Did anyone see the BBC4 prog tonight " What universe are we in"
Hard to take in (especially after just having my brain mashed by attempting to watch Brian Cox explain time travel)

--but Im fascinated by the basic idea that our universe is just another mathematical structure, and one of an infinite number of parallel universes . Not all the scientists agreed on this 'multiverse' theory , and it didnt sound like it was exactly easy to prove but I like the idea that 'in the beginning' all the particles (from where I dont know) get together randomly in every possible configuration -----so ultimately youre bound to get identically put together universes here and there.

Just because you get 'duplicated' universes after they were initially randomly 'configurated' , I wonder if that only applies to the 'natural' structure of the universe . I dont see how it could be applied to living creatures. I could if they were all duplicated there identically at the onset, but theyre not , they evolve dont they, so surely you wouldnt expect any 'identical/parallel' universe , to remain identical/parallel ?
Yey part of the time the scientists made it sound as if that was so. ie I will be the same in another universe somewhere in space/time
Sorry if thats somewhat jumbled , but it was all so hard, my head is nearly melted!
Anyone else watch and form any views?

I take the opinion that if (and that can be a big IF at times) our universe exists, there is absolutely very little chance that another universe doesn't exist.

It the old ripped paper question. If you rip a piece of paper is that always going to produce a unique shape that has never occurred before?

The "big IF" is that our universe most certainly doesn't exist as we perceive it. We have a very small number of senses and those that we have aren't acute. Eg, we can't see magnetism, we can't see gravity, yes, we have methods to show that they exist but we firmly believe they don't exist as well, we don't believe they have any substance. We choose to call these "fields" or "forces" but that is purely because we can't see or feel them.

In our little "universe" we have an absolute rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light but we have proof that some things do travel faster than the speed of light. That is our total naivety that light is that important, I put it in the same category that the proof of alcohol was measured against ethanol because that was considered to be the purest spirit, it wasn't.

Well judging on what I heard tonight, it would seem logical that if you ripped an infinite number of sheets, then sooner or later the ripped shapes would match ?

I agree we show only a small number of senses, but I believe we all have far more , most of us just havent developed our potential yet.

What you said about some things travelling faster than the speed of light is more or less what the scientists were saying was one of the main problems in proving the multiverse theory.

If you reckon there are more parallel universes, do you buy into the 'indenticalness' part?

They haven't even got the theory of evolution right yet. Only the other day is was disclosed by a scientist that we were never evolved from the apes, and we have always been an upright species not half bent or on all fours.

Whatever their next programme of interest is to them, it will never stop because it is impossible to discover what or how it all started. The very first atom, grain of dust to whatever was the beginning of all things, had to come from somewhere, but where ? I find that simple fact far more staggering.

I also believe we are nearer the end of our development rather than the beginning with regard to natural instincts. Our sixth sense has virtually gone, but with reference to DD, his remark about not being able to see magnetism or gravity for example, to my mind is key.

We cannot see the wind, we cannot touch the roar of the sea, we cannot smell the sun, we cannot hold the air , but our brain knows about them and retains that information. We cannot hold our memory, we cannot touch sadness, or laughter , we can see into the future, and remember the past. EVERYTHING we have lived through, thought about, done, heard etc. is retained in our memory, and where does that memory go to ? We can't see it, hold it, but it's there, a data record of our life . That is the part that will never be erased. The brain will die but the memory won't.......think about it !

We don't know very much in reality, and an excursion into the depths of what we call space, is of no consequence.If they found a form of living creature in another galaxy, they would shit themselves and in the process of scientists trying to make communications, planet earth will be falling apart at the seams to probably the extinction of all life. We are well on the way to that now. A more cruel race, could not possibly exist. They're about to go deep sea mining now and destroy some of the most precious species that have managed to survive millions of years.

There is also talk of sending nuclear waste up to the sun to get rid of it. Fire it into the sun ! They're all a load of nut jobs, who clearly continue to spend their time looking for another avenue to do more harm.

