Does the universe spin?

Originally posted by Evasius

Originally posted by Razimus

Originally posted by Evasius
The trouble is, our viewpoint is embedded deep within the universe. We're so far away from the edges, there's a limit to how far we can see.

There are no edges of the universe.

Did you confirm this via astral projection or actually physically exploring the outer realms of our universe? If neither, what proves that is the case? I personally have done neither, but I read books & try to keep an open mind.

[edit on 3/2/09 by Evasius]

Good post, and great follow-up. You took the words out of my mouth.

Unless of course Razimus is actually the creator, in which case I take that back.

Cheers!

(Edited because I got my "'us's" in the posters names mixed up)

[edit on 17/2/2009 by MR1159]

There are a couple related concepts here which may apply. This is more of a layman's explanation in contrast to some of the elegant theories posted above.

1. The shape and spin of our Universe may be something we can't know. Anything outside of a system is unknowable by those within a system. It's basically an offshoot of Newcomb's Paradox, involving free will and explaining that we can't give an answer.

In fact to a super being in a higher dimension, the Universe or the Multiverse may have a 'shape', but it would be in terms for which we have no concepts. (Just like a Flatlander can't describe or appreciate 'up').

-or-

2. The shape may be some kind of a 'hyper-shape', or a torus, or something similar (Klein bottle, Alice Universe).

One ATS poster actually postulated that the Multiverse may have the shape of a ring of tori (donuts on a ring).

Due to this "shape" which would be dynamically defined in such a way that no 3-D being would be able to apprehend, or 'see' or find an 'edge', it would be, for all intents and purposes, 'infinite', but only to the 3-D being. It would be 'something else' to, say, a 6th dimensional being, or a 9th dimensional being.

So we end up having to retreat into mathematical constructs and artificial definitions and call it 'infinity', since our senses and our limitations may prevent our understanding it.

To make a humorous analogy, if we did meet God and asked Him these questions, such as 'what is the shape of the Universe', He would answer but the 'sounds' that came out would sound like gibberish to us.

As far as the idea or question about rotation, I think it might be able to be inferred, but since there is no inertia frame of reference, it might also not be meaningful, or we'd only be able to give a 'partial' answer.

Finally, a lot of these questions may have some kind of "answer", but they are shrouded from normal people inside some complex math equations.

Again, just some not very scientfic musings.

no the universe does not rotate sorry to burst your bubble. If it did Kurt Godel would be a house hold name. (Godel is the guy that showed if the universe rotated you could travel back in time).

In 1951, Gödel demonstrated the existence of paradoxical solutions to Albert Einstein's field equations in general relativity. He gave this elaboration to Einstein as a present for his 70th birthday. These "rotating universes" would allow time travel and caused Einstein to have doubts about his own theory. His solutions are known as the Gödel metric.

However we know for a fact that the universe does not rotate. . . im sure you can find the research fairly easily. . .

However there is a geometric structure known as the tippler cylinder that would if sped up fast enough have an area of effect that would drag space and time along with it circumventing the need for a rotating universe and making time travel someday within human grasp

Does the universe rotate is an incomplete question really. To answer that question one would have to know what it is that the universe is possibly rotating in relationship to. If it did rotate then all matter space and time would be moving in one direction in relation to a central point and as far as we can tell everything is moving but not in a coordinated manner. Everything is moving outward away from a central point or points not around it so the universe cant be rotating.



[edit on 18-2-2009 by constantwonder]

i would of thoguht....if the universe is spining, does that mean that theres something bigger making the universe spin?

Moon spins round the earth, Earth spins round the sun, sun spins round the Galaxy, galaxy spins around the universe, the universe spins round........???

reply to post by constantwonder


Here's a pretty explanation of the Tipler Cylinder (one 'p').

Frank J. Tipler showed in his 1974 paper, "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation" that in a spacetime containing a massive, infinitely long cylinder which was spinning along its longitudinal axis, the cylinder should create a frame-dragging effect.

This frame-dragging effect warps spacetime in such a way that the light cones of objects in the cylinder's proximity become tilted, so that part of the light cone then points backwards along the time axis on a space time diagram. Therefore a spacecraft accelerating sufficiently in the appropriate direction can travel backwards through time along a closed timelike curve or CTC.[1]

Some people call this construct a Kerr-Tipler cylinder in deference to Roy Kerr who had a novel solution to Einstein's Field equations.

Kerr was really something - a self-trained theoretical mathematician who entered the third year program at Cantertbury when he was 17.

n general relativity, the Kerr metric (or Kerr vacuum) describes the geometry of spacetime around a rotating massive body. According to this metric, such rotating bodies should exhibit frame dragging, an unusual prediction of general relativity; measurement of this frame dragging effect is a major goal of the Gravity Probe B experiment.

Roughly speaking, this effect predicts that objects coming close to a rotating mass will be entrained to participate in its rotation, not because of any applied force or torque that can be felt, but rather because the curvature of spacetime associated with rotating bodies. At close enough distances, all objects — even light itself — must rotate with the body; the region where this holds is called the ergosphere.

So as not to give the impression that I know anything abou theoretical physics, outside of a reading of popular books like Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, Capra's Tao of Physics, Kaku's Hyperspace, and Hawking's books, I'm just following the links in Wiki.

It's difficult to follow the reasoning because as I said in the previous post, it's intimately wrapped up in an understanding of the math.

I'd really like to understand frame dragging, which was one of the things that lead me into my readings a few years ago. It's a property of one solution of Einstein's equations and the predicted effects have to do with the notion of the light cone.



-wannabe physics nerd.

(cont)

The Gödel metric predicts some pretty neat effects.

