There are other problems brewing in physics

And people used to think that illnesses were the result of "ill humors" before they discovered viruses and bacteria.

What's your point?

Most scientific problems cannot be solved until they are solved.

This thread needs Liza or peen.

I think it is a thing of exquisite beauty that the universe was created from nothing, as if on command, and as if a great and powerful being said “Let there be light”, and there was light. Believe what you like. It just think this is awesome!

“You haven’t asked, but I could tell you what I think ...”

I think that someday physics will come back around to the idea of some kind of dynamic ether as the fundamental substance of the universe...

R1 reminds me of a simple problem:

If you are guiding Santa’s sleigh to every good boy or girl’s house in Canada and various overseas British dependencies, how do you map out the trip, going from one stop to the next, so as to result in the least kilometers flown? UPS and others have the same problem.

When I was in college, I was told there is no mathematical algorithm that you can use to solve this. Obviously there are poor choices, such as alternating Atlantic and Pacific coasts, repeatedly, but there is no math solution. You have to settle for an educated guess.

Sometimes, they can prove that a problem can’t be solved, which is interesting.

One thing that the big bang explained very satisfactorily is the fact that the universe is expanding and all the bodies in the universe are getting further and further apart from one another. An infinitely old universe doesn't explain that expansion very well, if at all.

I’ll take Newton’s balls for $100 Alex

I love this story...

An event in Dantzig's life became the origin of a famous story in 1939, while he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Near the beginning of a class for which Dantzig was late, professor Jerzy Neyman wrote two examples of famously unsolved statistics problems on the blackboard. When Dantzig arrived, he assumed that the two problems were a homework assignment and wrote them down. According to Dantzig, the problems "seemed to be a little harder than usual", but a few days later he handed in completed solutions for the two problems, still believing that they were an assignment that was overdue.

Six weeks later, Dantzig received a visit from an excited professor Neyman, who was eager to tell him that the homework problems he had solved were two of the most famous unsolved problems in statistics. He had prepared one of Dantzig's solutions for publication in a mathematical journal. As Dantzig told it in a 1986 interview in the College Mathematics Journal:

A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, Neyman just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.

Years later another researcher, Abraham Wald, was preparing to publish an article that arrived at a conclusion for the second problem, and included Dantzig as its co-author when he learned of the earlier solution.

This story began to spread and was used as a motivational lesson demonstrating the power of positive thinking. Over time Dantzig's name was removed, and facts were altered, but the basic story persisted in the form of an urban legend and as an introductory scene in the movie Good Will Hunting.

There was no banging in the Big Bang, incidentally. Sound doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and besides, the physics required to bang wasn’t created instantaneously, anyway.

This shit hurts my brain and if I were high it would create a rather rough evening of chicken and the muthafuckin' egg.

If you look hard enough, you'll probably see that Elon Musk behind this. That man needs to keep his hands off linear time and object permanence.

Every American has the right to live in country where objects diminish in size with distance and lines converge at a point on the horizon.

NERDS!

Article is from 2015. Reality is obviously infinite ly complex. We will never fully understand. The universe is more like a dream than a solid thing. It likely only exists in our brains. It just ideas. Nothing is real. There is ample evidence that life is meaningless and there is no bad or good.

Oh, heck, Pierre. If you were standing close enough, the rapidly moving bubble of energy and matter would rock your world.

R16, BUT WHAT WOULD I BE STANDING ON? Ceremony? Or, on a tortoise, maybe?

Maybe F. Scott was onto something?

You're silly, and I like you very much, Pierre.

Omg.

When I hear shit like this, I’m reminded that the theory of plate tectonics only became generally accepted about 1950. You have to understand that to understand earthquakes, volcanos, the distribution of fossils, oil, gold, diamonds, the evolution of other planets, and a lot more.

Until 1924, we didn’t know there was more than one galaxy. Now we know there are, what, trillions?

Modern science is actually quite modern. We’re just at the beginning of understanding even the most basic science.

Hey, YOU! Got offa my cloud!

[quote] I think it is a thing of exquisite beauty that the universe was created from nothing, as if on command, and as if a great and powerful being said “Let there be light”, and there was light

This is how Martha Stewart earned her early fame. At impromptu dinner parties she would turn water into wine, not by slight of hand, but by simply insisting the transformation occur.

