Bobster said:
Suppose there was a law giver then.Then what governs all laws in this universe ??.Are we all just parts of physical,biological and chemical process going through the motions ?.
These are big questions, and of course no one really has 'the' answer. From the point of view of physics, everything that exists is a physical process acting in accordance with the physical laws. I'm not sure physics has anything substantial to say about why these physical laws are the way they are, though that could change. There is a further question of whether there exists anything 'beyond' physics, but this question is even harder to settle, since it seems that it cannot be settled on a sure empirical footing.
Was the big bang just a random lucky event that took place and all what goes on now just a consequence of this random lucky event ?.
It's probably uncontroversial to state that everything going on now is a consequence of the Big Bang, although keep in mind that quantum physics describes events on the smallest scale of nature as having an essentially random character, so it may have been possible for things to have been different even starting off with the same Big Bang. As to the cause of the Big Bang itself, there seems to be lots of theories about this but there is no definitive or universally accepted answer yet.
But where did this big bang take place ?.It must have taken place in some kind of space.Then what else was in that space ?.Damn ! questions just go on and on and on...
Well, if the known universe comprises everything that exists, and it began with the Big Bang, then there simply was no space or time in which the event of the Big Bang was situated. It's better in this case to view the Big Bang as generating or creating time and space, rather than being an event in time and space. In this case, it doesn't make sense to ask about where the Big Bang took place, or what happened before it.
As always the answers to many complicated questions which seem to never end come from observing simple phenomena.Why can't there be infinite universes ?
No one says there can't be. Some theories or interpretations of theories (especially some interpretations of quantum physics) imply that there are infinite universes (or at least, an unimaginably large number of them). There's really no consensus here, and the work is somewhat speculative. This is another big question that is just beyond our scope for the time being.
What if our own universe was infinite ? Whats infinity ? Probably solving the problem of infinity will solve many others.Like in maths infinity * infinity = infinity.and 1+infinity=infinity,but how ? why ? it all sounds confusing...
You can think of infinity as an unbounded quantity. Using a more mathematical approach, we can say that a set of numbers is infinite if, for any number N1 in the set, there exists a number N2 in the set such that N2 is larger than N1.
You can't really treat infinity as a number, but if you use set theory you can compare different kinds of infinities, and this is the basis for loose statements like 2*infinity = infinity. In set theory, we call the number of elements in a set the cardinality of the set. For example, the cardinality of the set {1, 4, 18, 29} is 4. We can say that the cardinalities of two sets are equal if we can map one element of each set onto an element of the other set, without leaving any numbers out. For example, take A = {4, 5}, B = {1, 19}, and C = {2, 10, 11}. The cardinalities of A and B are equal, because we can create a mapping of the elements of these sets without leaving out any numbers (for example, 4 --> 1 and 5 --> 19 is such a mapping). However, we can't create such a mapping for B and C, because we must inevitably leave out one of C's elements (one of 2, 10, or 11 will not be 'matched up' with an element from B). Since the cardinalities of B and C are not equal, B and C do not contain the same number of elements.
Now let's take two infinite sets of numbers. Let X be the set of all positive integers {1, 2, 3, 4, ...} and let Y be the set of all positive even integers {2, 4, 6, 8, ...}. Hopefully you can see that X and Y both contain an infinite amount of numbers. Now, it might seem to you that X has twice as many elements as Y. But this is not the case; we can prove that they actually have the same cardinality, because we can construct a mapping of each element of X onto each element of Y without leaving out any of the numbers. For each element of a in X, map it onto 2a in Y. So 1 --> 2, 2 --> 4, and so on.
That said, there are some infinities that are larger than others, in the sense that a one-to-one mapping between the elements of their sets cannot be created. For instance, the infinity of points inbetween 0 and 1 is actually greater than the infinity of positive integers, because any mapping between the two will leave out at least one number between 0 and 1. (See
here for a proof.)
These result might seem counterintuitive, but that's just the nature of the beast. There is no problem of infinity in mathematics.
we are dealing with huge things.we have tackled the problems of zero and small numbers.probably we need to solve this problem about infinity to solve all other universal large scale problems.I mean what's the largest number ? My maths lecturer wud say there is no exact largest number,u can keep going on adding the largest possible number to the next largest to get an even more large number.Or u can add 1 to the largest possible number to get the next largest possible number.So there is no end to this.But what when applied to physical reality ? Can the universe be infinite ? Can there be infinite universes ? There must be some upper limit...
Mathematics is abstract. We use it all the time to analyze physical reality, but this doesn't mean that all mathematics must have some kind of expression in nature. Could there be infinite universes? Maybe, but even if there isn't we can still use the concept of infinity in abstract mathematical reasoning.
I am so confused, I just don't want to die without finding out the truth.
I don't know if anyone will ever know 'the' truth, but this is a good place to start learning about the answers that we do have.
By the way, this thread has turned into something of a grab bag, but in the future you will find it more productive to come up with more specific questions and ask them in the appropriate forums. For instance, in this thread (which started off with a philosophical question about metaphysics) we've branched off to general questions about infinity and the big bang, but it'd be better to ask about infinity in the math forums, the Big Bang in the appropriate physics forum, etc. The more focused your question and the more attuned your audience is to that question, the better answers you'll get.
