- The Great Attractor would simply be the volume deeper in singularity. The cone of influence for the entire universe tends towards the center of our singularity.
- Dark energy, and the varying quantity of it, would simply be the amount of matter falling into our black hole. It would naturally start as a large amount (consisting of our parent star/mass) and later see variation as matter falls into it.
- Dimensionless physical constants may have been fields in the parent universe. As an infinitely small point, our universe singularity would resolve a continuous gradient to a single value. Our child universes would have a single value of gravity, for example, which could change over time (but would be constant across the universe as they changed).
I've got a huge list of interesting consequences, but as an armchair physicist it's probably all quack science :)
The great attractor is about 200 Mly away. Directly behind it, 600 Mly away from us, is the Shapley Supercluster, towards which the great attractor is itself moving. In the opposite direction is a underdensity, called the "Dipole repeller", and between the two, where we are, is a "dark flow".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley_Supercluster
If i could write i would write a novel about the great flow. That was awesome and terrifying to read.
Taking things /seriously/ is, imo, what keeps people out of stem. Stemmers are, if anything, fantasy rich and colorful people, physicists in particular!
Im glad not many people chose to downvote me too :)
Strangely, I'd love to read more on this if anyone can point me in the right direction
Kind of reminds you of the total perspective vortex from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Truly, on a universal scale even the most important and impacting human on an earth scale does about as much as a neutrino interacting with us.
[1] https://medium.com/s/story/are-you-suffering-from-existentia...
https://twitter.com/universal_sci/status/1217314288085479426
The real danger would be a super but unintelligent race doing the same (think "giant space ants"), since they wouldn't have philosophy department chairs.
The exception would be the fanatically oriented, as acting in opposition to logic is part of the basic premise.
Can't quite make myself claim it's better than Orthogonal.
The other thing is, if it's not curved then you still need to explain Mercury's orbit precession (43 arcseconds per century is it?). This is not an easy thing to do
It doesn't necessarily need to be your exact hypothesis, but if you generalize it and look at our universe (just our observable universe, or perhaps "the whole thing" in some sense) as possibly being a small object in a much vaster medium, perhaps a medium we could never directly access or observe, what implications could that have, and what could it potentially explain? Perhaps even a medium abiding by a completely different kind of physics.
Not to offend anyone here, but unless you have a solid grasp of the theory, nobody here is going to be "solving" the mystery of dark matter
For those unaware, it's from the show The Good Place. Good fun for me, highly recommend it.
Edit: Apparently a joke with the meaning of "you never know who might get lucky and have an interesting insight" was... disliked. My thoughts on being able to have insight from anywhere come at least partially from the (somewhat recent) story of physicists that noted a connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors (iirc) that mathematicians did not (after many years). Sometimes, insight comes from the outside.
Half my questions on Physics stackexchange are so naïve they’re not even wrong, they are so bad they get closed as nonsensical. Looking at past exam papers, I could probably get a grade B in A-level physics (A-level is UK qualification taken at age 18 between secondary school and university currently used to decide which university you go to).
The other half of my ideas are right, but actual physicists tell me they’re “obvious” and “not worth writing about”.
For some reason, physics seems to be disproportionately popular among armchair theorists compared to other fields like math or chemistry.
I’ve heard this before, but I wonder how true it is? I know my experiences are just anecdotes, but I knew a guy who was convinced the Hotel Room/Bellboy/Missing Dollar problem “broke maths”, and I’ve had countless frustrations with family members promoting homeopathy and acquaintances talking about chemical X being “one atom away from being bleach” like that doesn’t apply to water.
I’d be interested if anyone has done a real analysis of rates of armchair nonsense by sector.
Anyway, I just thought every device we make to measure something, there's some event the blows the scales. So what if you really just make shit up where does that go?
I like the other commenter defending the post about Cthulhu, It's just as made up as what I posted. Perspective is healthy.
