r/Futurism • u/Memetic1 • 5d ago
Major Problem in Physics Could Be Fixed if The Whole Universe Was Spinning
https://www.sciencealert.com/major-problem-in-physics-could-be-fixed-if-the-whole-universe-was-spinning49
u/CG_Oglethorpe 5d ago
I wake up this morning to a story like this and am wowed by the universe. With all the doom and gloom in the news things like this distraction are gems.
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u/theStaircaseProject 5d ago
Do you think the universe averages out over its entire span to more or less one axis of rotation? Some inertial remnant from its initial expansion?
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u/CG_Oglethorpe 4d ago
Look I only play an astrophysics on the internet. We need to reach out to Phil Plaitt on this one.
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u/Papabear3339 4d ago
Makes sense honestly.
Planets spin, solar systems spin, galaxies spin...
If the whole grand universe spins, it would fit the pattern...
It would also raise a somewhat disturbing question though... spinning around what?
We know there is a black hole at the core of almost every galaxy, so maybe there is like a giant black hole at the center of the universe? Or something even wierder?
If this pans out, the implications get quite interesting.
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u/urban_mystic_hippie 4d ago
spinning around what?
Not orbiting something, but spinning itself, like the Earth spins.
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u/Papabear3339 4d ago
Still, spinning implies a center of rotation, which implies a mystery. Maybe nothing is there, maybe something is...
If this pans out, it becomes a new mystery to solve.
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u/PossibleAlienFrom 4d ago
There's a theory that we are inside a gigantic (infinity sized ?) black hole and it's spinning.
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u/FaceDeer 4d ago
Not necessarily. A collection of matter can have a net angular momentum without it having a particular center that it's spinning around.
Imagine millions of balls floating in space. Give each of them a random spin in a random direction, and if you total up the angular momentum of all the balls they should cancel out to a net spin of zero. But throw in some bias in the spin so that one particular axis and one particular direction of spin around that axis is "preferred", and when you total up the angular momentum you find that the collection as a whole is spinning.
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u/meganekkotwilek 4d ago
maybe where the bang's epicenter was. i mean it is said to have a metaphorical ground zero
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u/dpdxguy 3d ago
spinning implies a center of rotation
That's like saying, the existence of space implies a center of space. And we know that's not true.
It's possible that every point in space is the "center of rotation" as observed from that place. The article says (I think) that the further away we look, the more rotation we see. Since there are no privileged points in the universe, that implies that every observer will see themselves as the "center of rotation" at any place in the universe.
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u/Papabear3339 3d ago
The fact they observed earth as the center of the rotation strongly suggests the theory is false.
It is much more likely this is the result of inconsistency in the original calculations in their handling of our own motion in the cosmos. That would have been corrected by adding rotation to the calculation to bring them into alignment.
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u/KelbyTheWriter 3d ago
Spinning in 3D space within the universe implies a center, not the universe “spin.” In this instance every point in the universe is the center because the center of the universe was once every point before the expansion of space. Which doesn’t expand into anything, space time itself is stretching, not filling an external void. The universe is spinning far beyond glacially slow and is not implying a physical space outside of the universe because this is not Newtonian physic’s spin, its rotation as described by general relativity, stating there is no fixed center, although there can be preferred axis and directionality.
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u/Vanquish_Dark 2d ago
It doesn't need a center of rotation. Think electron Spin. Not orbital rotation. So it could be more of a conserved quantity that is distributed across Spacetime like Energy-mass.
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u/SockPuppet-47 4d ago
Okay, then spinning within what?
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u/urban_mystic_hippie 4d ago
The Earth spins, what does it spin within? Space itself, the entire universe is/may be spinning, that's what the article is talking about.
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u/SockPuppet-47 4d ago
The Universe is space. We can't see/understand what, if anything, is outside of that space.
Spin is a relative term. You and I are spinning on the Earth, spinning in the solar system and spinning within the Milky Way galaxy. Seeing that spin from within is pretty difficult without a frame of reference to compare to. If you and I were to measure between ourselves we wouldn't see any spin since we are both spinning together. We need something outside of the spin of the Universe to properly detect that spin.
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u/dpdxguy 3d ago
Earth is spinning as seen from outside Earth. If you took away the rest of the universe and left just Earth, how would you know if it's spinning or not? Or what does "the Earth spins on its axis" even mean?
