h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm not a - but (didn't you just know that was coming ? ) surely one could equally as well argue that the universe is not flat ? If, for example, the universe was curved downward from a supposed central point, and as light travels (more or less) in a straight line, we could just be missing a lot of the light, and indeed dependant upon good ol' Sol. An idea I find preferable to that of the universe running down, as I see the 'Big Bang' theory as being aligned with the entropy theory. (Energy is constant but gradually being changed from Kinetic to Potential)

Alternatively maybe the sky gets dark at night so that stupid night workers like me, will know they're being used by management.

I gave up on A Brief History of Time when Hawkings started going on about Geodesics (I think that's what they were called) and how the shortest distance between two points wasn't a straight line... or something like that.

Anyway, bravo! Well written and easy to read - I felt I learned something, which is always a good sign

Sorry - forgot to say the article made me think, and boy thats hard to do when I'm at work. On the math front you could make it simpler for the non-numerate, by saying that anything multiplied by an infinite number automatically becomes inifinite itself. (Providning its an positive number)

You can make this argument work for some other shapes of the universe (ones which aren't flat), but it involves even more difficult maths! There are shapes that the universe could have where the argument wouldn't hold though. I think someone suggested that you could soak up all the light with suitably placed black holes (which you wouldn't get in a flat universe).

Well assuming that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, it is impossble for both space and time to exist together infinitly for this reason (the night sky not being bright).

Lets assume s is space and t is time, and an arrow means infinite in a given direction.

<---s--->
<---t---> would not work because the light had an infinite amount of time to get to earth.

<---s--->
t---> would not work because in order for space to have exist infinitly backwards in time there had to be time for it to be infinite.

so it figure that it must be something similar to...
s--->
<---t---> because then the stars have not existed long enough for the light to get here.
BTW great article!