This article was originally published in The conversation. The publication contributed the article on the space.com’s Expert Sounds: Op-ed & Insights.
About a century ago, scientists struggled to restore such a contradiction to Albert Einstein theory of general relatives.
Published in 1915and widely accepted worldwide by physicists and mathematicians, believed in the theory The universe static – unchanged, unstable and immobile. In short, Einstein believes the size and form of the universe today, more or less, the same size and shape it is often.
But to see astronomers in the night sky in the distance galaxies with a strong telescope, they saw signs of the universe. New observations suggested the opposite – that’s it before, Instead, expand.
Scientists soon know Einstein’s theory never said the universe should be static; Theory can also support the increasing universe. In fact, by using the same mathematical tools given to Einstein’s theory, scientists make new models showing the universe, indeed, Dynamic and Progress.
I spent decades trying to understand the general relative, including my current job As a physics professor Teaching courses In the subject. I know your head around the idea of a constant raising of the universe can feel scary – and about the challenge points to your natural intuition how things work. For example, it is difficult to imagine something like the universe without everyone, but physics says that is reality.
The space between galaxies
First, let’s explain what “expansion means.” In the world, “Expand” means something to grow older. And about the universe, that’s true, different from. Expansion can also mean “everything is away from us,” also true about the universe. Point a telescope to the remote galaxies and they all see to keep us away from.
What else, is more than they are, the faster they move. The galaxies as well as keeping each other away. So it is more accurate to say that everyone in the universe takes away from everythingall at one time.
This idea is not subtle but critical. It’s easy to think about creating the universe like explosions of fireworks: start with A Big BangAnd then all the galaxies of the universe fly in all directions from some central point.
But that an analogy is not right. It just doesn’t mean that this lie means that the universe expansion comes from a place, without it, but it also suggests that the Galaxies are the things that work, which is not perfectly accurate.
Less galaxies turned away from each other – this is the space between galaxies, the fabric of the universe himself, that forever up to date. In other words, it is not the galaxies of themselves acting in the universe; It’s more than that The universe itself they were carried away far away while it raised.
A common analogy is imagining that hits some dots on top of a wolf. As you blow the air in the wolf, it will expand. Because the dots are tied to the balloon, they are getting better. Although they appear to work, the dots actually stay where you put it, and the distance between them is better than expanding well.
Now think of the dots as galaxies and the wolf as a fabric of the universe, and you start taking the picture.
Unfortunately, while this analogy is a great start, no details also gets correct.
The 4th measure
Important to any analogy is an understanding of its limits. Some mistakes are clear: a balloon is slight enough to suit your hand – no is the universe. Another mistake is more creative. The balloon has two parts: the content of it and the content is full of its air.
These two parts of the balloon distinctly illustrated differently in math language. The face of the balloon is two-dimensional. If you have walked into it, you can keep, back, back, or to the right, but you can’t go or give up without leaving the face.
Now it looks like we’re naming in four directions here – ahead, back, to the left and right – but that’s the actions of two actions in two basic passage. That makes the upper two-dimensional – the length and width.
The wolf’s content, on the other hand, is three-dimensional, so you can act free in any direction, including or up-the length and length.
Here is the confusion. The item we think as “center” in the balloon is a point in an area inside it, in the area of the air below the surface.
But in this analogy, the universe is more like the Latex surface of the wolf. The balloon-filled balloon has no corresponding to our universe, so we can’t use that part of analogous – the things only in the face.
So ask, “Where is the center of the universe?“Is it like asking,” Where is the center of the balloon? “No one is not one. You can travel along the balloon in any direction, as much as you want, and you can’t reach a place you can call it.
In the same way, you can travel in any direction in the universe and never find its center because, like the face of the wolf, it is There is no one.
Part of the cause it can be challenged to understand is because the universe is characterized by the language of mathematics. The face of the balloon has two dimensions, and the balloon contains three, but the universe exists in four dimensions. Because it’s not just about how things work in space, but how they move on time.
Our brain is wired to think about space and time separately. But in the universe, they are united in a cloth, called “space. “That merger changes the way the universe works related to our intuition expectations.
And this explanation does not even begin to answer the question of what one thing is may expand forever – Scientists still try puzzles on which powers expand.
So ask about the center of the universe, we face the limits of our intuition. The answer we find – everything, which extends everywhere, all once – a look at how weird our universe is.
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