Universe 'likely to grow forever'

[doodab]

http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/dimensions.pdf

Deep stuff.

[TimberWolf]

I'm having trouble imagining more than one time dimension too.

[DaveB]

On the other hand.

There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.

And

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.

[sasguru]

We're just a bunch of monkeys on a rock, I don't believe we have the capacity to comprehend the real answers.

You might be a monkey on a rock, doesn't mean the rest of us are...

HTH monkey boy

[SupremeSpod]

You might be a monkey on a rock, doesn't mean the rest of us are...

HTH, monkey boy

ftfy

[EternalOptimist]

The place where you were born is millions of miles away from where you are now. The place you are now is many miles from the place you were when you first started reading this post.

If there is no time, then you must have been in two places at once. That means your body is millions of miles wide, you were dead at the same time as you were alive and you were drunk at the same time as you were sober. There is no experience, so experience points are an error, therefore there is no elite. I spent many years playing elite. If there is no elite, i get those years back so therefore time exist.

[scooterscot]

Simply not true. The "flow" of time might be attributed to human perception, but even if you view the universe as an unchanging four dimensional whole the time dimension is special. Without it's specialness, concepts such as "the speed of light" (which limits the ability of one point in the continuum to affect what happens at another) couldn't exist in the form they do.

Why do you think a universe that exhibits change is an extra dimension?

The universe is not linear, our perception of it is, this is what we call time. That does not mean it exists.

The universe is changing, there is even suggestion that the speed of light has changed since the first structures came into being.

As it says in the dictionary time "the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future"

The problem with that is there is nothing to stop me recreating the events of yesterday exactly as they were, today; how would you know the difference?

[Doggy Styles]

What's beyond the outer reaches of matter in the universe? Does that space go on forever? I hope not, it makes my bottom go funny trying to imagine it.

[scooterscot]

What's beyond the outer reaches of matter in the universe? Does that space go on forever? I hope not, it makes my bottom go funny trying to imagine it.

Now that is a question.

I've always thought that the day mankind overcomes the engineering challenges to build a craft to reach such distances you'd find a little label that reads 'made in China'

[TimberWolf]

What's beyond the outer reaches of matter in the universe? Does that space go on forever? I hope not, it makes my bottom go funny trying to imagine it.

No. The standard way to think about it is that we are on the outside of an inflating (4 dimensional) balloon. Everything is receding away from everything else and every point is at the centre of the universe. Nothing is outside the balloon. Not even nothing, it doesn't exist.