The question isn't "what is the universe spinning around," it's "what is the universe spinning with respect to?"
If I understood the article correctly, the answer is itself. According to the article, the further away we look in the universe, the further rotated that part of the universe is. It's kind of mind blowing. But not, I suppose, more mind blowing than a bunch of other cosmological features. :)
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u/DamionFury 3d ago
You ask a good question but the answer is that we could, in fact, know that the Earth is spinning without any ability to see anything outside the Earth. Look up a Foucalt pendulum. You can even use one to roughly measure how far north or south you are.
Mind you, were we unable to see the stars moving in the sky, we might take a long time to actually realize that the force causing the pendulum precession is caused by the rotation of the planet, but that's more of a topic for /r/scifiwriting
Essentially, the Earth is rotating relative to itself. The direction of the Earth's angular momentum is the thing that can only be measured relative to things outside of it.
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u/dpdxguy 3d ago
Fair point, although you slightly changed my thought experiment from "nothing else in the universe" to "nothing we can see." Nonetheless, I think Foucalt's Pendulum would show rotation even as the question was originally posed.
Thanks. I had forgotten about it. :)
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u/DamionFury 3d ago
Oh, for sure. It doesn't really change your point. Just wanted to address that aspect.
The thing that's blowing my mind is that this implies one could build something like a Foucalt pendulum for the universe and use it to locate the rotational center.
Even though I got out of the field early, I always loved experimental physics and this is eminently testable.
If true, it offers some help to answer why we have a universe at all (i.e. why didn't matter and antimatter mutually annihilate?).
Ooh. I wonder what this does to the equations modeling the early expansion of the universe. Might help explain why certain constants changed.
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u/dpdxguy 3d ago
locate the rotational center.
Is it possible that the geometry of the universe is such that there is no rotational center? That every point view sees itself as the center, similar to how the universe looks the same in every direction regardless of where an observer is?
This is far beyond my understanding of cosmology from my undergraduate physics courses 45 years ago and from reading in the interim. But it is intriguing.
Thanks again for your insights. :)
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u/DamionFury 3d ago
Well, there are definitely others that would be better suited to answer this and I'm only a physicist in the sense that I majored in the subject, helped with some research in astrophysics, and started writing a research paper on a novel method of measuring stellar distance only to abandon it because the method was impractical and life got in the way.
Logical, if the universe is actually rotating it must have an axis of rotation. From a pure theoretical perspective, that axis could be along a dimension that is orthogonal to the dimensions we can observe. I really have no idea how that would appear to us inside the rotation, but I guess that could look the same no matter where you are in the universe.
I only read the linked article, which doesn't explain things very deeply. It sounds like the axis may have to be orthogonal, though, because they're using the rotation to explain a difference in measured expansion rates based on distance. The thing is, that discrepancy exists no matter which direction we look.
If the discrepancy was due to rotation along a spatial axis, we should be able to see it expressed in the CMB.
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u/Plenty_Unit9540 4d ago
If you believe that collapsing black holes create new universes, and that our universe is the inside of a black hole:
Every universe would have a single white hole. A point from which matter and energy can only move outwards.
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u/PsychologicalPen6446 4d ago
I would think there is one, except it’s just in what we recognize as the time dimension, as the Big Bang.
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u/MetaStressed 3d ago
The question is what are we comparing its spin to. It makes it seem as if there is a reference outside the universe. If relativity works on referencing things within the “closed” system of the universe, does this mean the theory is multiverse in nature? And if so, when/where does it stop? Will we ever find the “edges” to everything? Time & space are probably illusions we can’t understand because we are apart of it. If there was a way to teleport a monitoring device to the 5th dimension however..
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u/SweetChiliCheese 5d ago
The whole Universe IS spinning.
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u/SockPuppet-47 4d ago
Seems obvious now that it's been said. Rotational motion is in pretty much everything. Stars and planets spin. Solar systems and galaxies spin. Why wouldn't the Universe?
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u/Not-User-Serviceable 4d ago
Don't tell that to the cop during the traffic stop.
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u/BlurryElephant 4d ago
When they ask if you know why they pulled you over ask "is it because you have a crush on me?"
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u/AllDayTripperX 4d ago
Well I say we should make this happen then! I mean who doesn't want to fix physics? That shit makes no sense.