It's funny how scientist can come up with these ideas of time travel and different universes , life in another galaxy etc. and be thought of as highly intelligent. Little Joe down the road, who isn't a scientist but is pretty smart will say the same things but is classified as mentally ill because there's a 'tick box' for that sort of thing.

Can't have one without the other.



And following on from that, the atom is only a concept, there is no such thing physically.



Our brain converts what it has perceived about them into a form it can deal with then stores that information, whether that impression pertains to reality is questionable. Our brains do a lot of conversions just out of a hope it thinks it understands when invariably it doesn't.

We might be perceiving our whole universe in a negative impression. What we think has substance might have none and what we think has little or no-substance may actually be substance. Or in simpler terms, what we think of as substance could be bubbles in a soup of something else, this closes a lot of loopholes in the current theories - welcome to the ether.

As someone who is interested in such subjects and who's brain has a lot of catching up to do to 'understand' I read with great interest your views. The idea that what we believe isn't actually the truth, and that the reverse is the truth I find this interesting. So believing that something has substance when in reality it doesn't - is this due to what we have been taught and therefore the teachers are in effect brain washing us either intentionally or not? And if we believe that something has substance, and think we have the proof, is there a parallel universe where the opposite is true? Thinking of yin and yang, and that everything, by law/nature has an opposite, does this apply to absolutely everything? And is the opposite of everything a mirror image?

Black holes I don't understand...yet!

I cant understand that DD . Surely parallel is only a loose word indicating the position/direction of something tracking alongside another . Doesnt have to mean they have to remain identical, surely ,just because they started out at the same time in the same shared way.
The multiverses can't all be in the same position out there (except those in another time) so each may be subjected to varying forces we may not even know about yet,which could change them( unless of course we blindly accept that 'space' is constant in every way, which we cant know )


Have to say I LOVE the 'are we in the soup or the bubble ' . Have thought about the concept, but never been able to express it .

Iam in the universe of 'Lynne' it's lovely.

As it revolves all around me... Lol.

We all like to visit the universe of 'me' lolli . Was going to say 'but we cant control even that' except of course we can if we close our eyes.--- "I think, therefore I am " then adding all the frills you want

Interesting but beyond me all this

The idea of a clockwork universe has been discredited now. Randomness seems to be built into the subatomic structure of the universe. I think this means that two identical universes existing - even given infinite universes - is impossible. The randomness would make them diverge, even if at one particular point two WERE briefly identical.

There is more than one 'infinity' by the way. Some are bigger than others, and I suspect you'd have to dig into Georg Cantors work on this to establish whether an infinite number of universes means that duplicates are implied. I did plough through this stuff once and was never quite the same after it. Good luck if you get into it though. I was glad to forget it!

That's the point, to be infinite it must have everything.

Cantor was looking at set theory and numbers, his basic premise (although probably not stated as such) is that if something is infinitely long but doesn't include everything (eg the set of even numbers) then that shows there is more than one infinite set of numbers and therefore more than one infinity.

Following on from that is you look at the infinitely long set of numbers that divide by ten this must be nine times smaller than the set of numbers that don't divide by ten but both are infinite sets.

All that is fine for sets and numbers but you don't have to branch far away in mathematics to find asymptotes where infinity, zero and minus infinity are all one and the same value as indeed is every other number and that is more realistic of what general infinity is.

Basically there are different mathematical models of infinity that can be used for different purposes but these are only tools and models, you have to branch into pure philosophy to see what general infinity is and there it is everything with nothing missing.

I can't understand all that, DD. So maybe you can explain 'gravity'.

Gravity is what keeps the planets and stars in orbit, but where is the gravity from ? There must be more than earth with gravity, but when the astronauts leave our atmosphere, there doesn't appear to be any gravitational pull. So, what's that all about ?

If there's another universe there must be gravity elsewhere besides this universe. Maybe everything will crash onto each other one day ?

