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Tempest

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I'll be honest here, I have no idea what is happening, but astronomy does interest me greatly. I look at the occasional article that pertains to astrophysics, but aside from that the rest of this just seems funny (Mainly because it confuses the shit out of me.)

Trust me, it's taken years for me to achieve the understanding of it that I do. For nearly four years I've been studying it. I'd be happy to explain what you don't understand.

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This is actually something I grapple with. I'm on the fence about it, mainly because there is no evidence either way and it rather inconsequential at this point in humanity's understanding and technological capabilities. If I must give an answer, I'd say no. But an infinite universe does destroy the three prevalent theories of the end of the universe, so an infinite universe would be inherently stable. Since the three theories:

Big Crunch: Everything collapses in a reverse Big Bang.

- It would take an infinite amount of time to collapse in an infinite universe

Big Freeze: Where the entire universe goes in to a state of no usable energy.

- The laws of thermodynamic would make this take an infinite amount of time as well

Big Rip: Where the universe is ripped apart because it has a limit to it's size.

- Obviously this won't happen an infinite universe since there is no size limit.

Other ways can of course happen, like a false vacuum state or something of that nature. But I really am on the fence about it.

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I'm tempted to take part of involvement in every sub-forum and this is the first thread in The Wasteland, but science isn't exactly up my alley. The most basic sciences (i.e. life sciences, physics) I think I know, but when it comes to specialties, I'm probably a Five of all Trades.

Currently, I'm taking a Principles of Engineering class, and I know that intense physics will emerge in the path eventually. And to be able to solve many basic physics problems, I need to know a good bit of trigonometry. I'm taking that math now, pulling through with A's and B's, but I want to know from anyone who is versed in physics how widespread trigonometric identities, equations, etc. are in that field. Could anyone answer?

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In Physics, you very rarely will ever use Identities and anything other than Sin, Cos, and Tangent. I have yet to come across an equation involving things like Cotangent. You will use Hyperbolic Sins though. But only when working with Lorentz shift factors and relativity. In normal Newtonian physics, you won't need to know complicated calculus. Only at more complicated levels of physics such as thermodynamic do you need more complicated mathematical skills and knowledge.

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This is actually something I grapple with. I'm on the fence about it, mainly because there is no evidence either way and it rather inconsequential at this point in humanity's understanding and technological capabilities. If I must give an answer, I'd say no. But an infinite universe does destroy the three prevalent theories of the end of the universe, so an infinite universe would be inherently stable. Since the three theories:

Big Crunch: Everything collapses in a reverse Big Bang.

- It would take an infinite amount of time to collapse in an infinite universe

Big Freeze: Where the entire universe goes in to a state of no usable energy.

- The laws of thermodynamic would make this take an infinite amount of time as well

Big Rip: Where the universe is ripped apart because it has a limit to it's size.

- Obviously this won't happen an infinite universe since there is no size limit.

Other ways can of course happen, like a false vacuum state or something of that nature. But I really am on the fence about it.

Finally something in this topic that I DID understand.

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Sorry. I'm might be getting carried away with how I'm wording things. I'm just happy there's finally other people I can talk about these things with.

There was a huge new discovery by the BICEP telescope in the Antarctic. So big Stanford announced they were going to announce it. Anyways, the telescope measures the polarization of light from the Cosmic Background Radiation; the radiation left over from the Big Bang that is ever present in the universe. By measuring this polarization, they can look for signatures of the original structure just moments after the universe. However one polarization in particular is very exciting. One that is polarized at 45 degrees and "jiggles" as it travels. There's only one thing we know of that could cause this: gravitational waves. This is huge for science, because it disproves a large number of theories of expansion of the universe, such as dark matter being made of axions. But the biggest consequence is one that has ground breaking repercussions; these gravitational waves had to happen at the quantum level. They happened less than 10^-12 seconds after the creation of the universe, when it was just a few meter across. At the current size of the detected region, they happened on the level of individual particles. The reason this is such a large discovery, is that it proves gravity exists at the quantum level, bringing us closer to marrying relativity and quantum theory.

A couple of great articles on the subject:

http://www.nature.com/news/gravitational-wave-finding-causes-spring-cleaning-in-physics-1.14910

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/gravity-waves-cmb-b-mode-polarization/

And a video if you like that better than reading all this:

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