Arch2008

Why not simply classify planets by their mass? That's pretty much what we do with stars and black holes. The Earth’s mass is approximately 6.0 x 10^24 kg, so you could have this as a unit. This way you could tell at a glance which planets would have one MotE (mass of the Earth) and therefore be in our normal gravity range. This would apply to objects with less mass than a brown dwarf star but large enough to be a sphere and that orbit a star (a moon would then orbit a planet). So Venus would be something like a .91 MotE planet.

Thanks!

Yeah. Here's another picture of hyperspace from Astronomy.com

http://astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=6670

Carl Sagan once imagined a 2 dimensional world similar to a sheet of paper in which “flat-lander” inhabitants knew only of forward, backward, left and right. They had no idea that a third dimension, that was beyond their experience, touched their 2D universe at every point.

This is sort of the perception of our own universe. What you see isn’t necessarily what you get. Extra dimensions may be so narrow that no accessible frequency of electromagnetism can be reflected off them, so that they remain virtually invisible. However, there is hope of their discovery:

http://www.news.wisc.edu/13422

Hello Alan. Are you this Alan McDougall?

http://wwwalanmcdougall.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Unimaginable%20Vasrtness%20Of%20Our%20Beautiful%20Universe

It's refreshing to get a "Master of Wisdom's" insights on the universe. Scientific knowledge should never get too jaded. Thanks for the 'essay'.

How much spacetime is there now? Can it really be quantified? Time passes, but doesn't ever appear to 'grow', so perhaps one should conclude that space too is not actually growing simply because the universe expands. Gravity bends spacetime and dark energy stretches and elongates it. Perhaps there is no more spacetime now than there was right after the Big Bang. What if there was only ever one instance of spacetime? The energy of the Big Bang, gravity and dark energy have just 'molded' it for 13.7 billion years.

Newton knew the effect of gravity, he just didn't know what caused gravity. We can see the effects of spacetime, we just don't know what causes it.

Therefore I vote no, spacetime cannot disappear or vanish locally because it is singular.

"A controversial claim by Laura Mersini-Houghton is that it [the WMAP cold spot] could be the imprint of another universe beyond our own, caused by quantum entanglement between universes before they were separated by cosmic inflation.[14] Laura Mersini-Houghton said, "Standard cosmology cannot explain such a giant cosmic hole" and made the remarkable hypothesis that the WMAP cold spot is "… the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own." If true this provides the first empirical evidence for a parallel universe (though theoretical models of parallel universes existed previously). It would also support String theory. The team claims there are testable consequences for its theory. If the parallel universe theory is true there will be a similar void in the Northern hemisphere of the Celestial sphere.[1]"

The WMAP may provide other evidence of a multiverse. So we may be able to get information about its existence.

Thanks for your reply.

Scientists at NASA imaged material in an acretion disk falling into a black hole and determined that it could only be a spinning singularity. I'm just a laydude, but I figure that observation trumps theory. Thus, Kerr Ring Singularities are stable enough to exist. I posted here because this is speculation, although Sen's paper helps. I'm just glad they didn't move it to the trash can.

Here are the solutions by Ashoke Sen:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/9411/9411187v3.pdf

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2008/06/25/national/a100115D10.DTL&type=printable

Here's something old that's now news.

Neil Turok claims that the cosmological constant is artificially low and that this can be explained by a “cyclic” universe, that grows from a Big Bang and then collapses into a Big Crunch only to Big Bang again.

http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/~steinh/lambda16.pdf

Thus, our own universe may have existed in multiple iterations. Also, colliding energy branes in hyperspace may have caused the BB and this process may have created other universes.

http://universe-review.ca/F15-particle.htm#manifold

Scientists hope to use the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data to determine what may have happened prior to the BB. This may settle the matter. However, no hard evidence has been found…yet.

Well this isn’t exactly the response I had hoped for. I’ve posted this elsewhere and e-mailed it around. John H. Schwarz e-mailed me that it wouldn’t surprise him if this wasn’t true, and I got an e-mail from someone at NASA who said that this is just too hard to prove, currently. However, here is a link to a Russian paper from thirteen years ago:

http://www.mindspring.com/~cerebroscopic/Burinskii.html

and another from 2000:

http://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/physics/issues/fiz-00-24-3/fiz-24-3-10-0004-12.pdf

Specifically:

“In particular, A.Sen has obtained a generalization of the Kerr solution to low energy string theory [6]. It was shown [7] that the fields near the Kerr singular ring in this solution are very similar to the fields around fundamental heterotic string theory.”

The reason I was interested in this is simple. If General Relativity, which is not exactly a “soft science”, predicts strings, or at least string like structures, then all of this “Not even wrong” crap from Smolin and Woit about string theory can come to a screeching halt.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/02/061002crat_atlarge

Hello, I’m obviously not a scientist, but has anyone considered that a Kerr ring singularity might basically be a closed string?

-I mean it spins in one direction only and is incredibly flat and thin (one dimensional).

-Its size is on the order of Planck’s length, like a string.

-Its spinning surface is wriggling quantum foam and a string’s surface vibrates.

-A closed string vibrates to represent nuclear particles and the higher the frequency the more mass the particle has. Since they are one dimensional, if a google strings were crushed onto each other by gravity, then they would still look like one closed string (or ring singularity). However, the frequency of the vibration would multiply and become infinitely high, thus representing a particle of incredible mass, like a singularity.

-We already know that gravity can implode a star into neutrons (and perhaps even quarks), so why not even smaller basic structures?

Perhaps it is simply an amazing coincidence that the smallest building block in nature and the most massive natural structure are conceptually alike. It just seems to me that string theorists might like to know that General Relativity actually predicts string-like structures.