Two universes can't crash into each other, if they could they must both be part of the same universe.

Another universe may not have gravity.

There is always gravity in our universe never mind where you are but as gravity is dependent on the distance between objects and the mass of both of the objects, it gets very small quite quickly with height for a small object such as an astronaut.

Don't forget the sun and the moon are the primary forces that drive our tides. Even though the sun is about 400 times further away from earth than the moon, the gravitational pull of the sun is roughly in the same order as the gravitational pull of the moon.

Astronauts in the space station are relatively weightless mostly because they are in orbit, the gravitational force is cancelled out by the centripetal force from their fast orbital rotation. If they stopped rotating round earth they would be both be drawn towards earth very fast. The gravitational pull at the height of the space station is about 90% of that at ground level.

On a slowish trip to the moon gravity must be very interesting, you will be dragged around quite a bit by the moon as it orbits earth and you.

Looking at the sun and the moon, they would appear to be much the same size, even though they are not, and if they were any different in the size that they are , we wouldn't have total solar or lunar eclipses .

As someone else stated on wiki, a long time ago :

"The moon is the perfect size and distance from the earth to exert gravitational pull that controls the tides. The earth is the perfect distance from the sun to support water and therefore life. Nearer the sun it would be too hot, further away it would be too cold."

Add to that night and day ,so perfect is the timing of the rotation of these planets we can consistently calculate sunrise and sunset in every corner of this world without fault.

Mathematics it is, but for all this accidental perfection on such an incredible scale, we as humans are not the greatest accident, but we as a creation in the grand scheme of things, are pretty wonderful !

I can believe that there are other universes ad infinitum, but do we really need to know ? Our lifespan is very short in comparison to the vastness of space.

We have a galaxy, we have all the planets asteroids, a moon and a sun. I don't believe there could be more than one sun, which sustains life as we know it, if we believe in the 'accident' theory. Such accidents can't repeat perfection.

You have the cart before the horse Granny. It is only 'perfection' to us because we have evolved to fit what we've got.

Had the earth, for instance, been 100% covered in oceans we would all be aquatic. Had it been colder, we would all be covered in fur and so on. We don't even know if life has emerged on planets like Mars or even the gas giants like Saturn or Jupiter.

A number of stars have now been discovered to have planets, some of them of a size and distance from the star to suggest they might have liquid water and be like earth. It is even possible that with more sensitive instruments that the composition of their atmosphere can be detected.

It is almost certain that life will have emerged on some of these, and estimates made of how likely it is to do so. The result of this 'guesstimate' is, from memory, tens of thousands for our galaxy. The famous 'Fermi question' - "Well, where are they?" - is probably best answered by the enormous distances involves and the universal speed limit of 'c', the speed of light.

It is ludicrously arrogant to suppose we are the only lifeform to exit anywhere.

Ex "had the earth been covered in water we would be aquatic or if colder covered in fur"

Or possibly we wouldnt exist as the millions and millions of random evolutionary changes may not have occured

Evolutionary changes are far from 'random' they occur in response to changes in the environment. If the world got slowly cooler, for instance, the creatures in it would evolve ways of living with it, fur, thicker skin, more subcutaneous fat etc. Read your Darwin.

Its a mixture of randomness and evolvement eg if it gets colder something with hair will grow more hair but prior to that there had been random changes and some creatures evolved hair which kept them warm and survival of the fittest kept that strain going.

Well, the Moon was once a lot closer than it is now, and is moving away from us thanks to the effect of our tides on it. When it was nearer the tides would have been bigger than they are now and eclipses would have lasted a lot longer and there would have been more of them. In the future, it will appear too small to cover the sun's disc.

