Asklemmy

43945 readers

587 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

What possible, fundamental, misunderstanding of the nature of the universe could make current academics look like flat earthers? (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

124 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

What would cause it to do that? Only thing I can think of is gravity, no? That would imply there's something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?

Or do you simply mean that our perception of space is limited and we simply can't perceive it properly and thus we'd go in one direction and end up back where we started? But if that's the case, it means we've also misunderstood light? Doesn't it go infinitely? So shouldn't there be a light source that reaches us from different directions?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Only thing I can think of is gravity, no?

They're not talking about the stuff in the universe being finite. The space itself could be finite, for example by looping back on itself. Tthe usual comparison is to a circular track - you can drive as far as you like on it without hitting an edge, but you'll eventually come back to the point where you started. Now scale this up to three dimensions.

That would imply there's something in the middle that keeps everything from straying too far?

Even if we're talking about a system held together by gravity, it does not need a central mass. The overall system just needs to be dense enough that each piece is stabilised by all the others.