To suggest that theoretical physicists are lay people with respect to math is silly. Also, I don't understand what you mean by a "connection between eigenvalues and eigenvectors" as the two seem quite obviously connected a priori?
I doubt that hypothesis is actually true, and it may never be testable, but it's also true that a lot of things believed to be untestable eventually do become testable.
I don't know why, but physics seems to be a much more popular target for these type of people than any other field.
Meta-physics is inscrutable (unless something leaves the realm of meta-physics). What's the harm in speculating about it? Like the simulation hypothesis, for example.
I understand it touches on real things here, like dark energy, but it's just dumb fun to try to conceive of if anything could lie beyond the universe and what it could possibly be if there is anything. It's likely forever unfalsifiable, but in some sense that's what makes it a fair subject for laymen. If it were testable, then you have to leave it to the professionals.
I know I have zero understanding of physics. I don't have any attachment to this or any other speculation. I'm not a crank or something. But it's impossible to not wonder about the nature of reality and the formation of the universe, you know? The fact that it's unknowable within our lifetimes, and probably forever, is the driving factor.
I like seeing how real physicists answer this question, too, in interviews and podcasts. They always hedge it with "of course this is wild speculation", like everyone should. I see I didn't really hedge my initial post, which was a mistake. This was a random thought triggered by that other post, not something I actually believe whatsoever.
It is more likely that physical laws have localised variations that we cannot tell from any discernible distance. Maybe pockets of vacuum do shit that we cannot fathom and if we observed it, we'd break the code for reality.
Which is not to that's how it would look. Photons are also falling, so you'd still be able to see the external universe even if the apparent direction it's in isn't traversable. (The photons are coming from the past. See above...)
I don't think that grasps space-time as one thing and why black holes are so mental. The event horizon is where the past no longer points outwards, that path is broken. There's no direction in space or time with which to point your space engine to escape. No time you could travel to were that is restored.
Even if it predicts observation, like Bohr's model of the atom did, you have some degree of abstraction between the model and the physical implementation, so to speak.
And that's the ultimate problem of string theories: even if we crack some math model, if it can't be observed directly, we just don't know. Quantum mechanics currently sit in-between the purely theoretical (where we do have a model that works, minus gravity, if applicable at that level) and the barely observable (we can infer, a lot, but not much in the way of actually seeing things; although I think nowadays we've crossed that bridge anecdotally enough to be confident but don't quote me on that).
Therefore, string theory models may require higher dimensions in the math to hack the problem, but it doesn't mean these actually exist — like Clifford's algebra, Geometric Algebra, you reason with 4-dimensions to treat 2D (x, y) problems, and 8-dimensions to treat 3D problems — but that's just the math, and the beauty of that is indeed to "unify" other algebras which become essentially subsets.
It's really important to keep that in mind when "gunning for" string theories, or seeing them as "explicative", interpretable. They're really not, at least not now, and possibly ever due to their construction. In truth, it's more about brute-forcing the issue (kinda like current deep learning?), hence the wild ranges of "possible solutions", from 11 to 26 dimensions (some go in the hundreds in suggestion) because they're basically trying to use computers to identify dimensions wherein our universe "fits" quite well, and derive what we don't know (e.g. quantum gravity, or whatever that means in the "promised dimension level"). At a "basic principle" level, that's what string theories are after. It's pure math, it's crazy smart, it's really elegant and almost godly, noble because it requires the state of the art of our evolution and technology; but like quantum mechanics the "interpretation" will not be delivered with the equation, and it may never mean anything to us.
It doesn't (cannot, really) state about the possibility that our universe, though self-contained in 4D, might be floating in a higher-dimensional space, like a 2D surface would float in 3D (and could be internally very consistent).
String theory, by the way, might not prove or disprove any of that (see my other reply to parent).
(I deserve downvotes for this!)
I'm still kinda fond of the Flatland theory myself. Us poor 4 dimensional beings can't figure out how to build tools that can take 5 dimensional measurements, so we see weird behavior we can't explain.