Because of the homogeneity of the spacetime and the mutual twisting of our family of timelike geodesics, it is more or less inevitable that the Gödel spacetime should have closed timelike curves (CTC's). Indeed, there are CTCs through every event in the Gödel spacetime. This causal anomaly seems to have been secretly regarded as the whole point of the model by Gödel himself, who allegedly spent the last two decades of his life searching for a proof that death could be cheated, and apparently felt that this solution provided the desired proof. This strange conviction came to light decades after his death, when his personal papers were examined by a startled astronomer.

A more rational interpretation of Gödel's motives is that he was striving to prove, and arguably succeeded in proving, that Einstein's equations of spacetime are not consistent with what we intuitively understand time to be (i.e. that it passes and the past no longer exists), much as he, conversely, succeeded with his Incompleteness Theorems in showing that intuitive mathematical concepts could not be completely described by formal mathematical systems of proof. See the book A World Without Time

Gödel's work is really interesting because it predicts a new type of Universe which is consistent with GR, and demonstrates a cosmological model of a rotating universe.

Following Gödel, we can interpret the dust particles as galaxies, so that the Gödel solution becomes a cosmological model of a rotating universe. Because this model exhibits no Hubble expansion, it is certainly not a realistic model of the universe in which we live, but can be taken as illustrating an alternative universe which would in principle be allowed by general relativity (if one admits the legitimacy of a nonzero cosmological constant).

Here's a pdf which goes over some of this.
link


www.abovetopsecret.com...

To answer this, I'll just direct you to my previous post in which I describe why it may be impossible to describe because such a thing is outside our frame of reference. We can give indirect answers but we probably can't give a direct one because of the FoR.

[edit on 18/2/2009 by Syandos]

Does a dish of Lasagna normally spin?

i see our universe as a layer of Lasagna in an infinitely large
tray of Lasagna... both 'above' and 'below' our material space
are other layers of cheese or sauce, then another layer of
flat Lasagna noodle. thus the dimensional differences between
layers of this multiverse.


there is no actual 'top' layer or 'bottom' layer of this infinite lasagna dish,
as its properties are akin to a continuous loop or mobius strip

reply to post by constantwonder


Actually, NO, I could NOT find any such research fairly easily. I found this page in the process of LOOKING for any research. The fact is this: what makes you think it doesn't? Because it doesn't LOOK like it does? Let me ask you this. What if its period of rotation was a billion years. Would you KNOW? Would the galaxies rotate in a way which is visibly different from how they do now? What if the period of rotation was 10 billion years? You say flat out "the universe is not rotating" but the real fact is that all anyone could POSSIBLY say is that it is rotating slower than their method of detection's level of precision. The best indicator I can think of is to look at the rotation rates of galaxies which have different axes of rotation. If they are rotating with the universe, they'd spin differently than if they were rotating against it, in other words. But cosmologists were stunned in 1998 to learn that the cosmological constant is nonzero. They were trying to figure out the rate of deceleration of the expansion of the universe - and this dark energy crud is just an invention of theirs for nothing more than the fact that it doesn't SIT right with them that the expansion of space may be an intrinsic property to the space they thought ought to be flat naturally. They have to come up with a theory for something they've never observed that MAKES it curved. Space not naturally being flat simply doesn't fit with their world view. Well boo hoo! It shows what they know, doesn't it! And likewise, it wouldn't surprise me if someone did discover the universe was rotating. As for this research you say PROVES it's a non-rotating universe, that is therefore a bit like research that proves that Earth is the only planet in the universe with life. It's a non-provable statement (since it could always be rotating more slowly than you can detect) so obviously no research can prove it. By all means, though, I would LOVE to know where I can get research on the possibility of the universe rotating, and something that puts limits on how fast it may be rotating.

[edit on 14-3-2009 by Sandor]

Also to those of you who don't seem to know what it means for the universe to be rotating - it means if you were out in the middle of nowhere and not spinning - and you can perform measurements to determine if you are spinning because if you are not spinning, you are not feeling any centrifugal force - but if you were in deep space and feeling no centrifugal forces, the universe would slowly spin around you. This would be the case wherever you were in the universe.

And no, it does not require something LARGER to MAKE the universe spin. It could simply be an intrinsic property of the space itself, that it spins. The question people should ask is what would the universe look like from here if it was spinning very slowly. Would it actually look any different from how it does now. Certainly light traveling in the direction of the axis of rotation of the universe would travel in a straight line while light traveling perpendicular to it would travel in great circles, and light with a component in each would travel in spirals - and on the surface it SOUNDS like it should be obvious in the appearance of faraway galaxies if the light that gets here from there is so twisted, but I don't think that is necessarily so. It is true, however, that light emitted by a light source along the plane defined by the 2 directions which are perpendicular to the axis of rotation, traveling in great circles, will return to its source. Therefore if it rotated with a period of n years, and you were standing on the surface of a star (don't try this at home kids), you would see in the sky a line dividing up the sky into 2 regions, and that width of that line would be the apparent diameter of the star as seen from n light-years away. So if it rotated with a fairly small period, we would see a band of light along the equator of the rotation representing the light emitted by the milky way or our star perpendicular to the universe's axis of rotation that has come back to us, so it can't be less than a hundred million years, I figure. It wouldn't necessarily be visible to the naked eye, for it could be a very thin line, and somewhat sketchy. For the light that would be coming back to completely miss us, we'd have to experience acceleration in any direction, enough to be moved out of the way before it returns - or more likely - the light would be bent off its perfect path by the gravity of the galaxies it passes by. The line would become wobbly in places and completely vanish in others. Because of this, if the period was over 100 million years or so, I'd expect the line to be made too sketchy and distorted to make out. Of course if it was 100 million years, galaxies with rotational periods of 100 million years would probably rotate differently depending on which way they're pointed, so that's why I think that would be a better test to put a tighter upper limit on the possible rotation rate.