* sleight of hand

What I want to know is, how in the holy name of Xenu did it seemingly occur to *nobody* that birds are sauropod dinosaurs? Not merely 'descended' from them, but literally *are* dinosaurs?

I mean, any halfwit can look at an ostrich & velociraptor skeleton side by side and notice that they look alike. I mean, hell, we even USE 'raptor' in the names of some birds AND dinosaurs. So, how did paleontologists get the nutty idea that dinosaurs were big lizards? Even a century ago, it seems like there was abundant evidence that 'bird' is a subset of 'sauropod dinosaur'.

And why the fuck do we STILL tell schoolkids that dinosaurs are extinct? They aren't. (Tweet. Tweet. Tweet. Twe-... purrrr.)

We don't know shit!

Are there black (glory) holes at Harvard and MIT?

All matter is an illusion. Matter is simply light that is in a "pause", or resting phase. Many physicists believe this to be true, yet it is not easily explained by any of them.

Stop Marying op, if you read the article they are reconciliable.

General relativity is order and science with known end and beginning. The universe started out as static then big bang then expand

Quantum mechanic is chaos and magic with constant flux and change. The universe is dynamic, constantly expand and contract.

The paradox is solved: the static universe have a big bang and expand until it is no longer have enough energy to do so, then contracts, collapsing on itself like a star going to supernova then form black holes.

After it contract it enters the new static phase , and then big bang, then expand again into the next alternate universe.

General relativity describes birth, growth of one universe.

Quantum mechanic describes birth, growth, death, and rebirth of multiverse.

R29, The expansion of the universe is actually accelerating, meaning that an expansion that stops and then collapses in on itself is less likely than ever imagined.

I heard it explained this way: inflate a balloon and put magic marker marks on 4 or 5 locations. Then, inflate the balloon further. You will observe that the distance between all of the marker marks, as measured across the balloon surface, becomes greater. That’s what is happening in space, in 3 dimensions. Space is expanding, so all galaxies are getting further away from each other.

Here’s another cool thing that shows how mass warps space to cause gravity. Put a bowling ball in the center of a bed. It causes a sag, right? Then roll a tennis ball on the mattress towards the lip of the sag. If rolled right for this illustration, the tennis ball will get caught in the well and will swing around the lip of the sag until it falls in and stops. Well, it stops because of friction on the bed and the earth’s gravity; but, if this were in outer space, the tennis ball might fall into orbit around the bowling ball.

This follows Newton’s law: an object in motion will remain in motion, unless acted upon by another force. So, the moon, for example, is actually traveling in a straight line, but it’s doing so within space that is warped by the Earth’s mass. That gives the illusion that the moon is traveling in a circle.

This is why I don’t think they will ever discover “gravity waves”. It’s not really a force, it just resembles one. This is also how gravity can have an effect on objects at such great distances, and can even act faster between objects than light can travel between the two.

The problem with the Big Bang lies in Inflation, which just was invented to account for math that failed. Instead of saying, "well the math didn't work," science said, "What a minute, something moves faster than the speed of light, for no reason, then stops, again, for no reason, then the math works," thus it must be right

That's like saying, "My check book shows I have $40 too much, so I wrote a check for $40 and tore it up. Now it balances, it must be valid 'cause the math is correct now."

Buddhist philosophy holds that there’s no beginning to the universe.

Pierre, don't make me come over there.

OP this has been an issue for 100 years now.

It's not surprising to find that science is false.

r37, I hope you never sail an ocean and fall of the edge of the world. You're clearly brilliant.

But r29 nothing expands forever right? That is just impossible energy wise. A balloon inflating will eventually burst and all its material will gather into a tiny smaller object.

Oops r39 is meant to address r30 obvi not r29.

[quote] But nothing expands forever right? That is just impossible energy wise. A balloon inflating will eventually burst and all its material will gather into a tiny smaller object.

I’m not so sure about that, Cutie R39. Why not expand forever? In this case, I think we’ve exhausted the usefulness of the balloon metaphors.

R33, I think “inflation” is a kind of place holder for something we don’t understand as yet. In math, it’s called a fudge-factor. It is like an observation or description of something that makes all the math work, without going into an explanation as to what caused it, or how it worked.

