How Deep Does the Multiverse Go? 202
StartsWithABang writes Our observable Universe is a pretty impressive entity: extending 46 billion light-years in all directions, filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies and having been around for nearly 14 billion years since the Big Bang. But what lies beyond it? Sure, there's probably more Universe just like ours that's unobservable, but what about the multiverse? Finally, a treatment that delineates the difference between the ideas that are thrown around and explains what's accepted as valid, what's treated as speculative, and what's completely unrelated to anything that could conceivably ever be observed from within our Universe.
Re:Math? (Score:5, Informative)
Because the expansion of space is independent of the light traveling through it, and the light that has just arrived came to us in some cased from objects that are now much further away than 14B lightyears
Re:Math? (Score:5, Informative)
Given a sufficiently large distance between two discrete points in the universe, the rate of hubble expansion between those points can exceed C.
http://www.universetoday.com/1... [universetoday.com]
You can think of it this way:
You have a ruler-- You can only move along the ruler at at most, 100 units per second. (we will use this as an analogue for going C) However, for every second, for every 1000 units distance on the ruler, a new unit of distance magically appears. If you have a distance between 2 points that is sufficiently large, (In this case, in excess of 1,000,000 units) more than 100 units will be introduced every second, which is faster than your maximum rate of traversal-- So you will NEVER reach the target-- it receedes faster than you can get to it.
http://www.universetoday.com/1... [universetoday.com]
Re:Math? (Score:4, Informative)
Most people can understand this on their own, but since you need some hand holding:
Imagine an ant on a rubber band. Mark the start position with a dot, let the ant walk for 5 seconds, mark the end position with a dot. The distance between the two dots will be greater if the rubber band was stretching while the ant was walking on it.
This is just one person's (Score:5, Informative)
Re:not true, IIRC (Score:4, Informative)
nonsense statement...had to read twice to be sure, but this is just technobabble and not based on scientific definitions of "space" and "light"
That's weird, I understood it perfectly as an (admittedly somewhat simplified) explanation of how space expands and how light travels through that expanding space. Don't blame your lack of understanding on what you imagine to be the GP's lack of clarity.
in other words, **NO** there is not 'light' hitting us from 14B ly+
No-one said there is. There is light hitting us which was emitted by objects which are now* more than 14 billion light years away.
*for a given value of "now," that is, but I'm not sure I'd enjoy trying to explain that to you.
Re:Wait a minute... (Score:5, Informative)
For fuck's sake. How many times must similar questions be asked?
http://science.slashdot.org/co... [slashdot.org]
These are all basically the same question, which reduces to "I'm going to assume that the people who spend their lives working on this can't do elementary arithmetic". Instead, they're working within the strongest theoretical framework they can encounter. In this case, that framework is general relativity and, specifically, Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker spacetimes. A subset of the FLRW spacetimes are the de Sitter and anti-de Sitter spaces. These have exponential expansion or exponential collapse, and as one might imagine, this means that if you somehow attached little radar transceivers to fixed points in (anti-)de Sitter space then the distance between them will change far greater than the speed of light would imply. There is no contradiction here, because in general relativity, the "speed of light" means something propagating along null geodesics, paths along which the observed travel time is zero. Null geodesics basically map out spacetime. This is then entirely and totally distinct from any conception of "space expanding faster than light" - the question becomes meaningless.
Re:Still nonsense (Score:3, Informative)
For the love of fucking GOD.
http://science.slashdot.org/co... [slashdot.org]
Read the fucking comments, you cretin, and try and avoid labelling something as "nonsense" which you evidently don't fucking understand.
Re:Still nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
Although he is a bit abusive I'd cut the AC a bit of slack; your question/comment has been asked several times on this thread and in past ones. The short answer is that space itself can expand faster than the speed of light and so events we observe from a long time ago can be further than c times the time it took for the light to get here. Even events occurring 'now' from regions in space expanding away from us faster than c will eventually become observable to us, although the concepts of distance and time and 'now' can get really tricky under General Relativity. It is all prescribed by General Relativity, or more properly, by some of the easier solutions of the General Relativity field equation which appear to apply to our Universe. You can't use intuition from Special Relativity when the distances and times involved get cosmological. Sorry I don't have a good reference right now, but it's all in Wikipedia (try General Relativity or Hubble Constant or Age of the Universe, maybe). I looked it all up a while back when I got burned (on /.) using my Special Relativity intuition where it didn't apply.