Personally I think "explosion" is an appropriate term. True, the explosions of our acquaintance are three dimensional explosions, but it's not much of a stretch to apply the term to four dimensions. After all, we use the balloon analogy and all sorts of other tricks to try and wrap our minds...
One definition of explosion is a violent expansion. It's true that we can't know what happened exactly at the ?singularity but "explosion" seems appropriate if you're trying to get the concept across to non-scientists, and during and after inflation it was pretty rapid. Let's not be so...
The big bang was indeed an explosion - an explosion of spacetime. This concept isn't something that most lay people are going to understand. In fact, I suspect most of us can't visualize it either, and can only use the balloon analogy to sort of get it. Getting some of the public to at least...
That's all speculative. It would be so cool if there were interaction between universes that we might be letting ourselves be seduced by any theory that suggests the possibility. It just seems to me that if each universe has its own spacetime - its own space and time - then a collision sounds...
If universes are being spawned by a mother universe ...
... would the mother universe be aware of its children?
This concerns the idea that our universe could have been spawned by an upper-level universe somehow, and we can't rule out the possibility that daughter universes could be spawned...
Are there changes in the appearance and characteristics of ice as the temperature continues to fall? Say at -30 C, -60 C, etc? Does it remain slippery? Is there a point where it breaks up?
When Hubble published that the galaxies were moving away from each other, the further away the greater redshift and the greater separation velocity, was he saying that space itself was expanding, on the basis of Einstein's general theory, or was he assuming a more or less fixed space, with...
I'm a programmer but weak on hardware so I'd appreciate your help. In a novel I'm writing there are about one hundred underground cities housing one million people in the US; the rest of our population is dead. Somewhat smaller percentage of survivors in Europe and Asia. We have several years...
What are the calculations to figure out how long someone can live in a sealed room of a certain volume? Please check mine.
Let's say that the room is 30 feet by 20 feet by 8 feet, or 4800 cubic feet.
I believe that high carbon dioxide levels will kill you before low oxygen levels will...
I'm writing a novel in the general category of science fiction, although it's set just a few years from now. I've gotten some good suggestions and information from members of this forum. There are a few questions that I feel require the help of a professional astrophysicist and an aeronautical...
I saw on the internet speculation that some rogue planets - and apparently there are a lot of them in the universe - might be able to retain a heavy atmosphere, enough to allow the possibility of life. However, the gas mentioned was hydrogen, which wouldn't sustain our kind of life, although it...
Let's say that a planet of approximately Earth's size - containing, as Earth does, core heat - were tossed out of orbit. Could it maintain any sort of atmosphere, or would all the component gases liquify and freeze, or be gradually lost to space? If it could retain any atmosphere, what gaseous...
What would happen to things on Earth if transported to the moon? For instance, say that a house, with furniture and fixtures in place, were dropped gently onto the moon's surface? How about food - meat, vegetables, fruit? Would things crack? Or would they survive the experience so that if...
Isn't the general idea that perhaps there was a black hole of unimaginable density which was somehow triggered into the big bang? If that's the case, then time within the black hole to an outside observer (if there was one) would have stopped, as we believe is the case with black holes in the...