UotNS and how it screws with your head

Jeff Wilson · 15 Jul 2010, 04:02 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 23:02:24 -0500
Subject: (urth) UotNS and how it screws with your head
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On 7/13/2010 3:44 PM, John Watkins wrote:
> This reminds me of C.S. Lewis's words about Milton's (fictive?)
> cosmology.  I slogged through Paradise Lost for the sake of saying I
> had, only really enjoying the fights, but Lewis fortunately provides
> this insight:
> "[Milton] invented a most ingenious device for retaining the old glories
> of the builded and finite universe yet also expressing the new
> consciousness of space.  He enclosed his cosmos in a spherical envelope
> within which all could be light and order, and hung it from the floor of
> Heaven.  Outside that he had Chaos, the 'infinite abyss', the
> 'unessential Night', where 'length, breath and highth/And time and place
> are lost'."
> Now imagine that, instead of Heaven, this sphere hangs from the floor of
> a larger sphere, that hangs from the floor of a larger sphere yet...and
> imagine that each sphere is continually contracting and expanding, dying
> and being reborn.  And some spheres have more than one sphere hanging
> off of them.
> But maybe there is a terminal sphere (or a set of terminal spheres) that
> really does (do) hang from the floor of Heaven.  Eventually.

Continuing the visit to Cosmology Corner, the above imagery is actually 
a fairly accurate description of physicist's Andrei Linde's form of 
linked expansionary universes.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >

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