the universe

It's incredible.
If you think that the smaller part of that nebulosa is larger than our solar system... what a myst!
 
add to that we are looking into the past, how splendid is that!

If you ever get the chance to sail in a boat and see the wide open ocean, we can appreciate just how "big" the world is, then you realise that even our sun is 1 million times bigger, the concept of "big" goes out the window, how do you even begin to grasp something that big in terms of real world sizes!
 
You can't.

It is impossible for our brains to comprehend just how large scale something like the sun is, let alone the universe, because we have no way of visualizing something of those proportions, or those distances.

For example, our Milky Way is 946 billion millions miles in diameter... :beer:

Yeah.
 
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Space and time are comprehensible even on extremely large scales, but grasping 7 or 11 dimensions (who's counting) gets much tougher, e.g. is "moving" still defined and if so what does it mean in a physical or ontological sense (rather than a theoretical physical sense)? If there are other-worldly visitors who utilize other than spacetime for travel, would we be able to comprehend the mode of transport if it were shown to us (the physicist us)?
 
Speaking of outer space... 2001 : A Space Odyssey was on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) the other day. It was so cool seeing that again after not seeing it for so many years. "I'm sorry, Dave." :)
 
Tom Marshall said:
Speaking of outer space... 2001 : A Space Odyssey was on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) the other day. It was so cool seeing that again after not seeing it for so many years. "I'm sorry, Dave." :)
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Great film, Tom. I haven't seen it in ages. Gotta check it out again. I wonder if it's out on Blu-ray?
 
J Michael said:
Space and time are comprehensible even on extremely large scales, but grasping 7 or 11 dimensions (who's counting) gets much tougher, e.g. is "moving" still defined and if so what does it mean in a physical or ontological sense (rather than a theoretical physical sense)? If there are other-worldly visitors who utilize other than spacetime for travel, would we be able to comprehend the mode of transport if it were shown to us (the physicist us)?
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Imagine how long it would take to accelerate to the speed of light (if it were possible)... even at 7gs of continuous 24/hr daily exposure... how long would it take? OK... now once you GET to that speed you only have another 100K YEARS of travel at that speed to cross our own galaxy... Now look at some of the Hubble images... up until the last century people thought all those bright points of light were stars... and now we know that there are, in fact, some 50-100 BILLION more galaxies like our own... so when you see an image that shows two galaxies close to each other... and then you realize by our own perspective (of being able to see them as dots)... just what the distances are between us... and perhaps you START to grasp the enormity of the issue!

Few can grasp this even slightly... but some can. While it won't change anything here I think it's about the most interesting topic there is.
 
J Michael said:
Space and time are comprehensible even on extremely large scales, but grasping 7 or 11 dimensions (who's counting) gets much tougher, e.g. is "moving" still defined and if so what does it mean in a physical or ontological sense (rather than a theoretical physical sense)? If there are other-worldly visitors who utilize other than spacetime for travel, would we be able to comprehend the mode of transport if it were shown to us (the physicist us)?
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Theoretical physics is my favorite subject (other than film).

I wish they taught it at my school.

Anyway, anybody else obsessed with Google Earth's "sky mode"?

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/08/explore-sky-in-google-earth.html
 
Yes.

I've gone on Wiki-binges about the string theory and m-theory and all of the different dimensional hypotheses. It's mind-blowing. The one thing I don't understand is how anybody originally decided on numbers like "11" for how many dimensions there are.
 
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