Quantum Pony

Not to worry! according to Michio Kaku (physicist that often appear on youtube videos these days), before the sun explodes, humanity would have constructed a gateway to another universe (and thus finally find a real world application for string theory!).

It just so happens that whenever I felt that way, someone else in the room will say something that makes me feel like a complete idiot

Quantum entanglement is definitely strange. In fact, when physicists talk about quantum mechanics as being strange they are not refering to its probabilistic nature nor a baseball tunneling through walls, they are refering to the strangeness in things such as entanglement . What you said does seem interesting and resonates with something said by Schrödinger : "Quantum physics thus reveals a basic onenes of the universe." Dark energy is mysterious as well. One of the current models is that dark energy is what actually drives inflation and the expansion of the universe . Thank you for the video! . When I posted that figure I didn't really know what dark flow is... The video certainly does provide compelling evidence of its existence and perhaps there is something interesting lying outside the observable universe as well .

(Not really a cosmologist here but learned a thing or two over beers with some pals ) To answer this question, we need to take a quick trip back in history . A few decades ago, astro people found something they couldn't explain - the temperature at different regions in the early universe is really really similar! They looked at the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) which is like a snapshot of the observable universe when it is around 380,000 years old. [1] The color denotes different temperature across different regions in the observable universe. Even though it doesn't look very homogenous, the temperature difference is really quite small. In fact, they are the same within an interval of 0.001 degree celcius. In special relativity, we know that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light. If I do something drastic like destroying the sun, Earth will feel no effect within 8 minutes as that is the time it takes for light to travel here. So cause and effect are not instantaneous but bounded by the speed of light. Similarly, any event within a radius of 300,000km can affect me over the course of one second. But if something is say 310,000km away, it will have no effect on me within one second. For those who are familiar, this describes the concept of a lightcone. Now back to the CMB. The time between the big bang and CMB is roughly 380,000 years. So it turns out (after some computation), if we print out the CMB picture above on an A4 paper and look at two points that are about 1cm apart, they are causally disconnected. That means, since the big bang, events that affect one point in the CMB can in no way affect the other point 1cm away (on the A4 paper). So then how can they have the same temperature o.O? It's like a random group of people going to a party but wearing the exact same shirt even though there is no communication of any sort between them! So it is really unexpected that causally disconnected region on the CMB have the same temperature! This is known as the Horizon problem. The explanation is inflation. Basically, shortly after the Big Bang, spacetime itself is growing at an exponential rate (infact, they are expanding faster than the speed of light), so the small patches with evenly distributed temperature near the time of the Big Bang expands really really quickly, giving us the homogeneous state of the CMB. This is why even though the regions in CMB are causally disconnected, the temperature are the same as inflation stretches everything so quickly that it seems to violate relativity. Thus solving the Horizon problem. So here is the punch line that answers the original question. Inflation shows us that spacetime near the beginning of the universe expands much faster than the observable universe. So one can argue that outside the observable universe today, there is still something as spacetime still exists which is much larger and ever growing. Although, I personally believe it is just empty space outside the observable universe lying happily in the fabric of spacetime. But we will never know since we can't ever see them . Throughout the eons, expansion of spacetime is no longer as fast as during inflation, but it is still happening and spacetime is still expanding. So I believe the current consensus is something like the picture below [2] However, spacetime would not be infinite (yet) but probably millions (10^30 according to some sources) times greater than the observable universe depending on the inflation model you are using. And beyond the boundary of space-time, well... who knows... It is a region without space nor time... . (side note: now that I finished writing it, I felt I could probably had just started with the punchline... but anyways, inflation is too cool a thing not to talk about ) References: [1] WMAP Collaboration (2003) First-year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) observations: preliminary maps and basic results. Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. 148 (1): 1–27. arXiv:astro-ph/0302207. [2] Hard Science (2014) What Lies Beyond the Edge of the Observable Universe? https://futurism.com/what-lies-beyond-the-edge-of-the-observable-universe That is an excellent and very tricky question. The idea is that time is relative and depends on the observer. Consider an experiment where scientist A stays near the horizon of a black hole (which is a very massive object) and scientist B stays further away. They each have a stop watch. Now, in general relativity, gravitational force is the result of the curvature of spacetime. So the stronger the curvature, the stronger the force. And mass is what curves spacetime. Since Scientist A is near the horizon of the blackhole, the curvature of spacetime is much stronger compared to scientist B. And general relativity tells us that the clock for scientist A ticks much slower than scientist B. However, for an object like Earth, it is not very massive on a cosmic scale so we can pretty much approximate the spacetime near it as flat. At the boundary of the universe, there can still be planets, blackholes or just vacuum. If it is just vacuum, the curvature of spacetime is probably similar to Earth (as in being flat). So time would pass pretty much at the same pace for a scientist on Earth compared to a scientist in the vacuum at the boundary of the observable universe. Very roughly, the clock ticks 'fastest' in flat space and practically stops when you are near the horizon of a blackhole. Hope that helps

