…it would be a ‘border’ between nothing and nothing?
In: Planetary Science
>what would the edge of the universe even mean
You’re the one using the phrase. If someone else is using it, they should indicate what they mean.
If it is edge of our observable universe, then it just means anything beyond that surface is causally detached from you. Anything even an infinitesimal distance beyond that edge would never reach you, even if you were immortal and it was travelling at light speed in your direction.
So what else might we choose to be an edge of the universe?
* Maybe some surface beyond which there is no matter. If the space continues though, you could theoretically keep going.
* Maybe some space surface beyond which the fundamental physical laws as we know them cease to hold? That’d probably be a pretty hard limit on where you could go even if FTL travel is possible. This one might speak to your “border between nothing and nothing.” It’d be “nothing but possibility of something” on one side, and “nothing even possible” on the other… but is there such thing as time/location/dimensions/sides/etc. there?
I imagine the edge of the universe as a point where there is only black nothingness infront of you and all the light of the universe is behind you.
you’re thinking too much in euclydean terms. That’s a limited way of speaking/thinking about the universe
I don’t think there is an ELI5 explanation for this. What I can tell you is that there are two concepts of “nothing” in this context. The first definition is the one where nothing has no properties at all: no mass, no charge, no dimensions, no space or volume, etc. It’s legitimately nothing. The second definition of nothing is empty space. Empty space has a volume and certain physical properties. The scientists of old might have called this empty space “aether,” while the modern day scientists call it space time. It has properties that can be measured and can interact with objects. Whatever it’s made of, it isn’t truly nothing because it has physical dimensions and physical properties. Theoretically it can be traversed whereas the first definition of nothing cannot be.
Space doesn’t have nothing in it. It’s full of photons, neutrinos, etc.
If the universe has a boundary, maybe there aren’t any of those particles on the other side of it.
it’s been theorized that universal curvature may not be flat and that it gently slopes away from observers in all directions but we have not been able to build sensors big enough to test this. So far we know it is flat to within 0.4% margin indicating that it may be infinite in nature. In which case you could travel forever in a single direction at any speed and never find an edge or hard boundary.
However if this were not the case and the universe were a sphere it would be finite but still would not have a hard boundary. You could travel forever in a single direction but you would simply pass the place you started.
Look into virtual particles. It won’t make anything more clear but should give you a better understanding of the “void”
Space is not just a vacuum with nothing in it. Space itself exhibits fundamental properties like the fact that it expands, it houses quantum fluctuations we call virtual particles, and it is the stage on which quantum fields like the higgs field and the electromagnetic field exist. The universe itself IS the space and everything it contains. Outside of that, we have no idea, and probably won’t know either since matter expands with space, but it cannot move faster than space (since space expands at speeds much faster than light).
Each universe is like a bubble so the edge of a universe is the edge of the bubble, with the spaces between universes being made up of pairs of positive and negative gravity particles locked together and rotating in a single spot non stop.
So such walls are what the multiverse was initially like but some spaces just started to have such gravity pairs breaking apart and collecting more and more gravity pairs until an indescribably huge empty space is formed and the gravity collection’s mass becomes so dense that the big bang occurs.
So other universes may have the charges of protons and electrons reversed since which charge they end up having is totally random thus people from one universe cannot go to another.
Vacuum has nothing in it but vacuum itself is not nothing. Space is also not nothing, the nothing in the context of what is beyond the universe means there is no space/time as we knows. Is it truly nothing? Who knows, but it doesn’t have space and time, so our entire understanding doesn’t work at all there as every physics law we derived has based on space and time. We literally cannot explain “what is beyond/outside space/time” because the concept is invalid in the first place. The idea of inside/outside before/after is created based on space/time, you cannot say “before time” or “outside of space” , because that concept does not make sense. It’s like asking “what do you see with your elbow?” The question itself is not valid for us, but for some species with eyes in their elbow, it is very natural question to them.
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