"Gavin Scott" <[log in to unmask]> wrote in message
news:9r9k2h01b0f@enews2.newsguy.com...

> I would be interested in knowing if there is a good reason why our current
> Universe *can't* be embedded in, say, a big flat empty 3-dimensional
space,
> which would give it a "place" to have come into existence and would
provide
> potential explanations for how the Universe came to be (perhaps as a
really
> improbable set of fluxuations in the quantum vacuum environment.

(i) Space is a property of our Universe.

(ii) 3 isn't enough. We have 4 we can experience as it is (3 length, 1
time), and there are possibly 7 more we can't experience.
 (Which, BTW, means we can't represent the Universe in HP3000 COBOL, as
COBOL arrays are limited to 7 dimensions. Bummer).

(iii) how do you mean, flat? What about a curved space? As it is, the
Universe is the 3-dimensional supersurface of a 4-dimensional hypersphere,
travelling on a time track that we assume is linear, as a working
hypothesis, because we don't know how to think about curved time.

Alternative explanations involve turtles all the way down..... :-)

Our minds are very tied to trying to understand things in terms of the
macro-world we inhabit.

A question which is like 'what's outside the Universe?', but for which it is
hopefully clearer to see that it is meaningless to ask, is 'which way up is
the Universe?'

Hopefully, knowing the earth isn't flat, together with seeing our recent
expeditions into space, have freed our minds enough to understand that 'up'
and 'down' are not the universal givens that our ancestors blithely assumed,
but are a property of how we experience gravity (or acceleration).

We now have to do the same mind-freeing exercises for 'space', 'time',
'outside' and 'before'....

--
Roy Brown

Trying to shed a ray of light on the matter. (Or should that be a beam of
particles?)

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