Thread: Universe

Have you been watching this TV series fronted by Brian Cox?

Episode 1 told us how we owe our existence to the stars.
Episode 2 featured interstellar planets and how they may outnumber orbiting ones.
Episode 3 informed us that our galaxy has stars formed elsewhere.
Episode 4 concentrated on supermassive black holes.
Episode 5 to come.

One fact it won't reveal.
Our planet is only 1/320,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 the size of the observable universe.

Please add to this.

Yes , great watch.


I appreciate the scientific popularizers but I know others have issues with them.

There was even a public set to between Brian Cox and one of the mods over on scienceforums.net about one of his debatable statements a good few years back.

I seem to be one of the few that dislikes Cox. I find him glib and rather like the scientific equivalent of a trendy vicar, trying to get dahn wiv ve kids. And he's bloody everywhere. I avoid him.

He can be irritating. Very irritating, like these lyrics from his D-Ream days which he later retracted because they contradicted the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics which means that things can only get worse in reality.

And things can only get better
Can only get better now I found you
(Things can only get, can only get)
Things can only get better
Can only get better now I found you and you and you.



Even more irritating I think he's the one on the drums.

Q: Where were the first extrasolar planets discovered?
A: Around pulsars.

He has rubbed shoulders with an extremely impressive cast of characters according to this. They cannot all find him as irritating as we seem to. Maybe the problem lies with us ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

I could not say how an impressive a physicist he is but I love his material and was very interested to learn that the stars are thought to have been created at the intersections of filaments of dark matter in the early universe.

Also loved his wayback/wayforward machine around the universe. (beam me up Scotty

Originally Posted by geordief

He has rubbed shoulders with an extremely impressive cast of characters according to this. They cannot all find him as irritating as we seem to. Maybe the problem lies with us ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

I could not say how an impressive a physicist he is but I love his material and was very interested to learn that the stars are thought to have been created at the intersections of filaments of dark matter in the early universe.

Also loved his wayback/wayforward machine around the universe. (beam me up Scotty

Where this stuff about filaments of dark matter come from? We don't even know what dark matter is - or even if it is matter at all?

Cox was inspired to take up science by watching Star Wars in the 1970's rather than Star Trek I believe.
And who wouldn't be?

A disaster scenario like no other. Hollywood should take note:
"If a black hole like Cygnus X-1 were to stray near the Solar System, within a light-year or so, its gravity would cause chaos. The orbits of the outer planets and comets would be significantly and possibly disastrously altered, and this would in turn threaten the orbits of the inner planets and even the Sun."

Factoids:
You could fit 1 million Earth's into the Sun.
To detect dark matter at CERN the LHC would need to be 100km in diameter.
Biggest structure we know is the Hercules Great Wall of Galaxies.

Big Bang problems:
There a shortfall of Lithium-7.
The Universe's diameter expands 3 times faster than the speed of light. It should be 28 billion light years across but it's more like 90 billion.

Originally Posted by exchemist

Where this stuff about filaments of dark matter come from? We don't even know what dark matter is - or even if it is matter at all?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_filament

Originally Posted by exchemist

Originally Posted by geordief

He has rubbed shoulders with an extremely impressive cast of characters according to this. They cannot all find him as irritating as we seem to. Maybe the problem lies with us ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

I could not say how an impressive a physicist he is but I love his material and was very interested to learn that the stars are thought to have been created at the intersections of filaments of dark matter in the early universe.

Also loved his wayback/wayforward machine around the universe. (beam me up Scotty

Where this stuff about filaments of dark matter come from? We don't even know what dark matter is - or even if it is matter at all?

Assume it is just a model that works

Actually I did ask this question elsewhere

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/f...9131#msg659131

Cox is such a controversive person... On the one hand, he can easily explain us difficult space facts. Also I withnessed an accident, that happened at his seminar. The room was full some ten minutes before the talk started, and there were still people arriving, so he went to the door, and said to someone “I have a reserved seat; you can have mine because I won’t be using it”, then took them to it, and for the rest of the time, he stood and chatted to people. That case deserves respect at least. But on the other hand I consider him to be one of the most irrigating pesron on British TV

Originally Posted by JohnPi

Cox is such a controversive person... On the one hand, he can easily explain us difficult space facts. Also I withnessed an accident, that happened at his seminar. The room was full some ten minutes before the talk started, and there were still people arriving, so he went to the door, and said to someone “I have a reserved seat; you can have mine because I won’t be using it”, then took them to it, and for the rest of the time, he stood and chatted to people. That case deserves respect at least. But on the other hand I consider him to be one of the most irrigating pesron on British TV

Can you pinpoint what makes him irritating for you?

Or is it perhaps the lack of a definite reason that makes it even more irritating?

To me it feels like he finds himself irritating.He seems very " uncentred" to me.

Originally Posted by JohnPi

I consider him to be one of the most irrigating pesron on British TV

I agree, he likes to pour cold water on other peoples ideas.
Like the idea that galaxies are formed from dark matter, and not as I was led to believe, by imperfections in the fabric of space-time.
It could be a bit of both.

As for the shape of the universe, we have an inwardly curving sphere (de Sitter space), a saddle of curved out space (anti de Sitter space) or a flat disc (Minkowski space).
It could also be doughnut shaped.
I'm going to suggest it's a double helix!

Originally Posted by geordief

Originally Posted by exchemist

Originally Posted by geordief

He has rubbed shoulders with an extremely impressive cast of characters according to this. They cannot all find him as irritating as we seem to. Maybe the problem lies with us ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)

I could not say how an impressive a physicist he is but I love his material and was very interested to learn that the stars are thought to have been created at the intersections of filaments of dark matter in the early universe.

Also loved his wayback/wayforward machine around the universe. (beam me up Scotty

Where this stuff about filaments of dark matter come from? We don't even know what dark matter is - or even if it is matter at all?

Assume it is just a model that works

Actually I did ask this question elsewhere

https://www.thenakedscientists.com/f...9131#msg659131

Ah I see. What he's saying is that - assuming dark matter is a real form of matter, - it would collect together under gravitation the same way as the visible matter in the universe. So the observed (and modelled) filamentary nature of galaxies would be mimicked by dark matter, invisible though it is. And because there is thought to be more dark matter than visible matter, it is the the gravitational attraction of these dense filaments of dark matter that would mainly be responsible for attracting visible matter into dense enough clumps to form stars. Yes that makes sense.

Assuming dark matter is really a form of matter, which we don't know yet.

Originally Posted by exchemist

Assuming dark matter is really a form of matter, which we don't know yet.

From the book We Have No Idea (2018).

DM might have some interactions we don't know about, but we are certain its mass contributes to gravitational effects.
It keeps clumping to form enormous halos.
Normal matter is pulled in by its gravity and it's believed DM is responsible for galaxies forming early in the universe.
In a universe without DM it would take billions more years for first galaxies to form.

But we do know some things about it.
It has mass.
It's invisible.
It likes to hang out with galaxies.
Regular matter and other DM can't seem to touch it. Clouds of DM can even pass through each other.

(It's spooky all right).

What did you learn from the final episode?
He went on again about inflation theory and the first trillions of a second.
I was led to believe that the universe may have started its expansion before and then collapsed only to try again, or something.
I still don't know why the universe bothers to exist, what switched on time, why is it mathematical, what fired up the equations, will it all expire as radiation or re-collapse.