Essay Abstract

The idea, that underlies most modern cosmological models, that the universe must be infinite, is examined and found to be uneeded. Attention is given to finite cosmological models which are found to be preferable since they provide a solution to Loschmidt's paradox.

Author Bio

Reeve Armstrong, born 1994 in Nottingham, England. I am a student of the University of Wolverhampton; to study Biotechnology. While I am not a professional physicist, I am very interested and passionate about the field. I would consider myself an 'amateur' theoretical physicist (although I believe that to be labelled such, is to imply that 'physicist' is a profession; rather it is someone with a rational, scientific mode of thought who is interested in the fundamental, natural world). I'm also a (currently) unpublished writer.

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  • Post #2

Dear Reeve Armstrong,

Very nice paper. The origin of the concept of Infinity may have occurred back when there was always more beyond the horizon, not to mention all those stars in the sky, and the realization dawned that once you start counting there's no reason (except for death and the need to invent new number-words) why you should ever have to stop, and language and thought had evolved sufficiently for someone to say "Yeah, well, you claim that's all there is, so then explain how existence can suddenly just end without there being another existence just outside it?"

You don't note the fine old "finite yet unbounded" (Friedmann et alii) model, and I'm guessing that's because way too much empirical evidence has piled up against it since the days when it was mainstream belief. (Which was as recently as the first publication of "A Brief History of Time" in fact.) Do you see it as salvagable? (Personally I really liked it, because it was such a neat package and you could always shrug and say, "Okay, we can't intuitively comprehend a balloon that's all exterior with no interior because like Kant said, the noumenal is beyond our ken.")

    Hello,

    Your conclusion is not rational considering the heat and thermodynamics. The closed evolutive system is essential.You must differenciate the infinite light above our walls and our pure physical sphere in evolution and its boundaries.

    If not you cannot understand the present and the past and the future.

    Regards

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      • Post #4

      Dear Mr. Armstrong,

      I found your well argued, exceptionally well written essay thoroughly interesting and a pure intellectual joy to read. As I have thoughtfully pointed out in my essay Sequence Consequence, human reality only really exists here and now. I do not mean to state this sarcastically, however, obviously, any real here cannot be finite and any real now can only be eternal. Otherwise, one would know where here commenced and how long now had endured. Abstract there can be abstractly infinite and abstract then can be of an abstract duration. Are you a Forrest or a County man?

        Thank you for the positive feedback, I appreciate it nmann. :)

        I would say that the FLRW model(s) are idealisations; an approximation. They can obviously be useful, depending on the context, it just depends on how accurate you need to be.

        In those models, apart from the "spherical" universe, the history of the universe is not projected up until the "end." (Probably because the assumption is that it continues forever) However, if my suggestion is right, then the future of the universe would be hard to visualise on such a diagram. (How would it 'look', for example, for the universe to end in a 'Big Rip' where the maximum entropy singularity would result without having space re-collapse? On the other hand, if there is no mass left in the universe at this far future time, how would we show on the diagram that the space is no longer relevant? And this gets us back to the initial singularity?)

        I think the best way to visualise it, is to use conformal diagrams where we can see that the far future (at heat death) reconnects to the "beginning" boundary.

        Thank you very much for the praise Mr Fisher.

        After reading your comment, I read through your Sequence Consequence essay. You have some fascinating; interesting ideas. Two questions came to my mind:

        First, according to your ideas, what would reality actually be like without any form of observers (before life evolved, for example)?

        Second, how do you interpret Sir Roger Penrose's "Andromeda Paradox?"

        My own position on the nature of time and events is that I take a (holistic) view that the worldline(s) are objectively real (in the same way that some quantum physicists understand the wavefunction to be real) and is the true description of reality. Following from this, I would say that humans (and other forms of conscious observers) - which have their own worldlines of course - considered at any discrete point (on their worldline), necessarily have a 1:1 relationship with the same discrete point on the 'surrounding' worldlines.

        As an analogy, you could put two rulers, side-by-side, parallel to one another; imagine that one of the measurements on one of the rulers, say 10cm, represents a particular event. This would match up to the 10cm mark on the other ruler. Suppose that one of the rulers represents your worldline and the other ruler represents the worldline of your surrounding environment. So, 'Joe'-at 10cm experiences the event that takes place on the environment-worldline at 10cm.

