Slightly off topic and not-at-all related to refreshments and vending but I thought a worthwhile post anyway. A concept that has fascinated me and baffled me at the same time, and at this ungodly hour of 2am on a Monday morning, I have the strangest urge to try and explain it to you...
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An interesting statement was raised in the Daily Mirror a few weeks ago from a professor who stated there “could well be over 100 billion other ‘Earths’ in the universe”. I wondered, could there really be 100 billion other Earths-like planets in our universe?
As my old physics teacher would have said, and many of the world renowned professors of the World state, the universe is infinite – the basic thinking is that “infinity is something that never ends” - looking past the Occam’s Razor definition, can infinity really be clearly taught to someone else, or understood by ourselves?
Infinity is to me a very confusing concept. I just hate the word itself completely. It’s as meaningless as the word ‘nothing’... Why do I hate it? Number one, you can’t put into something measurable. Infinity is a number so big that no matter how many zeros you add onto a digit, it can never be reached; 100 billion is no closer to infinity than 100 billion billion billion (and I’m not even going to try to write that out in digits!!). If time is infinite, we are no closer to tomorrow than the end of the world as we know it.
Which brings me onto my Number Two…it’s a scary concept. How can something just go on and on and on and on and on without ever finishing….nearly everything we know of and understand today, apart from the universe, has a beginning and an end – birth and death, today and tomorrow // having no end to something seems to me, in the thoughts of my fragile little mind, a confusing and impossible concept. Where is this “infinite” space heading into? How can there be an endless expanse of emptiness that just expands into another endless expanse of emptiness?
But then, if there is an end...what is on the other side of this end, or what would this end look like? When we look at the world as we know it, when there is an end to something, something usually exists outside it – let’s take for example a human cell, so therefore cells exist within our body (a “casing”, if you will). Like this, something must exist on the other side of this end, or we’re just going back into the rant about infinity again…and in fact we go back into it even if we say there is an end to the universe, as there must also be an end to the space on the other side of our universe, to which must also have an end…and so on.
Confusing.
We’ve just started trying to understand the mysterious of the universe – what is space, what are planets made of, how did life start on our planet. I'm no scientist, but what can I say, from my heart, about what I believe in the universe?
I don’t think the matter in the universe is infinite and I don’t see how there can be enough gases and molecules in one tiny spot in space to create an infinite amount of planets. Perhaps it will only seem like an endless expanse due to amount of years there has been since the Big Bang – 13 billion apparently? So, to reach the end, we would need a machine that would travel much faster than the speed of light, and even then it would take a million generations of people to reach it, and then another million to travel back and report to the other people what they saw. By then, the light and the planets they would have seen would have travelled billions of more miles, assuming there is no end to the “nothingness” of space, and the universe would be even bigger.
BUT, I don’t think there is an end, in terms of what we know as an “end”, to the universe. I know I said I don’t grasp the concept of infinity, but hear me out on this. If there was some sort of boundary, surely the gases and whatnot would “hit” it, and stop or bounce back – we would be able to see this in billions of year’s time, or maybe even tomorrow if I’m lucky! I think that in some plausible but weird way, space is a big circle. My theory is that if we can build a machine that can travel faster than light, and live to travel billions of millions, we would actually end up right where we started,
So let me wrap up my two theories.
- Space is not exactly infinite – if you managed to travel faster than light, you would eventually end up where you was before. But because we have no machine or method to do this at the moment, it might as well be infinite.
- There is not a “boundary” to the universe – if there was a boundary, there must be something on the other side of it, and then we go back to the whole question again, because that side must either have infinite space on it to which must have a boundary etc. Space is like a big circle.
Post your theories and let’s work this out together. We can crack the mysteries of the universe…probably.
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So, next week we will be back to refreshment topics - I have an interesting article due in regarding the health risks of bottled water coolers.
Until then...
Dave
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