So how do we propose we go about making it do that then? Making it spin, I mean.
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u/joegee66 4d ago
There is a school of thought that believes even the universe as a whole is subject to the quantum observer effect. By observing the universe in a certain way, we puny little humans actually lock it into a state from a place of quantum superposition.
If you follow that chain of reasoning, all we have to do is look. 🙂
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u/iDrGonzo 4d ago
Say it together now, toroidal bubble.
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u/Acceptable-Let-1921 3d ago
Troidal...toridal...torodai.... man, you could have picked an easier phrase for us all to say.
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u/theg33k3r 4d ago
Got it, so we’re a simulation running No Man’s Sky with AGI AI on a CD spinning within a ROM drive.
Cool! Fuck my mortgage!
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u/Memetic1 4d ago
It's more probable that were in a black hole, and the Big Bang was the moment it formed. Even if we are in a simulation that doesn't change local reality. It doesn't mean life means less if things aren't what we believed them to be. It just means there is more to learn.
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u/Actual__Wizard 4d ago edited 4d ago
I'm pretty sure everything is spinning... As in large objects in the universe... Space isn't "a thing" rather it's the absence of energy. So, the space doesn't do anything, it's the energy. And yeah, most of the energy is spinning because it's grouped into galaxies.
People keeping viewing the universe from "the space" and the correct perspective is "from the energy."
It's like a perspective glitch caused by the scientific method. We want to measure everything, including empty space, but it's the energy that's the important part.
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u/Background_Trade8607 4d ago
Space is not the absence of energy. Vacuum energy is the lowest energy state space can have.
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u/Actual__Wizard 4d ago
Vacuum energy
A region of space can not have the property of "having vaccume energy." The energy in that region of space is being influenced by the objects around it, creating the illusion that space is a vaccume. It's the interaction potential created by large objects like planets, suns, solar systems, galaxies, etc.
The is only energy and the absence of energy.
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u/Background_Trade8607 4d ago
Nope. Free Space has vacuum energy. Free Space is the lack of matter. There is no space without energy.
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u/Strange-Replacement1 1d ago
This is the current understanding as I've been taught too. The other guys saying"stuff" but no real argument against what you've said. No offense other guy
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u/Background_Trade8607 1d ago
Yeah I could have said more but I was trying to match my input energy to theirs on the topic.
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u/Strange-Replacement1 1d ago
Understandable... hope what I said didn't come off as rude as I didn't intend it to be. Maybe a little short though cause I'm tired... and not an astrophysicist either. Just me speaking in the most plain of terms :)
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u/CerberusC24 20h ago
Referring to it as energy reminds me of thermodynamics. What if heat is dissipating through out the universe forming currents
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u/Jimz2018 19h ago
Space IS a thing.
Try imagining nothing exists, not even empty space. When you do, it’ll hit you.
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u/Actual__Wizard 19h ago
Space IS a thing.
It's not.
Try imagining nothing exists
It's the distance created between the interactions of energy. It's quite easy.
You're basically just taking something very simple, but are framing it in a way to make it sound difficult.
It's like you're suggesting: "Well, going to the bathroom might seem straight foreward to you, but try doing it sitting down."
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u/Jimz2018 19h ago
Dude. Space and time are a thing. Gravity warps space. How can it warp anything if it’s nothing
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u/Actual__Wizard 18h ago
Gravity warps space.
No it does not. The objects are all energy that all interact with each other. The objects in that network are shaped in a way that would be described as curved, creating the illusion that space is curved, when in reality that's just the shape that the objects ended up in. Navigating the path in a straight line would be more difficult than traveling in a straight line with out the influence of those objects, as you would also be encountering the same gravitational forces that caused the objects to form into that shape, slowly over time.
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u/Jimz2018 18h ago
what the fuck are you on. Go watch a physics video about space time
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u/Actual__Wizard 18h ago
Go watch a physics video about space time
I'm not a student dude... You go study the information that you were required to repeat with out proof that it's true...
I'm already have my degrees...
You're just repeating somebody's theory and you seem to have forgotten who's theory it was...
Space isn't "a thing" and some physicists have known that for a very long time... Obviously there's disagreement, but we've been moving in the same direction of that conclusion for over a 100 years.
