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I'm going to be very amused if the Steady State Model - an unpopular relic from the 1940s - turns out to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state

I'm going to be very amused if the Steady State Model - an unpopular relic from the 1940s - turns out to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady-state_model

airstrike 4y ago
Speaking of unpopular pet theories from the 1940s, I'm a fan of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe EDIT: There's also this super fun PBS Space Time episode on the theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  I love this theory because it's both mindblowing and yet, when you think about it, weirdly makes sense. Assuming time travel etc, of course.
marricks 4y ago
There’s also more spiral galaxies than expected! If steady state gained favor that would be super fun, but this quote from the article seems to throw a little cold water on that. > At the same time, she notes that yesterday’s disks are different than modern ones. “They’re not today's Milky Way,” she notes. “They're turbulent, they're messy, and we need to study them more.”
dark-star 4y ago
My favorite theory is that the universe is finite, some sort of (hyper)sphere or -torus. If we could just look far enough out there we would see our own galaxy What would be even cooler is if it was warped like a moebius strip in a higher dimension, so that when we look out there, everything is mirrored from "our" reality :-D
- delecti 4y ago
  That first theory would be interesting, but wouldn't it be basically impossible to prove unless the finite repeating universe were also pretty small? We see distant objects as they were in the past, and I'm not sure we'd recognize our own galaxy a billion years ago and a billion light years away. It's actually an interesting thought experiment. If that theory were true, and assuming we could see ourselves face-on (rather than edge-on), then I wonder how far away and far back could we recognize ourselves.
  - dark-star 4y ago
    Yeah, I realize we're looking in the past and can't "see" ourselves (probably not even our own galaxy, depending how far out we have to look). But I guess the theory in itself is not any more "weird" or "outlandish" as the idea of an infinite universe. And maybe if we actually look both ways, we could find another galaxy that could be proven to be the same (because of some particularly remarkable stars/quasars/supernovae etc. in them). Who knows, maybe the universe is smaller than we think and we just don't recognize the "same" galaxies on different images because they are billions of years apart?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  You should read the short story The Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang who also wrote Stories of Your Life, the inspiration for the movie Arrival.
  - jadbox 4y ago
    That was one of my favorite stories and certainly relevant to the theories here.
- deepsun 4y ago
  That assumes that we can somehow see through time, which leads to a whole bunch of inconsistencies (aka time travel paradoxes). There's no way to look through large distances without looking back in time, unfortunately.
brap 4y ago
Since everyone is mentioning their favorite whacky theories, mine is the one that says within every particle is a whole universe, made up of particles with their own universes and so on, and what we call our universe is really just a particle in an even bigger universe. And what if all of those universes were actually the same universe, like some infinite recursion? Is there a name for this?
- someotherperson 4y ago
  Men in Black marble hypothesis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
  - brap 4y ago
    I also vaguely recall something from The Simpsons… Edit: ha, found it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94
    - karmelapple 4y ago
      Which itself is based off the intro the film Contact: https://youtu.be/EWwhQB3TKXA https://youtu.be/EWwhQB3TKXA
      - kepano 4y ago
        Which is inspired by the Powers of Ten 1977 short: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0 https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        In the 1954 book Horton Hears a Who its entire universe is inside a speck of dust.
- thinkmcfly 4y ago
  I dunno, I felt like this was a huge cop out in the movie Men in Black
narag 4y ago
The funny thing is that since we've been observing the universe for so little time, and we're so small, most of the evidence for the big bang and expansion is not direct, but a chain of deductions. I mean that we can't observe the expansion because we can't really triangulate at galactic scale. If there is another reason the light from distant galaxies turn to red, kind of a long-distance light fatigue, we couldn't really know. The reason I always heard that would be a confirmation, because it comes from a different causal path, was precisely the different composition of old galaxies. And now it seems they're not so sure.
- cryptonector 4y ago
  > If there is another reason the light from distant galaxies turn to red, kind of a long-distance light fatigue, we couldn't really know. It's not just red shift that demands an explanation, but also that the sky (space) is dark. If space wasn't expanding then the skies would be bright white. Another thing is the second law of thermodynamics, which very strongly implies a lot of standard cosmology. Of course, standard cosmology could be all wrong, but these deductions are quite solid as far as the physics that we know today.
  - ash 4y ago
    Why would it be bright white?
    - habibur 4y ago
      Any straight line you draw from earth to any direction in the sky will then reach a star.
      - fartsucker69 4y ago
        Which is insanely far away and all light coming from there will have diminished in energy enough to be barely visible? Inadequate explanation. Even if the universe was a closed box with perfectly reflecting borders, what you would actually see in the sky is something like an average brightness of the entire universe with some fluctuations.

