A question for anyone.........ish

[slothrop]

preferably someone with an understanding of theoretical physics.

According to the standard model of our universe, or at least my understanding of it; the universe is an infinate mass ever expanding. This is possible because of several factors including dark energy pulling the universe ever further, dark matter- allowing things like gravity to work in galaxies, atomic theory- allowing everything to be so incredibly impossible and so on. However, dark flow suggests that all matter (dark and light) is flowing away from our "infinate" universe into another universe "beyond". My question is stupidly simple (I am not a physicist so I am a little sketchy with some theories): How can anything infinate, namely our universe, exist within the confines of another infinity?

The basic point is that the universe isn't, in most models, infinite.

I hadn't heard of 'dark flow' before - I thought it was an old DJ Crystl tune or something - but looking at the wiki article, I'd say
i) be a bit cautious of it - the concept only came out in the last couple of years, so it hasn't really had time to be reviewed and criticized and checked by other physiscists and it might turn out to be speculation and
ii) I think the idea that stuff is being pulled into somewhere 'outside our universe' depends on how you define "outside our universe" - it looks like the stuff it's being pulled by is in a region outside of the universe that we can directly observe - but we can't observe it because that far away the universe becomes opaque to our observations, not because it's (neccessarily) fundamentally outside of the universe.

(The wiki has a link to a Discovery News article that says it might be "the pull of another universe", but that might just be journalists trying to hype up the stuff that sounds coolest - cf http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive ... micid=1174)

I guess the final caveat is that there's always a difficulty in trying to understand quantum scale or cosmological scale phenomena using a language that was invented to tell other monkeys where the best bananas are, and a sense of physics based around knowing where a cricket ball will land if you chuck it in a given direction - and this is why most of the theoretical physicists I know basically do very abstract pure maths and only occasionally stop to extract a prediction about what you'll see if you look at the light from a load of primordial galaxies. That's not to say it's not a good thing to try to understand, just that you will have to take on stuff that makes no fucking sense in terms of your normal frame of reference from time to time.

[jugo]

here's a recent look at the main ideas being discussed by scientists nowadays

[kay]

Anyone want to reccomend a book on this sort of thing? But something that starts off basic though!

Brian Greene is usually pretty good for this sort of thing, explains from the basic concepts in a fairly readable way. The Elegant Universe was one of his more popular books. I don't think there will be many books that cover dark flow to any extent though as it's still a relatively new observation.

Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is also usually a decent starting point, although a drier read. Another one I quite enjoyed was Jim Al-Khallili's Black Holes, Wormholes & Time Machines.

[nousd]

dark flow
will probably turn out to be
the equivalent of a sewer blockage

the sudden releasing of which
will propel a turdlike vehicle
across the cosmos