PLOT OF ALL OBJECTS

September 22, 2023 3:12 AM

"There is a long inspiring pedagogical tradition in physics of putting everything into one log-log plot... We then make the most comprehensive pedagogical plot of the masses and sizes of all the objects in the Universe."
posted by They sucked his brains out! (20 comments total)

(Note: Humans are assumed to be spherical.)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:13 AM on September 22, 2023 [10 favorites]

Our Universe is represented by the “Hubble radius” and has a mass and size that places it on the black hole line, seemingly suggesting that our Universe is a massive, low-density black hole

I hadn't seen that before. Thanks!
posted by vacapinta at 4:59 AM on September 22, 2023

"degeneracy pressure" is the name of my sex tape
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:37 AM on September 22, 2023 [5 favorites]

MetaFilter: the Universe is a black hole
posted by mule98J at 5:43 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Eponysterical? or Eponyspherical?
posted by JoeXIII007 at 5:46 AM on September 22, 2023 [2 favorites]

Since our singularity is in the past, however, the universe is more like a white fountain: the time inverse of a black hole.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 5:48 AM on September 22, 2023

Its because the Universe is strangely, flat. There isn't really a good reason for this, its just what we measure.

I do like the diagram (Figure 2) which shows us what is too big and dense to exist and what is too small to exist. Everything that exists is somewhere in the region between.
posted by vacapinta at 5:56 AM on September 22, 2023

What does Omega_Lambda, the light grey region to the right, represent?

EDIT: oh, would that be objects larger than the observable universe? Why is it a function of mass?
posted by I-Write-Essays at 6:07 AM on September 22, 2023

With regard to the universe being a black hole, they go on to say that it's not (see figure 4). This all involves the Hubble radius and the different things "universe" can mean and this question exists in a realm where the general audience encountering it generates more confusion than not.

“What does Omega_Lambda, the light grey region to the right, represent?”

It's the era — which we're in — where the dark energy density dominates.

Much of the placement of stuff on this plot are, in my opinion, examples of the weak anthropic principle. That is to say, they're necessarily and trivially true because otherwise we'd not be here to be looking at this graph. That's the case with both the "now" line in figure 1 and, I think, that the Hubble radius appears on (or very near) the black hole line.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:30 AM on September 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Mod note: Comment removed. Let's avoid snark about weight, it doesn't add anything to the conversation.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:36 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

So basically all familiar objects should be along a straight line (since to a first approximation everything you've heard of has density 1, so you can determine its mass from its density) of slope 3 (since we live in three dimensions).
posted by madcaptenor at 7:06 AM on September 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

"degeneracy pressure" is the name of my sex tape

Yeah, well I guess that's where we part ways, because mine is "Forbidden by Gravity."
posted by The Bellman at 7:49 AM on September 22, 2023 [8 favorites]

This is so much more interesting (and challenging to make sense of) than what I expected from the description, which was a video of epic music playing as a camera pans over CG models increasing in size from a quark(?) to a galaxy(?).
posted by straight at 10:22 AM on September 22, 2023

It's the era — which we're in — where the dark energy density dominates.

So that explains the shitty fucking timeline we’re stuck in.
posted by slogger at 11:12 AM on September 22, 2023

Following up on a bit in the paper, TIL that degrees of freedom can be fractional.

I find the idea that our universe could be a time-inverted black hole so romantically weird that it must be true or close to truth, given how romantically weird reality seems, sometimes.

Still gotta pay taxes, though.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:58 AM on September 22, 2023

This is fantastic. That Figure 2 diagram is beautiful. Thanks for posting it, They sucked his brains out!
posted by straight at 2:26 PM on September 22, 2023

It is absolutely a standout work of Art — in terms of data visualization, I can't think of many works that summarize hundreds of years of science in quite the same way.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 2:35 PM on September 22, 2023

Banana for scale?
posted by How much is that froggie in the window at 4:00 PM on September 22, 2023

"degeneracy pressure" is the name of my sex tape

Yeah, well I guess that's where we part ways, because mine is "Forbidden by Gravity."

Sub-Planckian Unknown
posted by lukemeister at 11:09 AM on September 23, 2023

The Scale of the Universe (Flash, revived from the dead by Ruffle)
posted by Rhaomi at 8:36 PM on September 23, 2023 [1 favorite]