        (The above assumes for simplicity no relative motion; otherwise the rulers would not be parallel - in fact it would probably be better to say they were those "super flexible" rulers you can buy!)

        I am not saying the closed system does not evolve. It just is not time-asymmetrical. The differentiation between present/past/future would therefore be subjective (relative; depending on where you are an what 4D direction you are travelling in).

        hello Mr Amstrong,

        I just would to show you that it exists a lot of infnities. But one infinity above our walls ! You know the infinite light above our physicality , is without time, space and mass. The light inside our physicality evolves, but this universal sphere is a finite system. I beleive that it is important to tell it . It permits to evitate the confusions about what is the infinity and the infinities.

        Regards

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        • Post #10

        Dear Mr. Armstrong,

        Thank you for taking the time and trouble to read my essay and for your positive comment about it. The answer to your first question is that I know what my reality is because it helpingly persists for me here and now. I have no idea what reality could have actually been like before the present state of human evolvement was arrived at. All paradoxes are abstractions and lack substantiation in reality. As there are no real identical states anywhere in the real Universe, it follows that although abstract simultaneous events can figuratively take place as measured in abstract identical states of measured time, each real event is unique as to its locality of a real here and only endures for a real now.

        I regret having asked you about Notts County. I feel sure I saw Tommy Lawton play once in a wartime friendly at Maine Road.

        Thank you for providing your answers to my questions, Mr Fisher.

        I am intrigued by your interpretation of reality. It is similar to the philosophical stance of 'idealism' where the reality we experience is actually a mental construction. I agree with this to a certain extent. For example, if - by chance - the genes that confer, what we call colour blindness, happened to be more popular among the human population and the ones with "normal vision" were a minority; no doubt society would agree that those with, what we would call, "normal vision" perceived the 'wrong colours.'

        This would apply also if most of the population had some form of, what we call, synaesthesia. In this situation, society would probably agree that the minority of 'normal people' perceived reality in an incorrect, limited way.

        Or imagine if most people had an eidetic memory, we - now the minority - would no doubt be considered to have some kind of deficiency of memory!

        So I think we can be sure that what each of us experience is not really objective reality, just a mental representation of it.

        Anyway, would I be correct in venturing to guess that you take a conventionalist view of mathematics?

        (You don't need to apologise about your comments on Nottingham, I think that I ought to have mentioned in the "author bio" section that, while I was born in Nottingham, I have lived most of my life in Lincolnshire! It is a shame one can not revisit and change past events, isn't it Joe ;) )

        Mr Dufourny,

        I understand your concerns. As I understand it, time is not separate from space so it seems to me that you must technically refer to events at any time point actually as locations and therefore distances between locations. Therefore, when I say that the universe may or may not be infinite, I am referring to whether or not it is infinite in distance, which is to therefore necessarily imply an infinite number of events. Following this, with regards to light, since photons do not actually "experience" time, I think referring to it as infinite is misleading since that would surely be to suggest that it travels a distance? (Clearly put: Light travels 3 dimensional spatial distance but does not travel temporal distance)

        I am arguing that the universe is finite in 4D distance (Spatial and temporal) and that by assuming so one can solve Loschmidt's paradox and conclude a symmetrical evolution for the universe.

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        • Post #13

        Dear Reeve

        Congratulations for your essay. I found it very well written and interesting. You address questions that certainly can be labelled as the deepest ones, and by being so young anyone can conclude that you certainly have a bright future. Keep going in this direction. I wish I could discuss your ideas in more detail, but I´m just not confident enough about my knowledge on general relativity and statistical mechanics for making any relevant points, and I don´t have much time to study it now. But I see that if you can objectively prove that finite cosmological models solve Loschmidt's paradox then this should receive a lot of attention.

        My studies in GR have focused more on its origin. GR can be recovered from Machian first principles, and a finite universe is also interesting because these principles on the nature of space and time can be easily implemented (see Julian Barbour´s work).

        My essay, Absolute or Relative Motion...Or Something Else? discusses how one can extended machian considerations to search for new physics. You might find it interesting ;)

        Best regards, Daniel

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          • Post #14

          Reeve,

          While I haven't finished your essay, I compliment you on having studied the subject so deeply at such a young age.

