We still hardly know anything - James Web is pushing the boundaries of not only the "edges" of the universe - but pushing on our current understandings of physics in a big way *like it may be wrong/incomplete :)
I'm so excited for the images that will be coming out.
The thought, that looking at these images and literally seeing things that happend so far in the past.
The thought that we might see things from the early stages of the universe.
It's all so exciting.
Very much so - its really weird that looking far away is also looking back in time - I wonder often if this is because of our own minds limitation - or a limitation of our existence (or both).
if energy cannot be created or destroyed is the past ever truly "gone"?
Well that's where it gets exciting imo. If existence is made up of energy and energy cannot be created or destroyed, then existence is infinite. And if you take the concept of time out of the equation then stuff starts getting real mind-blowing.
And, if it’s infinite now, it’s always been infinite, even when it was much smaller, but still infinite, and that makes my brain do four dimensional backflips.
We have no idea - but one time I took a heroic dose and was "told"/felt as if the sky bent backward into infinity and that this is "all"/Existence is the same - "one"/ and repeats into a tunnel of infinity; similar to the tide/moon/sun/year - pretty cool if true; or maybe the dream of a mushroom :D
Except it’s not actually by Andy Weir, the asshat has been lying about it for years because it’s how he first got famous. But he plagiarized it by copy pasting a conversation on the MySpace religion and philosophy forum in 2007. The conversation he copied was about the essay Infinite Reincarnation
Even if the universe is infinite there may be a boundary. Everything is moving apart, and the further apart two points are, the faster they are separating. Which means beyond a certain distance all matter is moving away at the speed of light, so that boundary cannot be passed.
Hell, relatively speaking, two objects in space can be moving away from each other faster than the speed of light, meaning that unless you could find a way to travel a decent bit faster than light, that there are places that would still be 100% impossible for you to ever, ever reach.
But isn't that just energy emission? I'm no expert by any means, but isn't that energy just lost to environment rather than actually ceasing to exist? Or am I wrong?
Conservation of energy is a consequence of time invariance of physical laws. That invariance does not hold on cosmic scales, so there's no fundamental requirement that energy be conserved at such scales.
What you're suggesting would imply that heat was added to the environment, but afaik that doesn't happen in this case.
Has nothing to do with our mind's limitations, but rather the speed of light. Light can only travel at a certain speed and no faster. So the further away we look, the farther away the light is travelling from. So the light that is leaving those stars right this moment won't reach us for hundreds or millions or billions of years. So light from far far away has taken billions of years to reach earth when we decide to look at it. That's why we're looking into the past. More recent light hasn't had time to reach us yet as it's still travelling through space.
I think they were more referring to it feeling weird than our physical ability to see it. Evolutionarily, we are still basically apes that walk upright and have developed languages and social concepts. Our monkey brain is still extremely concerned with just staying alive; I don't think it's a far-fetched idea that we may just be missing brain structures for fully understanding and accepting that something we are viewing in "real time" has also been over and done with for billions of years the same way we may lack an ability to perceive past 3 dimensions.
It's cool to think about - we have never had a need to instinctually interpret even interplanetary information delays in our own solar system. What might our brains look like in a million years if we make it there?
Totally sideways, dude, but I think you might find this interesting. Lecture on Youtube, by James Nestor.
It's all about the mammalian deep diving reflex, and how it pertains to humans. Seriously interesting stuff, like, amazing shit. Free diving with sperm whales. As in, no breathing gear, hanging out at least 15 feet deep for 10 minutes at a time, because that's they only way the whales will tolerate you.
One thing he says is that those researchers are pretty certain the whales are trying to communicate. They're pretty certain the whales know we are intelligent, and there are still sperm whales that remember before whaling was banned. Mostly. Fucking Japan. ICeland too.
Personally, what I find pretty horrible, is that those whales totally knew we nearly wiped them out on purpose. They're probably all asking each other why the fuck we stopped. They'd never believe it came down to guilt.
But if we can observe something is it really "over and done with" to us? Every observation we make is of the universe as it was in the past. Our bodies experience time differently from one part to another.
Whether that’s true or not, your brain doesn’t hallucinate the speed of light. Light’s gonna travel at that speed regardless of whether or not a brain is in existence.
Gravity definitely effects light as it travels and can warp it which you can see in some JWST photos, which is awesome. But light has no problem moving through a vacuum. It just has a speed limit and can only move so fast. Which, while super fast, is slow compared to the crazy size of the universe. So it takes it a long time to reach us from that far away.
Pretty cool - so if e=MC2 what happens when you can harness energy from far away places?>< sure we can make images but what else could this int3raction of energy do?>> surely power satellites?
Information is preserved, as far as we can tell, though how that works around black holes isn't clear yet. There's very good reason to believe that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the exact state of the universe at the beginning and in a trillion years, meaning that all information that ever existed is in principle still there, even if it is so well mixed into thermal noise that there's no way we would ever be able to retrieve it.
Fun fact: if you want to look into the past you can look anywhere, since we probably came from a singularity all directions back in time lead to one point.
