OllyK

See Post 46 - I know nothing

I have seen this explained on a web site somewhere, may even have been wikipedia, but I can't remember what it said.

suprabeast

without light, does matter not however still exist?? bit like a blind man walking around, you cant see things without light but it doesnt stop them being there

suprabeast

would the light just not leave the ship until it slows down?? much like a submarine with a door on the bottom... the air doesnt escape and the water doesnt come in

Leslie

I suppose one way to look at it is that there is so much matter which cannot be destroyed, only changed, and so much energy existing in all the matter. Things will just go on changing as all those billions of years go by, universes will self destruct and new ones will form and it will all go round again.

I just wonder how many other universes there are with life in them as well, and how it has developed compared with this one.

To try to encompass it all is just mindbending and I doubt that man will ever find a complete answer to it.

Come on ajm, whats it all about then?

Les

suprabeast

oh yes going back to the original statements, if the universe keeps expanding (as an open universe) , some theories are that due to the stretching of the universe and matter, eventually, it will pull stars apart to the point of creating black holes which will then suck the universe back together down to the tiny mili mili mili micron of nothingness which will then explode due to so much energy and start all over again

Fosters

you guys have already mentioned the wild haired man's special theory of relativity. it's all in there.

(effectively) faster than light? wormholes

can we talk about string theory now? it's much more interesting.

OllyK

OK find a site, wasn't the one I was after, but similar, it discusses the functioning of headlights on a ship travelling at light speed!
http://library.thinkquest.org/26657/...tivity_txt.htm

OllyK

I think you are along the right lines. As I understand it, Newtonian physics works fine most of the time, except at speeds close to or at light speed. Again have a look at http://library.thinkquest.org/26657/...tivity_txt.htm (I'm still reading it) but it covers some of this stuff in laymans terms.

Drunken Bungle Whore

The universe is a finite size - I believe the 'Big Bang' was somewhere around 37.5m years ago - so even if everything travelled at the speed of light, then the max size it could be is 37.5m light years across.

'A Brief History of Time' gets pretty heavy on this stuff - Hawkins making the point that we find it almost impossible to think without 'time' being a dimension and perhaps before the universe was here there was no time.

If you're really into all this stuff then try getting New Scientist - or at least having a rummage on their website - there's always tons of stuff about the universe etc in there.

OllyK

Gimme 10 mins or so to read up on it first

suprabeast

yeah need a heads up... if you explain the basics then i can generate my own opinion from that!!

OllyK

It's a bit older than that - 13.7 billion +/- 0.2 billion by latest estimates. I don't think it is expanding at light speed as the expansion, is by all accounts, accelerating and it would seem to be the considered opinion that it will continue to expand ad infinitum.

Jap2Scrap

What if we're just an experiment on a petri dish somewhere?

Edcase

But that just puts us back to 'what is it expanding *into*?'

paul-s

yep this theory was proposed earlier in the thread, an ongoing suck pop bang kinda universe.

suprabeast

thats where the theory of red shift comes into play i think... can help you work out the rate of expansion of the universe

paul-s

interesting point someone could just stamp on us and pour us down the sink !

Edcase

I often wonder that.

Wasn't it the royal scientist that recently said that we may just be a simulation?

having already been privvy to what the next generation of game consoles can do, we cannot surely be too many years from creating such simulations ourselves, so what is to say we are not already in one?

suprabeast

oh gosh its the matrix all over again

Iain Young

Aha, so everything is relative.

So, if you had a spaceship made like one of the russian doll things (i.e. a ship inside a ship, inside a ship), you could in theory travel at many times the speed of light.

• Accellerate the main ship to the speed of light.
• Launch the interior ship at the speed of light
• Launch the ship contained by that ship at the speed of light etc....

The third ship launched would to a standerby seem as though it is travelling at 3x the speed of light, even though each one is only travelling at the speed of light relative to its parent ship...

OllyK

I suppose we have to ask, why does it have to be expanding in to anything? It's just expanding. I could be wrong, but trying to think of it in terms of blowing up a balloon in a room is probably not the right way to think about it.

OllyK

It was propsed a little further back in hitory than that It has largely been superceeded by the theory that the universe as we know it is expanding at an accelerating rate and will continue to expand forever, but that may change next week

Iain Young

They also think the accelleration may be caused by the gravitational effects of dark matter.

paul-s

what its expanding into I think is just nothingness, its creating its own space as and when basically. until the point it shrinks back down to the size of a pea

OllyK

Strings? Knots? Where are the boy scouts

Jap2Scrap

Put me more in mind of the "Better Than Life" episodes of Red Dwarf

Vette_76

They're down the pub - which is where you lot should be!!

OllyK

You are going to need a pretty massive first ship! Light travells at 180,000 miles per second give or take, so your first ship needs to be a few hundred thousand miles long to allow it contain ship 2 and for it to have the space to accelerate.

I'll make a start on building the light drive, just let me know when you have a ship a couple of million miles long for me to attach it to!

Iain Young

But in theory it could work

Fosters

oo oo we like dark matter (and energy)

some theories speculate that the anti gravitational (negative pressure) properties of dark energy are propogating the universe expansion.


i'll explain about dark matter in a bit. it's good stuff, well the baryonic stuff is nice