Call it what you will. The real behavior is described by the math of general relativity. Human language is limited. Stretching is probably the better analogy though.
Is this supposed to dispute something I said? I didn't make an argument that stretching was a wrong word choice.
Didn't claim you did. I just made the point that it doesn't really matter anyway.
Everything that exists is by definition "natural". If ghosts were proven to exist scientist would study them and they would no longer be "supernatural", but just a part of our universe.
Strawman much. Whatever the Universe is expanding into or stretching from within has not been proven to exist through Scientific observation, so therefore it would be supernatural till otherwise.
I didn't intend to make a strawman. If you interpreted my reply like that then I need to be more clear on your position.
I thought you implied that scientists are silly because we dismiss "the supernatural" out of hand. I disagree with that. We simply study the world. Anything that seems to not exist but somehow still enjoy widespread belief would then be called supernatural or superstitious. A proper scientist would always be prepared to change his or her mind when faced with new evidence.
This fanfic gives, I think, a fairly realistic guess to how a good scientist would react when faced with the world of Harry Potter. And it is quite enjoyable too:
http://hpmor.com/"The universe" used to similarly be the word for "everything that is", but that is changing. Some scientist seriously consider the ideas of a "multiverse" where "our universe" is only a part of "all that exists". Anyway this is also just words. What exist is what exists.
What oven is the multiverse in?
What do you mean "oven"? The universe is not (as far as we know) in an oven. The universe is not a raising raisin bread, god analogy or bad analogy.
"What exists is what exists"...that's deep..but it doesn't explain anything does it.
It wasn't meant to be deep. It was intended to clear up this (i feel) strange dicotomy of "supernatural" and "natural". I already acknowledged that I must have misunderstood your position on this matter so I would be glad if you could explain to me what you meant by "Cause it's a problem for them to explain what the Universe is expanding into. Anything outside the Universe would be supernatural...and they don't believe in that silly concept."
Anyway, enough semantics for now, onto the actual science:
Space is just a part of the universe and there can come more of it without anything else diminishing. Just the same way as the world in a computer game can be made bigger without it expanding into the outside. (Note: I am not saying our world is a computer simulation, just that the same principle apply)
That goes against the laws of thermodynamics. The computer game is within a computer. The added information would require added memory to hold it.
Sure. For a computer in our universe. However *if* the universe happened to be a simulation there is absolutely no telling what the physical laws would be in that
real world that run it. Just as we could simulate a small universe that had no conservation of energy on a computer; our universe which has, could be simulated by something that hasn't.
Point is we cannot know what the laws governing the universe is from first principles. We have found that the universe appears to be following these laws of thermodynamics, we didn't know that before we looked. A lot of other things than energy appears to be conserved (amount in universe cannot be changed) for some reason: Charge, lepton number, baryon number, momentum, angular momentum. Some, like parity or proton number, has then been to be broken by the weak force. They are usually conserved, but the weak force can change them.
It feels intuitively obvious that space is conserved, that if things are going away from me then they have to be going
somwhere. But we cannot know that from first principles. We are evolved among a certain set of physical laws. Trouble is that on the very small scale (quantum mechanics) and the very large scale (general relativity) these laws behave differently, and therefore our intuition and common sense fail us. We therefore has to turn to the strict language of mathematics to try to overcome our biases and understand how it works.
An analogy is just that: an analogy. Analogies go some way to explaining a difficult concept, but eventually they break down. This particular one has been overused, misused and was not particularly good to begin with.
I'm not the one using the analogy as a means of validating it logically.
I am not sure what you mean by this.
An analogy is just that: an analogy. Analogies go some way to explaining a difficult concept, but eventually they break down. This particular one has been overused, misused and was not particularly good to begin with.
Great that you can dismiss their analogy but that doesn't refute the problem I pointed out about it. Perhaps you can give a better analogy.
I have certainly tried many times. The best I can come up with is turning to computers. You could imagine an infinite spreadsheet in a program like excel. Some cells are empty some are filled Forget memory, we cannot know if the universes resources are limited. Now you could make the computer display all the cells at twice their size. Then cut each cell into four new cells. The spreadsheet is now in a way twice as big even though it is still infinite. Every entry is now twice as far from every other, yet they have not moved.
Now do we know that if we move far enough in one direction we won't eventually reach an edge? No. But there is certainly no strong reason to suspect it either.
...Other than that nagging "common sense" saying "it has to end
somewhere.
What is true is that the theory of general relativity is the best description of the universe on a grand scale that we have yet. Why does space follow this math? We don't know, but the evidence is pretty strong that is does.
Strawman again. I didn't dispute GR, I only pointed out a flaw in the current theories.
GR
is the current theory on the large scale of the universe.
It's the same flaw...a world that can only exist in the material can not also simultaneously have no boundary.
I don't understand what you mean here either.
Topic: Outside the Universe (Read 22072 times)