          A few points; The advantage of infinity is that it negates entropy. Entropy only applies to closed sets, so if the universe is open, then energy is just traded around, as what is radiated from one area, is gained by another.

          As for Zeno's paradox, it overlooks the absolute, ie. zero is inert, not just fractional infinity.

          In my essay, I take issue with the current treatment of time. The sequence of events, which physics treats as a measurement issue, emerges from the changing configuration of what is. Not the present moving from past to future, but future becoming past. Does the earth really move along a fourth dimension from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates? As for the whole non-simultaneity thing, because events are perceived by different observers at different times, it's just a signalling issue. It's like saying because the news of Lincoln's death reached Kansas City before San Francisco, he must have died earlier to the people in Kansas City. Both observers are in the future of the actual event. Duration is simply what is happening between events. It is not external to the present. This means time is simply an effect of action, rate of change, not some geometric basis for it, which would invalidate the conceptual foundation for an expanding universe in the first place. Leaving redshift as lensing effect, likely because light travels as a wave and is only detected as a quantum.

          You are very young and very smart, but we trade intelligence for wisdom and so don't always believe what is fashionable. When you are my age, you will have seen many fashions come and go and be less than impressed with many. Consider the title of this contest, Questioning the Foundations. Think through some of the patches applied to Big Bang cosmology, from inflation to dark energy, as well where the speculation leads, multiverses, etc. Just because the math tells you something, ask yourself if it seems logical, otherwise you will find yourself going round an Escher staircase and thinking you have found perpetual motion. Read through these essays with an open mind. It is one thing you don't have to give up yet.

            Hello Mr Amstrong,

            I am understanding also your concerns. Here is my humble point of vue.

            In fact, it depends of what we want interpret at my humble opinion.The infinities appear inside our reals and rationals.So it is always due to our adds, multiplications....we can indeed multiplicate a serie giving so an infinity. The time is an other story.First of all, this time is constant in its pure locality and generality. And second this time is irreversible.

            Now of course we can superimpose for an understanding of our evolution, in its pure generality. If we want to have the correct simulations, so we must insert indeed the good linear road. But can we insert violatiopns of our generality.Let's take the principle of equivalence. It is essential to take it with the biggest rationalism. How can we formalize so the universal dynamic of this sphere? the events are rational. The system, physical, the sphere is a 3D system and a time constant correlated with the duration correlated with the rotations of spheres.

            The infinity is complex and so simple in fact.

            The symmetrical evolution is rational and dterministic.So the superimposings also must be rational and dtderministic.If not, never we shall understand the evolution since this Hypothetical BB. We must insert the good parameters of rotations of spheres at all scales in 3D and a time constant of evolution. It implies that we can travel in space only and in the future. Because we can decrease our internnal clocks due to rotating spheres and their rotations. But is it important to go in the future if we cannot return at our present.

            The irreversibility of this times is essential for a real universal irreversible dynamic.

            Thanking you

            Steve the crazy spherical belgian.

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            • Post #16

            Reeve

            Why you do not want to break the space-time into space and time?

            See my essay http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/1413

            Daniel,

            Thank you for the positive comments. :) I will have a look at your essay.

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            • Post #18

            Loschmidt's paradox: Why is there an inevitable increase in entropy when the laws of physics are invariant under time reversal? The time reversal symmetry of physical laws appears to contradict the second law of thermodynamics.

            I think Loschmidt paradox has paradoxlcal solution:

            Past is the future.Future is the past.Time is the circle.

              Mr Merryman,

              Thank you for the comments, I will take them into consideration. I will read your essay also.

              I assume, since you say:

              "This means time is simply an effect of action, rate of change, not some geometric basis for it, which would invalidate the conceptual foundation for an expanding universe in the first place. Leaving redshift as lensing effect, likely because light travels as a wave and is only detected as a quantum."

              And suggest that the universe could be an open set; you support a steady-state cosmology for the universe.

              If this is so, how do you explain the uniform Cosmic microwave background radiation?

              If I may ask another question: Since you do not think that time is not part of spatial geometry, how do you interpret time dilation?

              Sincerely,

              Reeve

              Yuri,

              That solution would only be paradoxical if you think that there should be an arrow of time in the first place. :)