Want some perspective on where you fit in on the universe?

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, Lyris. Every time you look up at the stars, you're looking back in time, to varying degrees. Fancy telescopes look even further back in time.

As for the paper folding, that always seemed like a convenient way of explaining the idea in a Star Trek episode but I don't buy it. Apply the same idea to my journey to work and any attempt to fold the road would leave me no closer to work and a huge bill for the amount of damage my JCB caused. You can't even fold the piece of paper used in the simplistic analogy without causing permanent damage to the page. And to even attempt it, you have to already have access to both Xs, needing that original A to B journey.

[importaku]

Imagine if that was true & everything that we could see was in fact just one particle of something else. LOL total mindscrew, mere humans are not meant for this

[Lyris]

Yep, Lyris. Every time you look up at the stars, you're looking back in time, to varying degrees. Fancy telescopes look even further back in time.

That is so damn cool, why in the frick did they not teach us that at school instead of filling our heads with other nonsense?

[Dogg Thang]

Well even diagrams of atoms look like solar systems. The smaller we go, the more it seems to look the same as the huge stuff. And I guess it all works with the same physics. Our galaxy could be a particle stuck somewhere on the ass of some giant creature. But then the question still remains - how big does it go? Or even how small?

I can't think about it too much or my head asplodes.

Edit: Lyris, tell me about it. I did University physics (ahem, briefly - college dropout) and one of the first things I learned was that much of the stuff we learned in school was old, wrong and had been disproven years ago. But yeah, some of physics and especially astronomy is absolutely amazing and school manages to make it violently dull.

[Anpanman]

How could you travel to the edge or end of the universe l

I know you couldn't but 'if' you could then what would be there.

At school the universe as I understood it meant everything and it never ended as there is always something there - even if it's empty space.
Remember having a discussion with someone who couldn't believe the vastness of it and simply said that it must end somewhere, so I replied that if you could travel to the end of the known universe and then hit a brick wall which was a million times bigger than the known universe - then what's on the other side of the wall...

Yep, Lyris. Every time you look up at the stars, you're looking back in time, to varying degrees. Fancy telescopes look even further back in time.

Correct, even our closer neighbours have a similar effect, for example light from the sun takes about eight minutes to reach us...so if the sun blew up NOW - bang! You would only begin to see it in eight minutes.

[MisterBubbles]

There would be nothing , no edge i know its sounds nonsense but this is how general relativity works, this is the easiest of physics to understand and luckly we aint going into QED and stuff yet or all our minds would melt.
Empty space isnt really empty , particles called quarks are everywhere, trying to think of a general read book that people can read to pick up the basic facts and understand more ( leave it with me )
Space was opaque for 300,000 light years (from the Big Bang ) , so thats how you cant see the edge, so as said if we went back to that time even with super time folding space machines we'd see diddly skwat.

[Lyris]

It really is sad how few of us actually understand this stuff, in a proper world it would be standard knowledge. Wonder when they'll start teaching something useful.

Please do get back to us, a nice easy introduction would be great!

[noobish hat]

How is this useful, except to Captain Kirk?

[MisterBubbles]

Well Captain Kirk would like to understand it too, as if we had a full understanding of physics , it would help the crew and Scotty beam them up , as of now we couldn't do that and if 1 atom or any particle got removed from your body as the beam up phase your body would disintegrate. This is the quantum mechanics i said about, we understand QED and relativity but lack a true understanding and thats where you hear the term theory of everything.
Plus it think its good to know about the universe we live in, thats what makes us human.

[Darwock]

So, if the telescope was pointed in that direction and it saw stars that were 800 million years old, that means the direction it was facing is where the universe started. Right?

So what would happen if you turned the telescope around and looked the other way for the same length of time? Would you be looking at a part of the universe that hadn't been created yet? If you saw more light from 13 billion years ago, then doesn't that put our location as the newest point? My brain can't handle this.

Er. I think I realise my major error here - light travels in all directions, ummm....

[MisterBubbles]

This little book is cheap and gives you the basics of cosmology , with all the theories in there.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=teach+yourself+cosmology&x=16&y=19

[Lyris]

How is this useful, except to Captain Kirk?

Well, consider how many people become preoccupied with understanding "the meaning of life" (strange concept) or "how we got here". Better knowledge of this sort of thing could give them something more important to think about.

Imagine what kind of a world we'd live in if this was as common knowledge as reading and writing.

[MisterBubbles]

Plus i forgot to say space is curved , this analogy is always in books , so a beetle lands on a balloon and decides to walk it from now on, so he walks in a straight line but never find a edge.

[Dogg Thang]

And yet a balloon still has an edge. Still has an inside and an outside. You don't even need a beetle analogy - we're not beetles. But we live on a curved planet that looks, at ground level, fairly flat. We could go around and around but that still didn't stop us realising that there was another direction - up. And then Earth had a boundary that could be crossed.

['Press Start']

Yep, Lyris. Every time you look up at the stars, you're looking back in time, to varying degrees. Fancy telescopes look even further back in time.

As for the paper folding, that always seemed like a convenient way of explaining the idea in a Star Trek episode but I don't buy it. Apply the same idea to my journey to work and any attempt to fold the road would leave me no closer to work and a huge bill for the amount of damage my JCB caused. You can't even fold the piece of paper used in the simplistic analogy without causing permanent damage to the page.

I know this is theory but how would folding space and time, a non physical object leave physical damage like paper. The theory is to fold the 2 points together and create a gateway. Nothing physically folds, only time and space so 2 locations that may be distant appear closer to each other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormhole