Originally Posted by catachresis /img/forum/go_quote.gif My Uncle Andy--God 'rest him--was a pretty radical theoretical mathematician. He argued towards the end of is life that he had almost resolved a proof of the Poincare conjecture, and he claimed that he would ultimately demonstrate the last great topographical mathematical theorem: the universe is a four-dimensional sphere with a three-dimensional boundary.
He didn't get it finished, and he died about fifteen years ago of intestinal cancer. When he was buried in the family plot in the little old country graveyard in Brewton, AL, his momma--another great mathematical mind but a devout Baptist--had something like 'God, accept your servant into your eternal arms.' inscribed on his tombstone. But Andy had 'The universe is a sphere.' carved underneath that. He stipulated it in his will.
I was in Brewton a few weeks ago and saw it.
Wasn't Poincare Conjuecture solved by this Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman couple of years ago?.. I remember he refused to accept the award that was due and continued to live in a village house with his mother.
After reading tons of physics/cosmology literature and formulating visual pictures in my head I've come to like this model: (whether my interpretation is correct or not, I don't know.)
Think of a sphere. A sphere has three dimensions. Now imagine some sort of creature that can only exist on the sphere's two-dimensional surface. To the creature, his "universe"(the surface) is infinite, but the sphere is of course finite.
Perhaps our observable, infinite universe is part of a multi-dimensional, finite "body".
Now I know this has a name but things seem to blend together after so much reading. Anyone know?
Edit: Looks like something similar was posted above.
The sphere analogy has been used to describe the space-time curvature before: The ant crawling along a soccer ball will keep going "straight" and end up where he started. The same general hypothesis applies if someone hypothetically travels "straight" through the universe at a rate faster than it's expanding. What differentiates the two analogy is while only the surface is curved ("2D") in the case of the ant, space-time ("3+1D") is curved in the guess of the hypothetical superman traveling near the speed of light.
edit: the "4D" commonly referred in physics is 3 spatial dimension and time itself as a 4th dimension. For finding finding patterns in randomness by formulating fractals (fractional dimensions) Google chaos theory, and for pure mathematical "fun" take linear algebra for transformations applied to various mathematical dimensions. Good luck visualizing THAT.
Go to a used book store and see if you can find a textbook from 1925. After you read it, compare what you think our text books will look like in 90 years. Thats how far our head is up our own arses.
Originally Posted by Ubijza /img/forum/go_quote.gif Wasn't Poincare Conjuecture solved by this Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman couple of years ago?.. I remember he refused to accept the award that was due and continued to live in a village house with his mother.
Correct. True problem solvers are not in it for the fame and/or money, rather the creativity and challenge.
You know what separates this site from most on the net? The fact that the topic doesn't have 25% of the respondees claiming that the universe is only 6,500 years old. Seems we're a slightly more educated lot than the average website... even news websites (where you'd think that the people are smarter given their drive to find out what's going on in the world) are plagued with it.
infinity is just a concept. anything that's not quantitative (love, joy, information, improvement) can be described as infinite. universe could fit into one of those but my belief in relativity leads me to believe otherwise
There simply is no way of knowing; we combine our observations and knowledge to make a theory, or a model, but since our observations are definitely limited (and probably our knowledge and rational powers too, who knows) we can never be sure we have a theory that covers everything.
Who knows, maybe our universe is a one of many...
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