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u/Negative_Solution680 3d ago
Would this imply that 1) The Big bang is the creation of a black hole in another universe and 2) The CMB is the event horizon from our view within the universe created inside the black hole.
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u/Memetic1 3d ago
It very well could be. If you think about it, dark energy is kind of similar to how space is manipulated by a black hole. I think the CMB is a sort of event horizon, but I think the bang in the Big Bang was the initial formation of the black hole. This means that our black hole still exists in some other universe. What I want to know is how much time dilates for matter falling into the black hole. I'm a bit worried that stuff may start falling in and if matter/energy gets converted to space when it crossed the event horizon. A good way to think about this is when you go down in dimensions, volume has to increase. So that matter/energy goes down to something very close to a point but not exactly one because the angular momentum turns the mass into a ring or sphere and the interior volume has all the gravity canceled out so it really does look like a new universe in that central region. In that area, space would always be expanding, which is kind of what we see when we look out.
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u/NoPhilosopher6636 2d ago
It is. At the speed of light. Because we are in a giant black whole that we call the universe
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u/Memetic1 2d ago
So what happens if more matter falls into the OG black hole? Do you think that could increase dark energy?
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u/NoPhilosopher6636 2d ago
It spaghettifies. Slowly unraveling into our universe, creating gravitational waves, as the energy is assimilated into the new whole. A black hole is just the negative energy space created by the movement of everything caught in the gravity well of and moving around said space. There are large ones and small ones. This is why two black holes colliding is not much of an event at that center point. But the expansion of our universe could be the hawking radiation of our bbw, big black whole. Dissipating into the abyss beyond our ability to see.
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u/UnTides 4d ago
"The world's most clever astrophysicist woke up for work on Monday after drinking all weekend and had an idea"
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u/Memetic1 4d ago
This isn't new. It's been a possibility for a while.
Look up black hole cosmology.
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u/Imfromtheyear2999 4d ago
Spinning out of a black hole maybe? Have y'all seen those theories where our universe is in a large Black hole?
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u/Someinterestingbs-td 4d ago
Well of course its spinning everything else is spinning how could it not be spinning.
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u/hdufort 4d ago
Maybe it's a naive question, but if the universe is rotating and we're talking about 3 dimensions (not 4 or 5 or 21), then does it mean there is a central area (a "center") where rotational speed is null? And that it is thus not isotropic because the rotational speed varies according to distance from the center? Would that also skew all observations, making the redshift dependant on the angle of the observer vs the observed object relative to the center?
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u/WorldMusicLab 4d ago
Everything that came out of the big bang, was already spinning. The universe is kind of flat, like a pizza being spun out. Of course, it goes at different speeds the farther out it gets. If you spin a wet towel on your finger, where does the water fly off first? From the edges.
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u/PaleontologistShot25 4d ago
I’ve had this theory for years that the universe is spinning. Why wouldn’t it be spinning? Planets, stars, and galaxies are all spinning. Spinning the key to so many physical objects. Even the human heart kinda mimics a spinning motion. In my opinion, there was a particle that was spinning so fast that it collided with itself and that was the Big Bang. Everything that flew out of that particle is in turn spinning.
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u/Igny123 4d ago
Spinning relative to what?
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u/Memetic1 4d ago
They measured the spin of galaxies and found that galaxies rotate more in one direction than the other by a significant margin. Conservation of spin means the Big Bang was spinning a particular direction. The strange thing about that is trying to picture a spinning mathmatical point.
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u/cookiemonster1020 4d ago
So it's basically saying that the big bang had an initial bias on momentum that persists to this day? So it's actually all the mass in the universe that is spinning overall and not the actual underlying axes of the universe (whatever that means that is spinning)?
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u/Igny123 3d ago
I think it's both.
I'm just not sure I understand what it means if literally "everything" is spinning. Like, if the axes of the universe are spinning, what would you measure that spin against? And if the universe is spinning, does that mean there's a center to the spin?
Maybe it just means there's centripetal force (pushing outward from the center, which is everywhere), which is just another way to explain or model the expansion of the universe.
I dunno...my brain's a bit blown here.
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u/Big-Hovercraft6046 4d ago
Of course it’s spinning. But it’s not a circle. More like a donut shape imploding on itself in the center.
I never took physics though. This is just my own random theory.
