quote:

ORIGINAL: CuriousLord

quote:

ORIGINAL: mnottertail

I sort of doubt I'll ever have to be beyond my means when it comes to Science on this board.. feel free to ask away..

..but what do you want to know about gravity? In the most basic sense, a blackhole sucks stuff in with gravity.. mass is attracted in.. and can't escape. Again, evaporation is Hawking's pet project on a contradiction to this. I'd explain it if you're interested.

Or are you asking me how gravity works..?

why don't you start with either, whatever your comfort zone tells you is right in your secret ganglion.........

you be the highschool teacher, (I will start you off here) and the event horizon, accumulates this material debris, and it is sucked into the hole, so is it like a blowjob?  at some point it get shit out and where do the wad go, I am as curious as you are.

Then , we get on, and you can explain me grave issues like gravity.

LOL





_____________________________

Have they not divided the prey; to every man a damsel or two? Judges 5:30

(in reply to CuriousLord)

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ORIGINAL: velvetears

Wasn't the universe at one time expanding and now it is shrinking (there's a scientific word for it i am sure)?

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ORIGINAL: Lordandmaster

Nope, it's still expanding.  Maybe the term you're looking for is the "redshift"?

This is a really good site, in plain English, maintained by the UCLA astrophysicist Ned Wright:

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#z

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ORIGINAL: littlesarbonn

(hold arms out wide) It's THIS big.

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ORIGINAL: bipolarber

Interesting question, and one that I doubt anyone has a simple answer to. Myself, if I were teaching your hypothetical class, I would take it in steps. First, I'd try to give them some scale of the solar system. I'd put various scaled pins into a circle of foam, about the size of a dinner plate...
"Okay, this represents our solar system. It's approcimately nine light hours across, not counting the Oort Cloud at the outer fringes. Imagine about three inches beyond this a tiny dot that represents Voyager II, the fastest moving man-made object. It was sent on a mission to Jupiter starting in the year 1978, about a year after Star Wars first came out, and Jimmy Carter was still in office. At this scale, the next solar system you might encounter would be Proxima Centuri, 4.3 light years away... that would make it about the same diastance here as New York to to LA."

Next, I'd replace the circle of foam with a smaller block, with only two pins in it, about six inches apart.

  "This is our sun, and Proxima Centuri. At this scale, the center of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, would be about 50 miles away. (Insert the name of an appropriate city near you)"

Then, I'd replace the foam blocks with one of those large, swirled looking toy balls you can get from Wal Mart. On it, using a Sharpie pen, I'd place randomly little "@" symbols representing about 30 galaxies.

  This would represent the "local group" of galaxies. There are about 30 of them, and the distance to them is varied, but they are all flying away from each other as space itself is expanding. So fast, that astronomers can actually measure the "red shift" in their light as they do so.

Beyond this, we deal in specualtion. Thanks to dark feild astronomy (pointing telescopes into areas of space where there are no visible stars, and taking extremely long exposures) We know there seem to be BILLIONS of galaxies out there, each localized group of galaxies (like our own local group of about 30) would be represented by a single grain of salt. Now, salt the parking lot of the local mall on a snowy day... and you've got an inkling of the scale of the known universes.

Problem is, we don't know if this is the only one.

If you have access to a copy of "Cosmos" the old Carl Sagan series on PBS, you could play the first half of episode #1, where Carl takes us through a half hour long explanation of this very topic. The boxed set is about $100, and worth every penny, even if a few of the episodes are beginning to date themselves... (mostly because we've found out so much more about the outer soloar system in the last 25 years.)

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ORIGINAL: seeksfemslave

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ORIGINAL: popeye1250
And no matter how big the Universe is wouldn't it have to "end" at some point?
And what would there be at the "end" of the Universe?
Some good answers in here thanks.

This question, and the fact that it would probably have to "begin" as well is a  mind bender that arrogant scientists splutter and cough  when asked about and acolytes ie dimwit followers, think scientists have "solved".
Nothing could be further from the truth, but science is rational isn't it. It must be because it believes itself to be NO?

To forestall the obvious responses: just because the scientific method can be seen to be logical and successful in solving the relatively simple problems dont get carried away and believe that scientists wont succumb to prestige and general purpose bullshit when considering the really difficult problems.

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ORIGINAL: popeye1250

...how would you try to explain to a class just how big in human terms that the Universe is?
I mean as good as you could and trying to put it on a scale that humans could understand.

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ORIGINAL: Raechard

Yep Science is full of theories and in most cases that are all they will ever be to us are theories. It made me laugh when I read recently how much the EU spent on the world’s biggest particle accelerator only to find out another accelerator may have already found the illusive god particle. Even if they didn’t I don’t know how they are going to justify the cost of the thing. What new technologies will come from it? Personally I think it would have been better spent into more research into nuclear fusion.