We could calculate day length whatever speed the planet is rotating, and do so for planets like Mercury (about 60 earth days I think) to the gas giants Saturn and Jupiter both of which have day lengths less than half of ours

You have missed the point about 'perfection' too and placed the cart firmly in front of the horse. We have adapted to the conditions on the earth, so of course they suit us to perfection. Were the earth to have been all water, and a bit further away so the surface was always frozen, we might have evolved as water breathing sea bottom creatures very different from ourselves. Perhaps something resembling a slug with intelligence. That too might be claiming it was inconceivable that such perfection could exist anywhere else in the universe!

That it exist at all is awesome, if indeed it does. We may well be living in a simulation. One could not tell. There is an excellent paper by Nick Bostrom exploring this possibility in some detail and he draws some startling conclusions in it. Rather more startling than anything that you'll see in 'The Matrix'. If you're interested you'll find it via google easily enough.

If you are interested in the nature of reality, Immanuel Kant's "Critique of pure reason" is the place to go. It's fascinating stuff but be warned it's hard going! His 'Noumenon' - the 'real' reality that exists, is bizarre beyond belief, being devoid of things like time and causality for instance.

While the moons orbit is being accelerated by tidal friction, transferring the earths rotational momentum to the moon, the moon's is also being decelerated by the solar wind/energy. I would find it hard to believe that as the moon travels away from earth that there is not a chance it will end up in a equilibrium between the two forces, obviously there will be quite a bit of overshoot and oscillation at first.

The equilibrium will not be fully stable because of the sun's variable activity and continual decay so the moon will have lost earth orbit before the sun dies.

The good news is that as time progresses the earth's rotational decay won't be accelerated by the moon as it is now although the sun will continue to slow us down, the solar effects on earth may be less than that on the moon because we have an atmosphere.

I think the moon is a long way from equilibrium. It is still moving away from the Earth and has a long way to go. It will probably end up as another planet around the sun. I wonder what a tideless earth will be like? Let us hope that its orbit, when it leaves the earth, will not intersect the Earths.

Now that would REALLY depress house prices.

My tide tables have been showing the tides increasing every year..thats why they built the Thames Barrage

I just watched Which Universe Are We In? on catch-up television. As usual, I’m fascinated by such programmes, but lose the plot when they try to explain complicated stuff. I was never very good at maths and apparently it’s ALL about maths.
Anyhow, what struck a chord was when the scientist at the end said how lucky we are as humans to have reached the stage where we can begin to understand and speculate on the nature of life, the universe and everything – even if there’s very little we can do to influence events.
He said we may be tiny specks in the universe (or multiverse, as the case may be), but in terms of what we have learned, we are giants. What an encouraging thought.

I doubt your tide tables show increasing tides. I doubt they show increasing sea level either, or sinking land, which are the reasons the Thames Barrage was built.

London has three reasons to worry. The South East is sinking as the North west rises - a response to the end of the ice age. Sea levels are rising due to global warming meaning the earth's ice is melting, and thirdly, global warming is likely to cause more frequent intense storms and there is the possibility of bigger storm surges.

Sea levels are rising by about 3mm a year. This corresponds to losing about 1,500 cubic kilometres of ice per year. Far to small to show up in tide tables which in any case are referred to mean sea level, not any absolute sea level.

One interesting point is the Greenland ice sheet. This enormous mass of ice has a large gravitational effect on the surrounding water pulling it into a 'heap' around Greenland. When it melts, although sea level will rise globally, the sea level as far away as the UK will fall slightly. Mind you, London and Liverpool and the Wirral will be well under water by then thanks to Antarctica melting. We will all be dead of old age by then, thank God.

You don't believe in God ! (with a capitol G) . Therefore no need to believe anything you say now.

What a wonderful piece of logical deduction, Granny!

I know what you mean though. I am equally suspicious of people who believe in an imaginary friend. One wonders what other nonsense they hold to be true.

Such a condescending waffling ---- Ex!!

God=universe
universe=God

Worshipping it won't make any difference to anything apart from relieving the guilt of sinners.

Imaginary friend ? That just shows how your concept is completely wrong , uneducated and ignorant. Another reason to diss your forced opinions on anything.