airstrike 4y ago

Speaking of unpopular pet theories from the 1940s, I'm a fan of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-electron_universe EDIT: There's also this super fun PBS Space Time episode on the theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dqtW9MslFk

Cthulhu_ 4y ago
I love this theory because it's both mindblowing and yet, when you think about it, weirdly makes sense. Assuming time travel etc, of course.

marricks 4y ago

There’s also more spiral galaxies than expected! If steady state gained favor that would be super fun, but this quote from the article seems to throw a little cold water on that. > At the same time, she notes that yesterday’s disks are different than modern ones. “They’re not today's Milky Way,” she notes. “They're turbulent, they're messy, and we need to study them more.”

dark-star 4y ago

My favorite theory is that the universe is finite, some sort of (hyper)sphere or -torus. If we could just look far enough out there we would see our own galaxy What would be even cooler is if it was warped like a moebius strip in a higher dimension, so that when we look out there, everything is mirrored from "our" reality :-D

delecti 4y ago
That first theory would be interesting, but wouldn't it be basically impossible to prove unless the finite repeating universe were also pretty small? We see distant objects as they were in the past, and I'm not sure we'd recognize our own galaxy a billion years ago and a billion light years away. It's actually an interesting thought experiment. If that theory were true, and assuming we could see ourselves face-on (rather than edge-on), then I wonder how far away and far back could we recognize ourselves.
- dark-star 4y ago
  Yeah, I realize we're looking in the past and can't "see" ourselves (probably not even our own galaxy, depending how far out we have to look). But I guess the theory in itself is not any more "weird" or "outlandish" as the idea of an infinite universe. And maybe if we actually look both ways, we could find another galaxy that could be proven to be the same (because of some particularly remarkable stars/quasars/supernovae etc. in them). Who knows, maybe the universe is smaller than we think and we just don't recognize the "same" galaxies on different images because they are billions of years apart?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
satvikpendem 4y ago
You should read the short story The Tower of Babylon by Ted Chiang who also wrote Stories of Your Life, the inspiration for the movie Arrival.
- jadbox 4y ago
  That was one of my favorite stories and certainly relevant to the theories here.
deepsun 4y ago
That assumes that we can somehow see through time, which leads to a whole bunch of inconsistencies (aka time travel paradoxes). There's no way to look through large distances without looking back in time, unfortunately.

brap 4y ago

Since everyone is mentioning their favorite whacky theories, mine is the one that says within every particle is a whole universe, made up of particles with their own universes and so on, and what we call our universe is really just a particle in an even bigger universe. And what if all of those universes were actually the same universe, like some infinite recursion? Is there a name for this?

someotherperson 4y ago
Men in Black marble hypothesis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKnpPCQyUec
- brap 4y ago
  I also vaguely recall something from The Simpsons… Edit: ha, found it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ycvlJ9XMd94
  - karmelapple 4y ago
    Which itself is based off the intro the film Contact: https://youtu.be/EWwhQB3TKXA https://youtu.be/EWwhQB3TKXA
    - kepano 4y ago
      Which is inspired by the Powers of Ten 1977 short: https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0 https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        In the 1954 book Horton Hears a Who its entire universe is inside a speck of dust.
thinkmcfly 4y ago
I dunno, I felt like this was a huge cop out in the movie Men in Black

narag 4y ago

The funny thing is that since we've been observing the universe for so little time, and we're so small, most of the evidence for the big bang and expansion is not direct, but a chain of deductions. I mean that we can't observe the expansion because we can't really triangulate at galactic scale. If there is another reason the light from distant galaxies turn to red, kind of a long-distance light fatigue, we couldn't really know. The reason I always heard that would be a confirmation, because it comes from a different causal path, was precisely the different composition of old galaxies. And now it seems they're not so sure.

cryptonector 4y ago
> If there is another reason the light from distant galaxies turn to red, kind of a long-distance light fatigue, we couldn't really know. It's not just red shift that demands an explanation, but also that the sky (space) is dark. If space wasn't expanding then the skies would be bright white. Another thing is the second law of thermodynamics, which very strongly implies a lot of standard cosmology. Of course, standard cosmology could be all wrong, but these deductions are quite solid as far as the physics that we know today.
- ash 4y ago
  Why would it be bright white?
  - habibur 4y ago
    Any straight line you draw from earth to any direction in the sky will then reach a star.
    - fartsucker69 4y ago
      Which is insanely far away and all light coming from there will have diminished in energy enough to be barely visible? Inadequate explanation. Even if the universe was a closed box with perfectly reflecting borders, what you would actually see in the sky is something like an average brightness of the entire universe with some fluctuations.