As I may have said before (I can't remember at this point), I have watched the whole Cosmos series from Carl Sagan, and I seriously recommend it to anyone who isn't bored easily by flowing, dreamy music, excepting the first episode, because I mean my attention span about science and math and such isn't the biggest, but seriously? When talking about the first episode, I compare it to trying to sit down and watch a yoga video without following the moves or doing anything else.
But the rest of the series has a lot to do with not only space, but biology, which is another interesting science (but we won't get into it much here)... But the reason why I wanted to bring it up was that I thought I was crazy for speaking about the universe as almost an organism as itself, using "natural selection" as to which universe will survive the longest.
It's not always the stronger ones that survive, but it is the norm to think of it that way.
If we think about the universe as an organism itself, then how do we know if its on the latter end of the universal scale?
For all we know, other universes (if they're there)could have survived the past thousand-billion years!
But then again, perhaps we could think about it this way: The universe is expanding. If a universe is contracting, it may be dieing (because everything is going to collapse on each other) but if its expanding, its making more room for more matter to emerge, and stuff won't be crashing into each other.
But the fact that its expanding at an accelerating rate (the speed at which it's expanding is equal to how far it is, so it becomes faster each moment) worries me, because what happens when it reaches that infinite amount of distance? Will everything be sucked into a vortex of terror or something? Haha, probably not. But still, will the universe begin contracting into what is theorized as "The Big Crunch"?
Well, according to "A Brief History of Time", because our universe is expanding so quickly, it is going to keep expanding forever, because there's not enough mass for everything to start moving toward each other again after a certain amount of time.
As far as we know today, we only have about 10% of the mass needed to have The Big Crunch. So what this means is, the universe's expansion will eventually slow down and seemingly stop at some point in time.
In other news, from "A Natural History of Zero", what was interesting was the philosophy behind the idea: Is zero a symbol for nothing, or is it a "nothing" that's there?
The first is what puts it on par with the rest of the numbers, the latter is what would keep it in another category all by itself.
This is an ancient, ANCIENT question, that cannot exactly be answered except by how the mathematician, or the student, or whoever uses it.
If you put zero in a category by itself in your work, then you're saying it's a nothing that's there (which is terribly confusing to those who think about it too long) and if you use it as a number along with all the other numbers in your work, then you're saying it's a symbol for nothing, just like 1 is a symbol for one, and 3 is a symbol for three.
Also, I thought I would bring in some stuff from H. P. Lovecraft's "Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner" First Writings (The Gleaner being the Pawtuxet Valley tabloid/magazine). for the Gleaner, H. P. Lovecraft's first writings ever published, Lovecraft wrote a number of astronomy forecasts and what he knows about stars, magnitude, and the planets.
What's cool is that these were written back in 1906, so it's interesting to see things in there that we know today were wrong, but back then were seen as the truth.
Part of this issues were caused by the fuzziness of the telescopes; you could only see something for about a few seconds before having to readjust and recalibrate the whole thing.
The first thing that started was that there was a professor named Dr. Lowell, who claimed to see perfectly straight crevices dug into Mars, and theorized that they were water canals for an extremely intelligent species.
I had to laugh, because we learned in science this year that it was false.
Plus, they hadn't discovered Pluto yet, so there were only eight planets just like there are today!
Another thing they said was that another professor had spotted dark green spots on the moon that could only be vegetation. Of course, this too was eventually proven false.
The people were beginning to panic because of Dr. Lowell's "discoveries", and many asked questions about extraterrestrial life. What would this look like? It says in the article that no one could be sure because although there's really no air, "there could be a thin, gaseous cloud" that the extraterrestrials could live in. But with the "discovery" of vegetation on the moon, the people would believe anything. Not to mention, that there was a theory of a volcano on the moon, because many people estimated different diameters for the moon's largest crater, and therefore they thought volcanoes must change it.
Back to Mars, Dr. Lowell also thought he saw circles cutting up these long, thin canals, and therefore he told everyone that this intelligent species must use them for when the winter on Mars has passed (which there actually is) and the poles melt (which actually happens) and let the water down the crevices (does not happen).
I wonder if our generations are going to seem this crazy in the future?
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