Universe question?

Question

If I drop a brick in the middle of the ocean the ripple would travel outwards until the kinetic energy dissipates. The kinetic energy would not return to its source.

If I drop that same brick into the middle of a wading pool the ripple would bounce off the walls of the pool and travel back to its source. Also, it would encounter other kinetic energy from all sides of the wading pool.

The ocean ripple causes little disturbance while the wading pool ripple creates chaos from all the colliding ripples. So my question is this.

If I took the same principle and applied it to the universe wouldn't that suggest the universe has boundaries or physical limitations? The universe is full of chaos. There is no smooth "ripple" that explains most things in the universe. The brick in my proposal is the "big bang".

Answer 1

Nothing of what we know applies (necessarily) to the big bang.  There are numerous opposing camps. Just as we look toward  the east for sunrise, and to the west at dusk, so we find exactly what we predicted, to many decimal places.  

When the big bang pays a visit, you're working with huge amounts of energy and minuscule doses of time and space.   There aren't enough scientists to process what happens there.  

I hope this helped.  It's not much.

Answer 2

The ripple isn't creating the wading pool.

Answer 3

First of all, the "ripple" caused by dropping a brick in the middle of the ocean would be completely swamped by the 10 metre waves there, so it is not a good analogy. In a wading pool, there are no 10 metre waves created by the wind currents and ocean currents and tides etc, so once again it is not a good analogy.

Indeed there are smooth ripples which flow through the universe. Every natural phenomenon in the universe is cyclic, described by simple harmonic motion. I challenge you to find a natural phenomenon which is not simple harmonic or a combination of several simple harmonic motions.

Finally, the big bang is somewhat larger that a "brick in the ocean".

Answer 4

Well, I don't suppose the big bang is over yet.  Our Universe is still expanding at an accelerated rate.  But the billionths of seconds that we can mathematically 'see' of the initial big bang everything did seem to happen all at once as these initial billionths of seconds grew from zero time to billionths of seconds to millionths to many billions of years.

It's interesting to hear someone to say that we'll never have enough scientists to calculate the forces within the big bang in a day and age where computers are being created with phenomenally more power all the time.  I'm not saying we'll define our initial singularity tomorrow - but someday we will.

Answer 5

Big bang makes sense only if the universe is finite but unbounded. The big bang supposedly happened everywhere at the same instant, and there are no boundaries for it to reflect off of.

If the universe is infinite, there was no big bang. It may have begun with extremely high density and temperature, but it was always infinite in extent.

According to my Fractal Foam Model of Universes, chaos rules at the tiniest scale because of the expansion of space in finite random amounts averaging approximately 10^-105 cubic meter. Each new bit of new space radiates tiny ripples of pressure waves (dark energy). The p-waves in turn generate s-waves, and exchange of momentum between p-waves and s-waves causes the s-waves to orbit one another converting the s-wave energy to mass. Each fundamental particle is an attractor which makes order from the chaos.