• Question: can we change and make gravity in space so we can create a universe?

    Asked by Joef MacG to Scott, Ry, Maggie, Hannah, Daniel on 8 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Maggie Lieu

      Maggie Lieu answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      We can’t really change or make gravity out of thin air but it would be cool if we could!

      We can however make artificial gravity with the help of centripetal force. A giant rotating spaceship could mimick gravity and we could live up there in space.

      We can’t however create a Universe, its just so infinitely big. We can’t even make a computer simulation of the Universe because its so big! It would just take too much computing power… but some people believe that we all live in a computer simulation

    • Photo: Hannah Middleton

      Hannah Middleton answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      We can’t create a Universe, but like Maggie said it’s possible to make artificial gravity! There’s a rotating space ship like that in the move 2001: A Space Odyssey 🙂

    • Photo: Scott Melville

      Scott Melville answered on 9 Nov 2017:

      Maggie and Hannah have already covered artificial gravity (which is so cool!), so let me say a bit about creating Universes. We’ve tried to do this a few times using computers – i.e. simulate an entire Universe. We can just about manage it, but only if the Universe is pretty boring – like if it only has a single incombustible chemical element in it so stars (and life) can’t form (those are very tricky to simulate).
      One really famous one is the Millennium Simulation,
      https://wwwmpa.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/virgo/millennium/
      which managed to make lots of galaxy clusters just like in our Universe (none of them have life though).
      What about out there in space, are there ‘other Universes’ there? Some of the wackier theories say ‘yes!’, and imagine that maybe inside black holes there are whole other Universes (which are causally separated from this one), or that maybe there are new Universes being born all the time, but just so far away that we haven’t seen them yet (these are called ‘vacuum bubbles’). Nothing like this has ever been observed though – so it’s more like science fiction rather than actual science 😉

Comments