Alan McDougall

Receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, because they are embedded into the fabric of the universe that is expanding and accelerating at near c

OK lets try half?

My difficulty with an infinite eternal universe is the arrow of time would be pushed back to the infinite past, entropy could not happen and we would never had reached the moment in time we now exist in A athletic competition must have a start line or the expectant spectators would wait for ever for them to pass in front of them at the finish line

Why is our universe asymmetrical instead of symmetrical. After all the same quantities of matter and antimatter were created in the moment of the big? Luckily for us the antimatter "went elsewhere" and we live in a universe dominated by matter The matter/antimatter scenario of the early universe should have annihilated each other leaving the universe a soup of game rays, no stars galaxies,etc Alan

I simple cant rap my mind around the fact that some quasars are said to be receding at 6 C and are 14.5 light years from earth.? Please enlighten me? Alan

Mass/gravity effects time, thus do we age faster on the moon than we do on earth? Alan

If we could dig a hole a 1 000 miles deep, what effect would it have on our weight,if we compared our weights from that measured on bathroom type scale. (bottom and surface)? I was a mining Engineer so this led me to propose this question (please overlook the ramifications of heat lava etc) Alan

OK assume the void in which the earth finds itself in is absoloute zero, how long would it take for the earth to dissipate all its energy, reach total entropy and freeze solid Come on guys you know what I mean, total decay Alan

Why never", I know absolute zero cant happen, but the earth could cool down in a trillion trillion google years to just a tiny fraction of absolute zero, Even hadrons must ultimately decay and vanish in an estimated 35 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 years

Greatings I am new? My question is east to stated but more difficult to answer (accurately) Assume we could remove the earth from any other heat source in the universe. Leave it somewhere in a hypothetical totally empty vacuum , except for itself of course How long would it take the earth, to dissipate all its heat by entropy, and freeze down to absolute zero, right down to its iron core Peace Alan

Hey Guys All great responses john5746 I realy really like yours, that is profound Alan

Hey Guys, I joined a long while back but did not participate. I know bringing up the idea of the possibility of an intelligent designer of the universe on a science forum is not exactly a good idea. Anyway I see that it could fit into the bracket of pseudoscience So lets bounce off the topic ans see where it goes if anywhere My case (in a totally a non irreligious way) could be the exactitude of the cosmological constants, that if even one differed minutely we would never have come into existence Alan

Greetings people, Some quasars are believed to be 14 billion light years from us and receding at greater than the speed of light. I still can’t rap my silly little brain around this, how are we earthling sitting out here somewhere in the universe observing light from an object that might no longer exist. The 14 billion light year distance seems impossibility to little me Please help this little tiny entity Take Care ALAN

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." "READ THIS" "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." (DAMN STUPID SPECULATIONS LIKE MINE) "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. "IS IT POSSIBLE TO IMAGINE AN IMPOSSIBILTY?" A Class I impossibility is something that doesn't violate the known laws of physics, and could conceivably become possible decades or a century from now. Back in 1800, airplanes might have been on that list, just as "Star Trek"-style cloaking devices are today. Class II is reserved for technologies that sit on the very edge of our understanding of physics, and might be realized thousands or millions of years in the future. Faster-than-light spaceships, wormholes and backward time travel are on Kaku's Class II list. Class III impossibilities . Buillding perpetual motion machines and predicting the future are the two broad topics that get a Class III rating in Kaku's book. (But if you can go back into the past, couldn't you in effect predict or change the future? Well, maybe not.) Scientists are working on ways to make whatever you put inside a specially shaped hunk of metamaterial invisible - but only in certain wavelengths. Quantum teleportation is indeed a reality already - but what's teleported is actually information rather than, say, "Star Trek" crew members or characters from the movie "Jumper." (THUS INCLUDED IN MY BAD ESSAY) Even backward causality is the subject of serious research - but there's likely to be a yet-to-be-discovered clause in the laws of physics that will rule out time paradoxes. Comments?

OK My badly written essay, so full of grammatical errors has some speculations in it. For the life of me, why do you not allow original thought on this forum? Einstein and Newton would have been most unwelcome here. Must we just sit on the back of scientists that came before us? Sort of standing on their shoulders instead of our own There was I little crazy man who speculated on riding on a light beam, what nonsense is this. “He was no less than Einstein”. Ok, if I post anything in future I will enclose myself in a box of present scientific knowledge, never ever dare to offend the lofty establishment for fear of their wrath. Heck, maybe by doing this I can avoid being burned at the stake. When Hubble said the universe was more than our galaxy, he at first received vitriolic derision. “The Milky Way was the whole universe stupid” they said. The mortal Alan

Klaynos The CERN paticle collider decidely is a microscope, it looks at the minute or tiny using particles instead of electrons or photons Micro (small)-scope(observe or view). I am informed in science/physics but you guys dont want to give me space to ground myself into the forum. My essay "The unimaginable vastness of the universe" has been posted on the numeruous forum I have visted or joined without once the negative comments I unkindly received here. It was worded by me in a manner that peak the interest ofthe lesser informed hat visit the site. My original post that started this thread was not speculative read it again. (it contained facts) If science were confined to present facts and not allowed to speculate we might still be living in caves trying in vain to crack a nut with a rock. Other nonscience people visit the forum so I worded my thread to be of interest, now you have moved it into the esotic were it does not belong. Just wisper the word and I will excuse my unwelcome presence Alan

Why the heck move it?? Now any speculation about the universe becomes psuedoscience CERN most "poweful microcrope" in search of the "God Particle" And if we are not allowed to speculate!! what is the reason for this forums existence??

