Recent content by junglist

is Dan Brown a well known cosmologist? I've never heard of him in cosmology related discussion before. as a novelist he is not only unbelievably bad, but also known to distort and fabricate 'facts' for the purposes of his stories.

Regular consistent rain would be handy. Its these devastating floods and long running droughts that are problematic.

our major telco's pump masses of space-filler foam into their junction boxes to reduce the air volume and supposedly protect their wiring/componentry. This however, raises new (immense) problems in servicing difficulty.

interesting read. thanks for posting.

aside from the hangups with regard to 'units' i think the point and questions that phantomjay is posing are more about what causes something to behave as it does rather than whether it has a value of, say, 3. I think this line of questioning is still very interesting and very valid.

while not strictly on the discussion of an infinite universe this will assist in people's understanding of the supplied analogies somewhat. - I'd suggest that people familiarise themselves with the concept of 'mobius strip', 'klein bottle' and a 'hypercube' to at least gain an understanding of...

very true. it is of course still an analogy. some people like the raisin / bread analogy better, but i don't like it as much as the balloon because it implies a finite distance to the crust/edge of the bread/universe unless you assume the bread is infinite. the balloon allows a...

my understanding is that the big bang happened everywhere at once and there is no 'edge' to it. the light we see from the cmb is the inside surface of a spherical void in infinite space.

great post!

while everyone is stuck on the balloon analogy, it appears to me that the discussion is going round in circles - reinforcing confusion and misunderstanding. now to add more confusion, ill throw my hat in the ring. the balloon analogy has 2-spacial dimensions and one time dimension. the...

Thanks D H. I had a listen to an old audiotape from Feynman doing a lecture on the 'theory of gravitation' at Caltech or somesuch in the 60's. It helped me understand the further complexities of planetary orbits as he explained some of their properties resulting from proximity of the other...

Now I'm worried that I'll end up asking questions on this forum for eternity... ...thanks to wallace and kurdt with your informative and hasty answers. this place is like crack for the inquisitive mind. :D

if you mean two orbiting each other and then one performing a figure 8 by passing through the gravitational centre of the first 2, then no. borek means 2 in close orbit and the third in a much wider orbit almost as though it is orbiting a single object of double the mass. see...

if only one of the planets is initially moving then the others will have to move due to changing gravitational acceleration as distances between the stationary/moving planets vary.

that is sequence is awesome, but its making me dizzy.