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The first one to address the problem of an infinite number of stars and the resulting heat in the Cosmos was Cosmas Indicopleustes, a 6th-century Greek monk from Alexandria, who states in his Topographia Christiana: "The crystal-made sky sustains the heat of the Sun, the moon, and the infinite number of stars; otherwise, it would have been full of fire, and it could melt or set on fire."
The universe should thus achieve, or asymptotically tend to, thermodynamic equilibrium, which corresponds to a state where no thermodynamic free energy is left, and therefore no further work is possible: this is the heat death of the universe, as predicted by Lord Kelvin in 1852.
In 1912–1914, Vesto Slipher discovered that light from remote galaxies was redshifted, [7] [8] a phenomenon later interpreted as galaxies receding from the Earth. In 1922, Alexander Friedmann used the Einstein field equations to provide theoretical evidence that the universe is expanding. [9]
By analogy, an infinite plane has zero curvature but infinite area, whereas an infinite cylinder is finite in one direction and a torus is finite in both. The ultimate fate of the universe is still unknown because it depends critically on the curvature index k and the cosmological constant Λ .
One of the unanswered questions about the universe is whether it is infinite or finite in extent. For intuition, it can be understood that a finite universe has a finite volume that, for example, could be in theory filled with a finite amount of material, while an infinite universe is unbounded and no numerical volume could possibly fill it.
The paintings portray a swirling universe of wonders, explaining a black hole's characteristics with images of Halloran's wife being bent by its warped spacetime.
He added that Alan Guth, one of the co-authors of the theorem, disagrees with Vilenkin and believes that the universe had no beginning. [ 10 ] [ 11 ] Vilenkin argues that the Carroll–Chen model constructed by Carroll and Jennie Chen, and supported by Guth, to elude the BGV theorem's conclusions persists to indicate a singularity in the ...
The argument fails in the case that the universe might be shaped like the surface of a hypersphere or torus. (Consider a similar fallacious argument that the Earth's surface must be infinite in area: because otherwise one could go to the Earth's edge and throw a javelin, proving that the Earth's surface continued wherever the javelin hit the ...