The edge of space

[Guadalupe]

I would like to take a ride through a wormhole that will lead me just outside our universe to watch it as it expands. WOW! Then, come home just in time for a good cup of ;)

[sinewave]

Not everyone agrees that it's infinite, and there are good arguments against it being so. And what's so 'random' about it (considering it's amazing uniformity)?

 

 

The ocean's wave surface is amazingly uniform also, but the location of the wave peaks and troughs are entirely unpredictable in place and time. They are indeed random, and connected to the atmosphere, which tapers-off to space proper and is bombarded by every kind of particle, from photon to neutrino, which particles affect global weather, which affects waves on the ocean surface. It is an open and quite unpredictable dynamic system.

 

Likewise space is observably filled with waves, and amazingly uniform, at the large scale (as the ocean is), but at the small scale, space, and the waves in it, are likewise fully randomised.

 

Something that is genuinely 'random' implies it contains unlimited possibilities.

 

If it did not contain infinite possibilities then it could not be said to in fact be random at all, because sometimes you would be able to exactly predict where a wave crest or trough would be in time and space.

 

The uncertainty principle denies such perfect predictability, thus space implicitly is a genuinely infinitely random state of overprinting wave interaction dynamics.

 

An infinity can not be contained via something finite. If space has a genuine infinite randomness property, then it can not be a finite space.

 

Thus a genuinely random small scale space dynamics (in an otherwise nearly flat isotropic space) indicates the cosmos is ultimately unquantifiable. Only limited subsets of it can be quantified, and any attempt to construct a quantification of the whole of the cosmos is doomed to quantitative delusion.

 

Quantity implies limitation.

 

Randomness implies no limit.

 

Thus the quantification tools we have are unable to address the cosmos we observe, without wholesale quantitative delusion resulting.

 

QED

 

You can't quantitatively get past randomness (ask Heisenberg), renormalisation introduces quantitative limits, to allow the quantitative tools to work, but then their results only apply to the limited situation, and not to the actual random totality.

 

--

 

(it's similar to applying Newtonian mechanics to cosmology, it was ‘correct’ at the appropriate scale, but erroneous when applied cosmologically, thus renormalisation’s quantification's applied to a genuinely random wave-filled cosmos are implicitly an inappropriate application of that tool)

[Erasmus00]

An infinity can not be contained via something finite. If space has a genuine infinite randomness property, then it can not be a finite space.

 

You yourself used the ocean and ocean waves as an example of the randomness you were talking about. The oceans are obviously finite, so this step in your logic seems to break down.

-Will

[Little Bang]

No matter how far apart two particles get, the force between them can never be zero, it can only approach zero. I.E. no place in the universe is gravity free.

 

Infinitely random, I don't know what that means, either something is random or it's not random and we don't have a proof one way or the other. We suspect that it is random but until we understand every facet of the universe we can't prove it.

[Bobby]

How can an infinitely random space, at any scale, have an 'edge'?

 

illogical

 

If space is defined by the amount, location and momentum of all mass and energy, it certainly is beyond our present ability to determine the shape of the Universe, but that doesn't mean that space is randomly populated. For all practical purposes, the atoms on the surface of a balloon are infinitely and randomly located, but the balloon stil has a shape.

[Bobby]

Originally Posted by sinewave

An infinity can not be contained via something finite. If space has a genuine infinite randomness property, then it can not be a finite space.

 

 

You yourself used the ocean and ocean waves as an example of the randomness you were talking about. The oceans are obviously finite, so this step in your logic seems to break down.

-Will

 

To some extent, everything in the Universe affects every other thing in the Universe. The number of water molecules in the oceans is finite, therefore there cannot be absolute randomness. That said, considering the size and composition of the Universe, the actions of each molecule of water is beyond our ability to predict, but that doesn't mean it isn't predictable.

[Bobby]

___In regard to talking of a spherical shape, this in itself implies a boundry, ie an edge.

___There is no edge as I understand it, but rather space curves back onto itself. Just as the expanding balloon example (in one of Niviene's links, & commonly cited elsewhere) points out that points on the 2-dimensional surface move apart as it expands & none has claim to center, the surface of the balloon has no edge either. Leave any point & keep going "straight" & you return to the same point. ;)

 

 

 

Disregarding the thickness of the material of a balloon, a ballon is two dimensional. However, the balloon exists in a three dimensional space. Perhaps our Universe is like the balloon. If so, then unless we know something about the extra universal dimension, it seems to me that we cannot know where the edges of our Universe are.

[Bobby]

No matter how far apart two particles get, the force between them can never be zero, it can only approach zero. I.E. no place in the universe is gravity free.

 

Infinitely random, I don't know what that means, either something is random or it's not random and we don't have a proof one way or the other. We suspect that it is random but until we understand every facet of the universe we can't prove it.

 

 

Yes there is no place in the universe that is gravity free, yet Einstein appears to have used the concept when talkinbg about the speed of light.