I think it’s more like saying, "My check book shows I have $40 too much, so I wrote an entry for a $40 deposit in my check ledger, until I can figure out if it was a forgotten deposit, or was a check I previously wrote that hasn’t cleared my bank as yet, or something else.”

Inflation is not exactly the same as expansion, although the terms are related. One of the laws of physics is that, absent another force acting upon it, an object will continue moving in the same direction infinitely, especially in a vacuum, which space is. We're used to living on earth, where all sorts of forces act upon us all the time, one of the biggies being gravity. You throw a ball and eventually it's going to slow down and fall to the earth. We also have friction and many other forces that slow down and stop objects. We can't apply that earth-centric intuition to space. There doesn't appear to be a center of the universe that would somehow suck all of the farflung objects of the universe back to it in the future, or at least one that has any sort of force attached to it. As objects travel away from their point of origin in the universe, every objects is getting further and further apart from all other objects, and since the interaction with gravity is part of what gives heat to many objects and gravity grows weaker with distance, in the far future (maybe 10 billion years from now), the universe will grow quite cold and dim as the stars wink out. Even the ever-youthful members of DL will be long gone by then. Even Olivia de Haviland and Catherine Zeta-Jones will wink out.

The intelligence and, quite frankly, *brilliance* on display in this thread is both humbling and breathtaking.

R41, well, expansion takes energy and thermodynamics states that the universe is a closed system. Thus, the energy is finite, so eventually the expansion will be halted. The article stated that String gas cosmology predicts the universe go through a period of static phase with no expansion. These ideas are in line with each other.

Moreover, we cannot assume a perfect system for the universe with no intervention. There are multiple civilizations in the cosmo. They (including us in the near future) have had, have, and will have use dark matter for energy. The dark matter we are swimming in ARE basically crude oil. Once we figure out how to coalesce it, we will "solve"the energy crisis and abuse it. Eventually, abuse leads to cosmological disasters that create black holes. Imagine trillions of civilization abusing this" free energy," eventually all these black hole merged into a mega black hole with massive singularity so large that the universe just shrink back to its static form.

Keep it comic’, boys.

I consider this “sexy talk”. 😘

*comin’

R45

Proof of your closed system assertion?

If black holes exist, the loop can’t close.

[quote] R45: well, expansion takes energy ...

While this, you, seem to make sense to me, I’m not sure it is correct. If the universe is expanding into a void, that could be the rare case of (seemingly) free energy. An object in motion in a void continues in motion - is it using energy to do so?

There is a certain poetry to the idea of a cyclic universe that collapses on itself and re-bangs; but I have heard that this has been disproved. Einstein refused to believe that the universe was not cyclic, IIRC, but he was not always right.

R48 in any science current textbooks, the entire universe is dictated as a closed system. That is the basic rule of thermodynamics. Things don't just disappear. Even with black hole, since space time continuum is warped, they just get recycle into the past or the future or a distant point in space. Thus, nothing disappears, what belongs to the system stays in the system. It may leak into an alternate timeline, but it is still part of the system as a whole. It just get distributed to another point.

Pierre, r49, you did work in finance dear, you know the old sayings" nothing is free." Well, it's the same thing with energy in the universe

An object prefers to remain in static equilibrium unless acted upon by a force which correlates with kinetic energy. Motion means energy. An inflation of the universe means a force is pushing the celestial bodies in certain direction, which means kinetic energy. This is where the gravitational wave comes into play.

The worst problem in physics was solved by the wizard at Park and 73rd.

R50

“... in any science current textbooks...”

That is called argument from authority.

The problems in physics aren’t getting any less complex or closer to resolution. They are, in fact, multiplying. Exponentially.

Thank you, r52. I googled "is the universe a closed system" and instantly ran into a quora discussion in which physicists were arguing about this, so clearly it is NOT a settled question. Some preferred to say that the universe is neither open nor closed, but an isolated system, which means that it doesn't have to follow the laws of thermodynamics. The open and closed systems within it do, but not the universe itself.

R52 darling, i have successfully put out reasoning why the universe is a closed system even with the existence of black hole. Perhaps, if you stop being a troll and actually read the points I've made, you might actually learn something.

Love it! More!