Sorry John!! Regards Alan

Good morning people, The 12 odd ball problem! Here is a statement of the task. There are twelve balls, all the same size, shape and color. All weigh the same, except that one ball is minutely different in weight, but not noticeably so in the hand. Moreover, the odd ball might be "lighter" or "heavier" than the others. Your challenge was to discover the odd ball and whether it is lighter or heavier. You must use a beam balance only, and you are restricted to "three weighing operations" Alan

I leave it at your elevated level of perception, anyway I gave it a bash "Demigods." I hope this problem of deductive reasoning has not already been put to the forum If so please disregard.

Greetings, Try this with a few friends next time you are in a group. Ask one of the groups to put their one arm firmly horizontal with fist lightly clenched. (The one with the arm outstretched, must not know what the group is trying to achieve) The whole group must think beautiful happy peaceful loving glorious thought at the person selected secretly to outstretch their arm in the correct manner. What the arm carefully for a brief moment and then try your uttermost to project hateful evil depraved nasty horrible hurtful ugly thought at your poor victim, look carefully at the outstretched arm. What you will see when beautiful thoughts are projected the arm stays firm and horizontal to the floor. When you project bad thoughts, the arm will wilt our sink a little. Try it. You can reverse the order negative thoughts first and it should still work. Try it sometime and report back. Regards. Oh!! while we are about it try to think of two shapes one inside the other "Please dont think about it simply draw what comes into your mind "immediately" after reading this" Alan

Maybe I should have thought more carefully about the title of my thread. Take mount Everest, one simply cannot conceive of its immensity unless you try to clime the monster. Ask any mountaineer and they will tell you ,even after climbing, it remains beyond conception. My grandson who has climbed the much smaller mountain of Kilimanjaro, says it remaines surreal and so huge he could not rap his mind around it vastness. As a South African where one can easily go to a park and see a huge bull Elephant, one must stand side by side to appreciate it colossal massiveness. To say you can do the same with a universe which may be infinite is just silly Regards Alan I acknowledge that the small scale universe is also difficult to comprehend, but it is really all about the huge number of viruses/ microbes etc, you must contend with. A single drop of water contains more atoms than there are stars are in the known Universe

People I insist the universes immensity is beyond human comprehension. Go to this link for the slide picture http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/0404/0404feature_slide1.html "I have visted other forums, but few jump in and cratch their heads for something negative to say, without giving a newbie the space to to ground themselves" . I see I am "closed minded", man!! how far off reality can one get, you make this assumption on my very first thread knowing absoltuley nothing about me. Just wisper the word and I will go elswhere! by Josh Gough (How many stars are there in the universe?) No one can ascertain the answer to this question with absolute certainty due the immensity of the universe and fact that light from vastly distant galaxies has not even had time to reach the Earth. The reason for this is that even though light travels at approximately 300,000 kilometers per second in a vacuum it will still take billions upon billions of years for it to travel from the outer limits of the universe across the seemingly infinite distance to planet Earth. Yet, in 2003 Australian astronomers set out to answer this very question to the best of their abilities. They used two of the world's most powerful telescopes to observe 10,000 visible galaxies and then extrapolated this data out to the edge of the known universe. The number they estimated was an astonishing 70 sextillion, written as 70,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. 70 sextillion is 7 followed by twenty-two zeroes! More importantly, is there any way for us to even begin to get our minds around a number so large as this? There is if we descend to the Earth for a few moments and use our imaginations. Imagine that you are laying on the beach at night, looking up at the expanse of the sky and stars above you, amazed by the surreal feeling of imbibing the cosmos. Countless grains of sand stretch out in all directions beneath you. Hanging in the sky, the moon acts as a sentinel shining its light on the clouds that creep by it like apparitions. Incessantly the waves roll to the shore in curls, spirals, and tumbles and then recede, pulled by the tugging reins of gravity from the moon. Mesmerized by this thought you walk toward the tide and begin to dig your ankles into the sand beneath your feet as the water splashes over them. Burying your feet in countless minuscule grains of sand as you fixate on those dots of light piercing the night's canopy, you pause to ponder a question that enters your mind. You think to yourself, "What if I were to walk every beach of the earth, digging my feet into every sand bar, then lay myself down and drag my fingers through every smoothed plane of wet sand to build countless sand castles. How many grains of sand could I count? What if I then were to traverse every cubic millimeter of every desert on this planet Earth, diving into sand dunes and shielding myself from devastating sand storms, but through pure magic were able to tally up every last grain of sand on my feet, every grain surrounding me in the dunes, and every grain blown violently at me from the punishing winds? Surely, I would find that there must be more grains of sand on this planet Earth than there are stars in the universe." The Australian researchers would say that you were very diligent yet also very wrong. They estimated that there are at least ten times as many stars in the known visible universe as there are grains of sand along every single beach, and in every single desert on the planet Earth. Inevitably this inspires us to wonder about the possibility of life elsewhere in the cosmos. Dr. Simon Driver, who spoke at the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union about this calculation, said this when asked about this possibility, "Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable." Somewhere on a distant planet, with far fewer grains of sand on his or her own world than exist stars in the universe, may lie an intelligent being peering out into the universe amazed by the very same possibilities that you and I have dared to imagine.

Sar, You look at tiny things, then tell me what is the most powerful microscope on earth? Oh I am "not going the god route by the way", however, to really comprehend the vastness of the universe you would need to view it from a great obsever platform, something just like your microscope in reverse.