"Of course, if he's swimming with barracudas, he may not be as well-hung as you remember, Chrissy."
I got a few nibbles while I was snorkeling (I must be pretty tasty LOL), but the barracuda stayed away. Must have been that barracuda steak I had the night before.
Chromo-cuda
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
I've been hearing this sort of thing batted around behind the media scene for awhile. They were afraid to release it because the data and interpretation is rather bold. But yes this is really cool stuff. WMAP has been a real boon to our understanding of the universe's history. I can remember going to talks when they were talking about what the satellite COULD do, and everyone just sitting there open-mouthed. When I first started learning astronomy, the whole "first three minutes" had pretty much taken the "we'll probably never know for sure" turn. Then COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) opened the door and WMAP followed through. Very cool stuff indeed.
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
"Ah linux..the gateway drug of nerddom...fad-tastic!! I disagree...that is great if you are a student with limited resources...but who can deny the distributed networking capability of the Sun Solaris so you can run all your test simulations in developing a better x86 processor in the time it takes you to make a run for a 6-pack of Mountain Dew at 3 in the morning--just for the heck of it!"
Hey, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics uses a heterogenous network of Sun Solaris machines, Linux, and Macs. And everything is on hourly, daily, and weekly mirror backups. You can file that away in /dev/null if you want.
I personally loved Slackware back in the day when it was all completely customizable installation. I can still remember spending hours reconfiguring my kernal for optimal performance on the benchmark programs. Anyone for a quick game of Rogue?
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
Others have already done a fair job explaining this, but let me just summarize.
The universe wasn't a marble to begin with, it did't have dimensionality at all, at least not in the way our senses comprehend dimensionality. The Big Bang was not an explosion, rather it was some event that caused the universe to obtain 3+1 (3 spatial and 1 time) dimensionality and it began expanding those dimensions. It was marble sized a VERY short time after that event.
It didn't expand into anything related to our known universe. The argument could be made that our universe is expanding into a higher order dimension than we can perceive, but there is really no way to prove that, at least now. You can think of the universe stretching over time. What was once a mile between two objects will eventually become two miles (assuming we are at or below the critical density and no other forces are in play).
Hope that makes sense
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
"It wasn't 'in' anything. "It" was it. Space and matter were created from this 'marble' type thing... at least as my understanding goes..."
Check
"So. It is my theory... and a very watered-down version of this whole big bang thing... the marble... that marble not only created matter, but the space for matter TO BE."
Check, and it is this space that is expanding and sometimes dragging the matter with it
"This inflation theory does not answer why it all happened... all it does is give a closer understanding of HOW it all happened... It's best left to Chrome to explain. When the heck is he going to get back anyway?"
I does answer why in the sense of "why is matter distributed in the way it is distributed in the universe today." It doesn't answer why in the "for what ultimate purpose" sense.
Dang Corri, for a jock (isn't that what you call people who aren't nerds) you're pretty smart.
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
"the big bang had to happen EXACTLY as it did in order for 'life' to be. If there was one iota of a variation in how it all occurred... the universe as we know it would not be here... it would have expanded so fast as to blow itself apart... or, had it not expanded as fast as it did, it would have collasped in on itself."
Here is where I will diverge from you a bit Corri. I understand the argument, but there are a few underlying assumptions that need to be addressed. When you say "life", what do you mean? You mean life as it exists on this Earth. Saying that life could not exist if the current conditions weren't exactly as we observe them is akin to saying that I wouldn't be here if I wasn't born.
As far as the universe itself is concerned, we can speculate on what would happen if we tweaked some of the fundamental parameters of the universe (Planck's constant, gravitational constant, speed of light in a vacuum, permitivity and permeability of free space, etc.), but we really don't know what would happen, because we can't do it. Remember, those fundamental constants are HUMAN INVENTIONS designed to help us explain observations. Who is to say that the fundamental constants might not be tied together in some complementary way (i.e. change one and another changes to balance it)? Or who is to say that if we tweak the constants, we don't come up with a whole new set of rules. The Anthropic Principal is a nice hypothesis, but it is IMHO self-defeating because it uses human-created models to show that a human-infested universe is inevitable.
"There are fluctuations out there which physicists cannot explain... some parts of the universe expand more quickly than others... and this makes no sense to physicists... it should all expand 'uniformily.' The Inflation Theory, if I understand it all to some degree at least, explains these 'fluctuations.'"
Close. Many of the hypotheses now are leaning toward dark matter "seeds" that created the early universe fluctuations and that inflation helped smooth them out in our little corner of the unverse, helping things to procede to the galaxy/star model we see today. The inflation model helps explain why the fluctuations are at the observed level, and also helps explain the overall density of the universe.
"You should probably read about Causality, too."
YES! Anyone who hasn't taken the time to ponder the predictions of Relativity really should jump down that rabbit hole. It is fun and enlightening.
"I know. I think about this sh!t."
Ditto.
Chrome
"Recollect me darlin, raise me to your lips, two undernourished egos, four rotating hips"