Our mortality is what gives life meaning. Although a plasma canon hand coulddd come in handy..

First language: The Black speech of Mordor -Ash nazg durbatulûk! my second language is chinese

Now that I think of it, I havn't played the original game of any of the game series I've played Dynasty warriors: DW 5 Castlevania: Aria of sorrow, Dawn of sorrow, Curse of Darkness, Lord of shadows 2 GTA: San Andreas, Vice city, IV, V Kirby: Nightmare in dreamland, Kirby & the Amazing mirror Supermario: Four Except maybe the old arcade game House of the dead, which I've played all four (took me 12 years to finally beat them all)

Lock myself in the basement and binge watch 28 days later, Zombie land and all Walking dead episodes to better prepare myself.

Yup, its all depends on the definition I'd say that in our world, almost all acts of "Magic" are not reproducible. Some clever tricks, illusions or in some cases just statistical anomalies. The tiny subset of actions that are reproducible can probably be well explained using our knowledge of science today. The tiny tiny tiny subset of actions that are not statistical anomalies, reproducible and seems unable to be explained by the science of today, can probably be explained by the science of tomrrow .

Long time ago, the magnetic properties associated with a compass would probably be considered magical. Then, some time later a British guy came along and said "Wellll, lets just make this magical force a Force (in a scientific way)." They then experimented on its properties and wrote down a few equations and BOOM, magnetism became science rather than magic. So one can argue that anything that seems magical can one day be explained by science (as few other posts had already pointed out). Now let us look at Equestria and consider the following: Aside from the four fundamental forces of nature, the ponies discovered unicorns can control a fifth fundamental force. They experimented on it, wrote books on it and were able to consistently reproduce different feats such as teleportation or levitation based on fixed sets of instructions. Finally, they decided to give this fifth force a name: "Magic". But to the ponies, it is no different from the other forces of nature as they understood it well enough by applying the scientific method. For example, Starlight trying to combine Accelero spell and Similo Duplexis spell to allow her to be in two place at once (making a hypothesis/conjecture). She then casted the spell (conducting an experiment) and it worked! Eventually, they can probably explain "Magic" using mathematics as well (if they had not done so already). So I would argue "Magic" in Equestria is scientific.

You're is absolutely right! . I've actually been thinking, for the last year or two, to incorporate Magic into the standard model of Equestria physics and see what interesting things we can do with the new physics. It is quite an ambitious task, especially if we were to do it explicitly by writing out some math . It is kind of like a toy model of a universe where we throw in new forces and new particles and see how the dynamics changes. Should be pretty fun! Hopefully, I can have some ideas in the next few blog posts haha. And by the way, nice banner!

Thanks ! I might be overanalyzing a bit (ok maybe more than just a bit) but the way science and magic are displayed in the show seems to have a very nice and coherent structure and symmetry that I wish to explore more in the future. Haha, excellent point! Just finished installing Grammarly And indeed, assuming what we know about our universe can be carried to MLPverse is assuming A LOT. However, it would be quite difficult to recreate all physics based on the episodes themselves. So in order to proceed with describing physics in Equestria (which is something I really wanted to do ) I wrote a few axioms on my other blog post as a starting point: Axiom 2: Scientific theorems and laws that are true in our universe are also true in Equestria universe. It's a bit of a cheat but it allows me to move forward haha. We can also look at the Equestria Girls universe which seems to be modeled over our universe. Here, we have a stronger argument that the physics we are familiar with is indeed the physics in EQG. And since EQGverse and MLPverse are linked, we carry our argument over.

As a result of Obi-won attempting to kill Yoda at the end of Empire Strikes Back, Yoda created the first Galactic Empire. Hence leading to the sequel, BattleStar Galactica.