Sunday, October 07, 2007

Found this interesting article off a Freakonomics link just the other day:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119128309597345795.html?mod=e-commerce_primary_hs

Now, I found this interesting in a round-about interesting way. Let's start from the very beginning for this story.

I read somewhere, quite some time ago, that scientists had come to the conclusion that the universe had been growing from its very birth, many billion years ago. The thing is, the universe has never stopped growing, and the scientists believe, and in fact are quite sure, that the universe will continue to grow on for all eternity. This theory, which will be called the "Infinite Growth" theory for use here, I applied to some other concepts, including the Internet.

Well, the theory's been blown apart by this article, on the Internet count anyway. But reading the article got me thinking: what if, just what if, those scientists who came up with the "Infinite Growth" theory got it all wrong? What if there's a size limit in which the universe can grow in?

Imagine then, the growing universe meeting its boundaries on any given day. Now, what we call space is really a vacuum; there's nothing there. So it doesn't seem too bad in the beginning. But what if the universe continues to be able to grow, even when its boxed in? As more and more planets and more and more stars (very much like our Sun) are created over billions of years, would it not reduce the physical distance between such objects? And as time passes, probably over billions of years, wouldn't it lead to the gravitational pulls of the various planets and stars interfering with each other? Would it create disasterous phenomena on the scale of black holes or worse?

I'm just hazarding wild, nowhere-in-hell-right guesses after all, seeing that I'm no scientist (and the fact that I pretty much sucked in Physics). But I reckon if, touchwood, something like this happens, we won't be seeing it in our lifetimes, and maybe not for another twenty-seven to the power of sixty-three generations.

Yea.












Erm.














Right?

i heard the crickets at 11:43 pm

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