Thread: pulsating universe

Originally Posted by Abra

Energy is never lost. It is lost as thermal energy, and dissipates through the universe. It doesn't leave the universe--the universe is a closed system (for this argument. Just as you said, it doesn't make sense for energy to come in from an outside source, it also doesn't make sense for it to leave to an outside place.). The universe has the same amount of stuff (energy and matter) as it had in the first place.

That's a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Here are two versions, both of which don't allow what you just described:

"Heat generally cannot spontaneously flow from a material at lower temperature to a material at higher temperature."

"It is impossible to convert heat completely into work in a cyclic process."

The background radiation is almost completely unusable, at least according to thermodynamics.

Hmmm... I remember that at the Big Bang though spacetime was infinitely wrapped up, before expanding. If a very large quantity of the mass in the universe had formed a singularity, spacetime would be very warped to the extent that it could suck in radiation... I don't know if this solves the thermodynamics problem though.

Everything in the universe is cyclic, so why not the universe itself too? As above, so below..

Really? Okay, explain how the following things are cyclic:

- A ruler.
- Radioactive decay.
- Computational linguistics.
- y = ax + b
- Ringo Starr.
- Adjectives.
- Ham.

Originally Posted by Xei

Hmmm... I remember that at the Big Bang though spacetime was infinitely wrapped up, before expanding. If a very large quantity of the mass in the universe had formed a singularity, spacetime would be very warped to the extent that it could suck in radiation... I don't know if this solves the thermodynamics problem though.

Indeed, one can imagine that if the spacetime metric itself shrinks to a Planck length, thermodynamics might not work the same way. But then again, the radiation is radiating out at the speed of light. It's like an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. What wins? We may never know. But we do know for sure that our current understanding of thermodynamics would have to be wrong for the radiation to be 're-integrated' into the singularity.

well, id think that the idea that the universe is "pulsating" would explain where all the matter came from (Kinda)

Originally Posted by Xei

What you described is actually an extremely well known cosmological theory. If there is a high amount of mass in the universe, this would be true. However, by current estimates, there is not enough, by a factor of around 100;

but all the matter in the universe had to have been on top of each other at some point (as described by the big bang). So how did it all get there? Because it was all pulled in by gravity.

where else could it have come from?

i dont know, im a man of ignorance with a willingness to learn