Did the early universe had one dimension?

[iguana_tonante]

My avatar is a meerkat, but I guess it could pass for a sloth in a bad light. So, what's "Sid the Sloth" called in Italy?

Sid il Bradipo. Sid is recognized as a first name, even if it's not used in Italy.

I have no idea, I don't watch the movies on dvds in italian
Even the idea of listening to the trek actors saying "plancia" instead of bridge or " velocita' di curvatura" instead of warp makes me sick

Funny you say that. I could think of quite a few unfortunate or disappointing translations, but the ones you mentioned sound fine to my native ears.

That rendering of "warp speed" does seem odd. Isn't there an equivalent term from weaving that they could have used to preserve the metaphor? My dictionary lists "ordito" for "warp" but you know how misleading dictionaries can be.

Well, they could have used "trama" (actually, "weft"), in that case "velocità di trama" would also mean, literally, "speed of plot".

More seriously, I don't think that weaving is the first thing people think when hearing "warp", but more something along the line of "distortion" and, indeed, "curvature". So in this instance, I think that "velocità di curvatura" seems appropriate. But I might be mistaken.

 

[RoJoHen]

I would never think of weaving when hearing "warp." I'm clearly missing a definition of something, because I'm not even sure how you could think that.

 

[boco]

To me warp is distortion... so yes, curvatura is appropriate, but still sounds weird to my years! Italians and other people took many other foreign words and used them , why not use warp too??

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I read a dodgy explanation of Warp Drive (almost certainly non-canonical) that reckoned the warp factor was the enfolding number of the space-time metric in the direction of travel. "Ruck", "crease", "fold", or "pucker" might have been alternative terms, although "warp" does sound cool in English for some reason I can't fathom. "Ruck factor" is not far from being a very dodgy Spoonerism. "Weft" definitely doesn't work, nor does its equivalent "woof".

 

[Mikhail]

To me warp is distortion... so yes, curvatura is appropriate, but still sounds weird to my years! Italians and other people took many other foreign words and used them , why not use warp too??

In Russian there is no separate word for "warp." Basically the literal translation is the same as a translation of word "curvature," and also frequently people just use the word "warp" without a translation. The same in russian physics literature.

 

[boco]

To me warp is distortion... so yes, curvatura is appropriate, but still sounds weird to my years! Italians and other people took many other foreign words and used them , why not use warp too??

In Russian there is no separate word for "warp." Basically the literal translation is the same as a translation of word "curvature," and also frequently people just use the word "warp" without a translation. The same in russian physics literature.

warp should become a universal word to describe the notion

 

[Mikhail]

It likely will, eventually. At least in physics no one has such problems, because after math - English is a language of physics.

 

[boco]

true, math and physics are universal languages

 

[Mikhail]

I can't say "I love you" using math, you know...

 

[boco]

yes you can, using 0 and 1...

 

[Mikhail]

Hmm, curious. Is it math?

 

[boco]

served:
01101001001000000110110001101111011101100110010100100000011110010110111101110101
of course not only math.. a lot more

 

[Mikhail]

You proved you can

 

[Mikhail]

0110100100100000011011000110111101110110011001010010000001111001011011110111010100100000011101000110111101101111

 

[Kai Winn]

Here's something interesting I've read:
the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.
They suggested that the early universe --which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first --was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).

Amazing there are people who can wrap their minds around stuff like that. Shouldn't at least space have existed before the big-bang theory put the universe into it? Space doesn't depend on stuff in it, or some enclosure.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Here's something interesting I've read:
the mind-boggling concept at the heart of a theory that University at Buffalo physicist Dejan Stojkovic and colleagues proposed in 2010.
They suggested that the early universe --which exploded from a single point and was very, very small at first --was one-dimensional (like a straight line) before expanding to include two dimensions (like a plane) and then three (like the world in which we live today).

Amazing there are people who can wrap their minds around stuff like that. Shouldn't at least space have existed before the big-bang theory put the universe into it? Space doesn't depend on stuff in it, or some enclosure.

That'd be String theory whose solutions are usually found by perturbative expansion against an existing space-time background - this being one of the main criticisms levelled at it by some theoreticians. Matrix theory, String Field theory, Loop Quantum Gravity, and anti de Sitter/conformal field theory are alternative approaches. Apparently. I can't say I understand any of them very well apart from recognizing that the dichotomy in worldview about background dependence in Physics probably goes back to Newton and Leibniz.

 

[Lindley]

Shouldn't at least space have existed before the big-bang theory put the universe into it? Space doesn't depend on stuff in it, or some enclosure.

It sort of does. It's certainly difficult to wrap your mind around nothing, not even space, existing. But that's what the theories say. It's difficult to even talk about because the English words you want to use to explain the concept don't really apply, eg, you can't say "space took up less space in the past".

 

[iguana_tonante]

Shouldn't at least space have existed before the big-bang theory put the universe into it?

As far as we know now... nope. Also, "before" the Big Bang is meaningless: time, as well as space, began with it.

 

[Kai Winn]

I hope science will come up with a better theory about the origins of the universe in my lifetime, big bang smells like creation and religion. Well, time. I like the view of some philosophers who claim that time is a human invention, but doesn't exist outside our minds. Try to define it for yourself, and all you come up with is that it's a means of comparing stuff with recurring events in nature. Nothing that flows or can be travelled however, the paradoxes and causality violations which inevitably arise make the idea of time travel absurd. I also have a problem with how the second is defined nowadays, it's the time a photon needs to travel 299,792,458 metres (in vacuum). It took a long time to figure out how fast light travels, and now we turn it around, and use the way to define time?

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Not quite - that's how a metre is defined. We have very good clocks, which are much more accurate than the old standard metre.

"The meter is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second."
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html