 

Hmmm. It appears to me that you can never know if something is truly randon. Perhaps your examination stopped only one step short of showing non randomness. I'm not very knowledgeable of chaos theory, but doesn't it try to find structure within randomness?

[infamous]

I'm not very knowledgeable of chaos theory, but doesn't it try to find structure within randomness?

And if structure is found, doesn't that nullify the term random? Just one time, consider what the term random means. Websters defines it as: haphazard, violence. Doesn't say anything about causless or action without cause. No action is without cause, some will argue that quantum fluctuations are causless. Show me the proof, I say we don't know the cause because we just havn't found it yet. Random doesn't mean causeless. Randomness is more closely associated with chaos, and chaos does not have anything to do with a causeless action, but rather, it is generated by complexity.

[sinewave]

You yourself used the ocean and ocean waves as an example of the randomness you were talking about. The oceans are obviously finite, so this step in your logic seems to break down.

-Will

 

 

er, … no, ... I did not use the ocean in isolation, I said the ocean couples to the atmosphere, and the atmosphere couples to the cosmos, as the particle’s energy coming from space drives the weather, which drives the waves.

 

How could you have missed this? ;)

 

i.e.

 

"...The ocean's wave surface is amazingly uniform also, but the location of the wave peaks and troughs are entirely unpredictable in place and time. They are indeed random, and connected to the atmosphere, which tapers-off to space proper and is bombarded by every kind of particle, from photon to neutrino, which particles affect global weather, which affects waves on the ocean surface. It is an open and quite unpredictable dynamic system. ..."

[sinewave]

No matter how far apart two particles get, the force between them can never be zero, it can only approach zero. I.E. no place in the universe is gravity free.

 

Infinitely random, I don't know what that means, either something is random or it's not random and we don't have a proof one way or the other. We suspect that it is random but until we understand every facet of the universe we can't prove it.

 

 

Quite, something which is random (as opposed to the artifical pseudo-'random') implies no limit to possible outcomes.

 

Fairly simple.

[sinewave]

If space is defined by the amount, location and momentum of all mass and energy, it certainly is beyond our present ability to determine the shape of the Universe, but that doesn't mean that space is randomly populated. For all practical purposes, the atoms on the surface of a balloon are infinitely and randomly located, but the balloon stil has a shape.

 

 

eh? what has the shape of the universe got to do with it?

 

Quantum fluctuations of virtual particles are random, they occur in space.

 

How simple is that?

[sinewave]

Originally Posted by sinewave

... the actions of each molecule of water is beyond our ability to predict, but that doesn't mean it isn't predictable.

 

 

eh? ...

 

if it's "beyond our ability predict", ... then, ... that;s because it is not predictable. ;)

[sinewave]

And if structure is found, doesn't that nullify the term random? Just one time, consider what the term random means. Websters defines it as: haphazard, violence. Doesn't say anything about causless or action without cause. No action is without cause, some will argue that quantum fluctuations are causless. Show me the proof, I say we don't know the cause because we just havn't found it yet. Random doesn't mean causeless. Randomness is more closely associated with chaos, and chaos does not have anything to do with a causeless action, but rather, it is generated by complexity.

 

 

Irrelevant red herring.

 

We know the cause-effect relations of the weather and waves in the ocean, yet this doews not make exact wave-peak prediction any more predictable. They are and will remain random and thus unpredictable.

 

;)

[infamous]

Irrelevant red herring.

 

We know the cause-effect relations of the weather and waves in the ocean, yet this doews not make exact wave-peak prediction any more predictable. They are and will remain random and thus unpredictable.

 

;)

Show me the proof that "They will remain random and thus unpredictalbe."

[Bobby]

And if structure is found, doesn't that nullify the term random? Just one time, consider what the term random means. Websters defines it as: haphazard, violence. Doesn't say anything about causless or action without cause. No action is without cause, some will argue that quantum fluctuations are causless. Show me the proof, I say we don't know the cause because we just havn't found it yet. Random doesn't mean causeless. Randomness is more closely associated with chaos, and chaos does not have anything to do with a causeless action, but rather, it is generated by complexity.

 

 

 

Hmmm. I didn't put it very well. My thought was that chaos theory looks for patterns or structure in SEEMINGLY random numbers.

 

I don't think that nothingness is possible, thus I agree that quantum fluctiations have a cause. All of space is filled with energy of many kinds. I would think it likely that occasionally an area of space would have enough energy to materialize a particle.

l

[Bobby]

Originally Posted by sinewave

... the actions of each molecule of water is beyond our ability to predict, but that doesn't mean it isn't predictable.

 

 

 

eh? ...

 

if it's "beyond our ability predict", ... then, ... that;s because it is not predictable. ;)

 

 

Huh? Just because we can't predict it doesn't mean it isn't predictable. Perhaps I misread your answer.