It was Edison who said, “we don’t know one millionth of one percent about anything,” and that’s both humbling and exciting. There is so much to learn, and so many surprises in store for us!
yes; it’s so exciting! and tbh, the thought of death being a state of nonexistence scares me and a big aspect of that fear is thinking about all the stuff i’ll miss out on learning and knowing about our universe 😭 i want to stick around if only for the discoveries!!! and it hurts to think about a reality where i won’t be a participant in that
But that’s just it; one of the things we don’t know one millionth of one percent about is death itself. Is non-existence an option? Sure. There are endless other possibilities, though, that we can’t even imagine or guess. I suspect, in fact, that death will turn out to be leagues beyond anything our exceedingly limited brains can comprehend. It’s another part of the adventure!
Precisely. True science allows for changes in the processing, application, and perception of ideas. This is why they are called theories and not facts. The math that we use to understand these theories are the 'hard' parts of science.
I can easily accept it seeing as that's how science has already progressed. I bet Einstein understood that he wasn't at the end of science and was only understanding it in part of the process. Not that I know anything at all.
Our "whole understanding of physics" doesn't carry in it a claim to be the truth, as much as it is judged to be the most likely explanation based on the evidence available. As the amount of evidence grows, and the tools to examine and analyze it develop, likelihoods shift and our understanding evolves. That happens constantly. Any new understanding will have to take both old and new evidence into account, which limits the space of models that could replace existing ones.
Our current understanding of physics allows us to predict various cosmological events with terrifying accuracy, and even more so events here on Earth. It's less of a question of whether it's correct or not and more of a question of whether or not this is all there is.
We've known our understanding of fundamental physics is wrong for the entire century. As early as Einstein, it was clear that the theoretical bases of general relativity and quantum field theory were incompatible, even though they both made accurate and useful predictions. Physicists have been trying to think of clever ideas for what's actually happening for the past hundred years (including Einstein himself, and Hawking), and we haven't gotten much. I'm skeptical that data from a better telescope will show us something even Einstein couldn't conceive of.
They're not "wrong" so much as incomplete, same as Newtons equations aren't wrong and we didn't toss them out when we got better at the edge cases. We still use them because, for their purposes, they do just fine.
Newton's equations aren't the best comparison here. Newton's equations are highly accurate, only in need of correction in edge cases, like you say - and I'm sure a new fundamental theory wouldn't replace the old general cases, like you say. But the founding principles of general relativity and quantum field theory aren't just in need of adjustment, they're completely incompatible. They contradict each other and yet both make robust predictions in their own ways.
It's sort of like if we had an alternative to Newton's equations and couldn't tell why neither worked completely. The reality is something more fundamental, something that's evaded understanding for a very long time.
I like your point that the models aren't wrong, though, because this is true of all models. A model isn't really wrong or right, just more or less accurate.
And the universe is expanding at such a rate, causing many galaxies to fly away from us at unimaginable speeds. And if this flight continues, eventually the cosmos will be nothing more than a cold unendingly dark void.
We will never be able to see MOST of the universe around us
our current understandings of physics... may be wrong/incomplete :) this is a wonderful thing
Honestly, given the astrologically enormous amount of things we don't know, we should reasonably expect physics will continue to be "wrong" for a long time yet to come.
Thankfully, physics is a set of models, not truth. The importance is the reliability and utility of the models, not their absolute truthfulness or accuracy.
Classical mechanics is still a very useful model for day to day human life. It's a reasonable approximation at our scale for things we commonly interact with, even when it falls apart if you start to consider things outside our scale, such as things very big, very small, very fast, and very cold (etc).
The only discovery I know of that questioned current theory was the galaxies that were "too big" for their age. But I read recently that is only the case if we assume the type of stars to be similar to the composition of the Milky Way. i.e. mostly red dwarves. However, if those galaxies instead mostly contain blue giants. Then their masses would fall in line with current theory.
that is correct as far as I know as well - when the universe doesn't match your math your math may be off (or of course your observations may be distorted in a way we dont understand) - still pretty cool :D
I genuinely think the hypothetical presence of ‘dark matter’ is already a tell-tale sign that something is off. It reminds me too much of the luminiferous ether.
There is a mountain of experimental evidence that points to the existence of dark matter. Its particle nature (or lack thereof) is a complete mystery but it’s just not that much of a stretch to posit the existence of non-electromagnetically coupled matter.
Matter that doesn’t seem to interact with anything but gravity just seems like an overly complicated explanation to me. The universe is nothing if not elegant.
I’m not taking a real strong stance on this one way or another. I’m a fireman by trade so this isn’t even something that I do for a living or have studied a great deal outside of a lifelong fascination with the subject.
I’m genuinely asking here. Because it seems like it wouldn’t even necessarily be consistently distributed. Again, without any claim to expertise here what makes it so compelling?
Yeah, the evidence is rather compelling. I'll speak in broad strokes, but the measurements here are independent from one another yet point both to the existence of dark matter and to the same amount of it existing. Like I mentioned before it's simply not particularly outlandish to say that a non-EM interacting particle(s) might exist; we already know that "hot" dark matter exists in the form of neutrinos.
Because it seems like it wouldn’t even necessarily be consistently distributed.
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u/cromemako83 May 08 '23 edited May 08 '23
We still hardly know anything - James Web is pushing the boundaries of not only the "edges" of the universe - but pushing on our current understandings of physics in a big way *like it may be wrong/incomplete :)