Tuesday, June 08, 2004

What is on the other side?

I happened to be reading The Emperor's new Mind by Roger Penrose.
Penrose talks about the big bang being considered the start of the universe (Chapter: Cosmology and the Arrow of Time). He says that the Big Bang and the subsequent expansion of the "universe" created the space that we call the universe(This he represents pictorially as an expanding balloon). And it is an accepted fact that the universe is expanding continuously.

So my question is "If i were on the edge of this expanding universe, then on one side is the universe as we know it. What is on the other side?"

any Answers?

4 comments:

Epiphany said...

Hmm not really an answer but this is wot i thot....If u take the universe as a baloon....and u r on the surface the the other dimensions according to u'r point of view will be...Inside and Outside the baloon with u at he edge.....rite?? now the question is wot is inside the baloon?...if more galaxies, then outside the baloon is also filled with galaxies for the balance and thus u r not at the edge and so this is argument is not true!!!! If the inside is empty then u will have void again outside to maintain the balance again!! so depends on which side is the other side (inside or the outside??)!!! ;)

sanjeeth said...

You need to visualise a ballon here. Iam reminded about a conversation between my proff and another student
stud: If space and time was created as a result of big bang, how was it before the big bang
Proff: Your question is flawed. If the Big Bang says time was created as a result of the Big Bang before Big Bang is meaningless!
Visualising these concepts is .......

Smart-Alecky said...

the other side is the universe we donot know about. Right. cos if you know then you wouldn't have asked.
and to sanjeeth's comment. So big bang was start of time and that it started with a dense mass of matter with high denisty exploding and expanding. The question still remains what was this matter like before big bang. And for the time I think it's more like fixing the reference frame for measuring time. The origin being the big bang. But time would have existed before it, much like we have negative axis. Something of the sort. But we don't have a notion of negative times, so this now seems senseless.
Also since the wikipeida ;) says dense matter where even light cannot pass, infinite temperature and pressure. So if the black hole and all the heavinly bodies can bend space curves and time lines, wouldn't it have had an astonishingly strange affect on time. Would the time and space line bend so much that they becomes some rather strange pattern. Wouldn't then it become something like the time curve bending back with next to zero radii of curve so that the time at t+1 would actually goto time t-n? Wouldn't that lead to some notion of negative times?
Darn! I should have chosen a different field of education.
Enlighten Me O Lord!

Praveer said...

Let me define universe:
Universe is the minimal area which can exhaustively cover all the existing heavenly matter.
It broadly contains
1. Solid Matter
2. Empty Space
3. Nothing Else

And universe is expanding, it is convering more and more area. If I get your question correctly:

at time t: area = x
at time t + delta-t: area = x + delta-x

Now, u want to know at time t what constituted delta-x right ??
The answer is EMPTY SPACE. Let me explain

See in time delta-t: delta-x area is covered by the universe.
Now delta-x is a part of the universe which not only contains solid matter of the planets stars etc but also empty space in between them.
Expanding universe actually means solid matter bodies moving further away from each other.

Proof by contradiction:
Universe is covering more and more area meaning its covering more and more EMPTY SPACE. Because by definition had there been more solid matter outside it wud have been a part of universe already.

So at time t delta-x is EMPTY SPACE !