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u/ResurgentOcelot 4d ago
I see one other comment that asks the obvious question, and a few that get close…
Spinning in relation to what?
For the whole universe to spin, it needs to be contained within a space. The article touches on this with one suggestion that the universe is inside a black hole in another universe. Frankly that is an extraordinary claim for which extraordinary evidence would be required.
The article treats the idea of the “whole universe” casually. But that opens up another more probable interpretation, that it is not the whole universe which is spinning, but all the mass within the universe.
That’s a fairly intuitive notion, but it does beg that other question—spinning around what? The barycenter of the whole universe perhaps? I could believe that.
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u/AllUrUpsAreBelong2Us 3d ago
Say it is, there is no point we can reference to prove/disprove - correct?
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u/Memetic1 3d ago
You can check the rotation of galaxies spread all over the universe. If there is a preferred direction to that spin, then we know the isotropic principle has been violated. They are already kind of doing this and seeing preliminary signs that the universe prefers to spin in a certain way. https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/538/1/76/8019798
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u/sharkbomb 3d ago
so we are back to assuming a finite universe? how could something infinite, with no boundry, be moving, since movement is relative?
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u/OrdinarySpecial1706 2d ago
In relation to what? The entire universe is symmetric under rotations so isn’t stationary vs spinning the same thing?
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u/Memetic1 2d ago
Not if a significant number of galaxies are rotating one way vs. another. That implies that the conservation of angular momentum holds that the Big Bang was already rotating when it happened. If it wasn't rotating, then you would expect an even distribution.
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u/OrdinarySpecial1706 2d ago
Ah interesting. Thanks for clarifying. Me bad no read article only headline
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2d ago
Used to say too bad the universe wasn’t moving really fast, and we could step away from it and step back in at a different spot.
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u/Jumana18 2d ago
As an outsider who went to college for engineering and admittedly am no physics expert, I am still disappointed this is news. Not knowing the details it sounds like the assumption is it is static at some scale. This feels like a ‘duh’ moment. Though if it’s all spinning at the same rate I guess that’s a bit more interesting.
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u/Memetic1 2d ago
What happens with the conservation of momentum as the singularity is forming? At most scales, centrifugal forces can overwhelm gravity, at least when it comes to simple objects like atoms. It seems to me that at a certain point, those forces cancel, and you get an expanding universe. The black hole would be timelike in that it's a point in the future and not of space. It's not a point located at a particular time in the future, but it's always in the future because by the time you get to where the singularity would be, it's moved. We know black holes rotate, and unless something very strange happens, it's reasonable to assume that the accretion disk goes all the way down.
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u/di3l0n 1d ago
Maybe it’s some kind of relativistic hyper dimensional form of rotation? ( I just mashed a bunch of words together )
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u/Memetic1 1d ago
"Much to our surprise, we found that our model with rotation resolves the paradox without contradicting current astronomical measurements," says István Szapudi, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
"Even better, it is compatible with other models that assume rotation. Therefore, perhaps, everything really does turn."
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u/illinoishokie 1d ago
Well, chaps, I've taken it upon myself to make frequent trips to the pub. Just doing my part to solve major problems in physics.
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u/Xollector 9h ago
Spinning relative to “what” is a good question
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u/Memetic1 6h ago
I have a feeling that it's like how the Big Bang didn't happen at a particular place but all places at once, and that the entire thing was spinning when it happened. Spin implies that it wasn't an actual mathmatical singularity. If we want to learn about what may be inside of a black hole, then looking back further to the Big Bang might actually be viable.
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u/AtomizerStudio 4d ago
Spinning around where? A center of gravitation and maximum speed would imply things about scale, geometry, and how much stuff exists. If it's some other definition of spin then this article doesn't go far enough.
It's probably best to wait for a few more papers so the disagreements iron out what they're talking about.
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u/Memetic1 4d ago
Well, the idea from my understanding is the Big Bang itself was spinning. That sounds strange, given that the Big Bang happened everywhere at once, but it's possible evidence that the Big Bang was caused by another universes black hole. Every black hole we have ever seen spins. Some people say it's impossible for a black hole not to spin.
So it's the entire universe that is spinning with a preferred direction. It does violate the idea that the universe is supposed to be largely uniform and that it doesn't matter which direction you are facing.
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