.
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Even without much of a telescope the planets were tracked. The Ptolemaic system was hyper-complex with epicycles etc to account for the movement of planets in the night sky. Copernicus' system greatly simplified the system.
 
Quincunx said:
Even without much of a telescope the planets were tracked. The Ptolemaic system was hyper-complex with epicycles etc to account for the movement of planets in the night sky. Copernicus' system greatly simplified the system.
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The Mayans had nothing to aid their naked eye and made their calculations off of what they could see moving around in the sky. I'm not sure that counts as empirical evidence yet their calendar proves the accuracy.
 
Quincunx said:
The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle falls out of the mathematics of waves and fourier transforms. What do you mean by "eternal laws" or how they were created? Is there anything particularly philosophical about 2+2=4? Does it require some special feature of the eternal universe or is it effectively tautological?
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2+2=4 is only a convention, a construct of the base 10 numeric system we have agreed to use. It's not an eternal truth.

2+2 is equal to 11 in the base 3 system.


A quantum flux that created the universe could seemingly only have happened if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was in place and preceded it. Which begs the question, why did the Heisenberg uncertainty principle exist before creation? You can't have quantum flux without the principle underlying it in place already. It just a chicken before the egg question
 
Cypress said:
2+2=4 is only a convention, a construct of the base 10 numeric system we have agreed to use. It's not an eternal truth.

2+2 is equal to 11 in the base 3 system.


A quantum flux that created the universe could seemingly only have happened if the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was in place and preceded it. Which begs the question, why did the Heisenberg uncertainty principle exist before creation? You can't have quantum flux without the principle underlying it in place already. It just a chicken before the egg question
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Agreed on human construction vs. "eternal truth". Oxygen has 8 protons, 8 neutrons and 8 electrons in our conventional counting system. It'd still the same number of parts regardless of any other numbering system. That's a universal truth.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Agreed on human construction vs. "eternal truth". Oxygen has 8 protons, 8 neutrons and 8 electrons in our conventional counting system. It'd still the same number of parts regardless of any other numbering system. That's a universal truth.
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It's an open philosophical question as to whether numbers are real, or a convention constructed by our minds.

I think mathmatical concepts like Pi and e are eternal truths, because they represent something fundamental about spatial relationships and rates of change that exist even if you changed their representation to Roman numerals, base 2 numeric symbols, etc.
 
Cypress said:
It's an open philosophical question as to whether numbers are real, or a convention constructed by our minds.

I think mathmatical concepts like Pi and e are eternal truths, because they represent something fundamental about spatial relationships and rates of change that exist even if you changed their representation to Roman numerals, base 2 numeric symbols, etc.
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Convention. While the reality of an oxygen atom is real, our ability to perceive it is a construction.

How do we tell the difference between reality and fantasy? Verification by others and the ability to replicate results.
 
Doc Dutch said:
Convention. While the reality of an oxygen atom is real, our ability to perceive it is a construction.

How do we tell the difference between reality and fantasy? Verification by others and the ability to replicate results.
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Is the same true for time?
 
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