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Old 2011-09-23, 22:19   Link #16777
Vexx
Obey the Darkly Cute ...
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: On the whole, I'd rather be in Kyoto ...
Age: 66
Quote:
Originally Posted by ChainLegacy View Post
At no point did I mistake dark matter for darkness so you need not elaborate on that any further.

Is there a physical boundary to the universe? And beyond it, is nothingness darkness? I suppose it's more philosophical at that point.
There's likely not a 3 dimensional boundary.... head off in a straight line and at *some point* you're probably going to return to where you started (though billions of years may have passed and it'd be unrecognizable). There's like a 4+ (10, 11, +?) dimensional space that is bounded that we exist in.

This is easier to view from the perspective of an ant on a globe. the globe appears flat to him, but if he travels far enough he notices he's back where he started. If he develops binoculars, he notices the 'horizon effect' and begins to put together enough clues that he lives on a sphere in some larger space. That's roughly what we're doing in a 3-d perceivable universe. There are behaviors and clues we're collecting that imply a higher dimensional reality both at the quantum and the cosmological levels.
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