Universal books -- Claim The Earth -- Chapter 4: Under the Sun

How big is the universe?  The universe is only as big as human being can possibly measure, not as big as human being can possibly imagine. Man can imagine a straight line extending unlimitedly, but such a line is meaningless in the understandable world, since brain can never figure out the meaning outside of what brain understand. That was a point made concisely by believer of the theory of relativity.

Back in reality, when a fast runner runs very fast, at the end of the run, he or she might be able to leap into the air long and high like Carl Lewis or Michael Jordan. But eventually, the long jumper will fall onto the ground. When a car or a motorcycle was driven at a very high speed, the automobile would be able to fly over the cuckoo's nest, but will eventually smash into something on the ground. An airplane pilot can fly solo and circle the earth, but will eventually have to land on earth. A rocket can accelerate to different escape velocity and free from the pull of the Earth, the Sun or the Milky Way, but still the rocket would be orbiting something and run along a certain orbit when the circle or the oval gets bigger and bigger.   No matter how fast a rocket initially gets propelled, it cannot travel a straight line forever.  A rocket traveling more than 12km per second can escape the pull of the earth, but cannot escape the pull of the Sun. Another rocket traveling more than 43km per second can leave the solar system but cannot escape the Milky Way.

What about a rocket traveling at the speed of the light, or anything traveling close to the speed of light? It will escape many things of the mundane world or the mundane universe, but eventually the light would be pulled back to go around this gigantic and gargantuan circle that has many stuff in it. Such a circle will not exceed a distance in the magnitude of 12 billion light years as based on some simple high school level equations in physics. Since nothing can travel than the speed of light, that is practically the size of the universe that we live in. One piece of unfinished thought is, what if the center of one universe starts from the 1/4 diameter of the other universe? Putting this remaining question aside, the outer curve of a universe is practically as straight as any 'line' could possibly be. The outer surface of that universe is as 'plain' as any plane could possibly be.

Of course philosophers, thinkers, geometry teachers, priests and theologians alike would oppose to the idea that an imagined 'straight line' or 'absolutely plain plane' needs to be bent in the physical world. But physicists continued on with their study of this physical world that can be only measured ultimately by light and came up with ideas that were shocking and astonishing. Such ideas included: light is the speed that cannot be surpassed in the universe; universe was finite. As Professor Fang argued that human could imagine the infinity of the universe all they want, but it is meaningless to discuss what an infinite universe is, in the eyes of physicists. An infinite universe should be discussed by philosophers or probably theologians.  But since human observe the universe with light or ultimately electronic waves, there is no point to discuss things that cannot be measured by this ultimate tool of measurement -- electronic waves. That was the foundation of the special relativity theory by Albert Einstein.

Words from the Scripture "there is nothing new under the sun" can be interpreted by Einstein as God was saying there is nothing more to see under the light. With so many translation errors happening between Hebrew and English, there is nothing new under the light was probably what God intended to say anyhow. Can human brain understand things that human brain cannot sense, describe and measure? Light is therefore the practical limitation of the human thinking and description, therefore the limit of the description of the universe as we know it. As you can see, such trick is not new under the sun either, just like the thoughts happened before in the forms of: Can the almighty God create a stone that he cannot lift? Can energy generate more energy? Can robots create more robots that ultimately control the human? These are the questions along the same line as "can light detect something light can never catch" or "Can electromagnetic wave measure something this e-wave can never interact with?"

"Under microscope or even smaller scales, similar questions can be asked. Can light measure something that is much smaller than the wave length of any kind of light - I mean electromagnetic wave?" Wise Guy clarified the ambiguity with his friend. "Good question, that is what 'uncertainty principle' is all about. But let's finish the theory of relativity first", David stopped his friend.

"Most educated people in the world are familiar with the equation that velocity equals to distance divided by time or v = d / t . Such an equation was describing two objects moving against a background of an absolutely flat plane and a forever-existing and never-ending time. After Einstein pointed out that maybe the equation should consider speed of light traveling in the vacuum is the only 'constant' that everything should measured against, the background of so-called 'absolute space' disappeared, and 'absolute time' disappeared too.  The more surprising between those disappearances was the vanishing of 'time' that we understood in the traditional sense.

Just like how people gradually came to accept the concept that the earth is round, the disappearance of absolute space time took quite a long 'time'. Einstein' reasoning was actually quite easily observable and well documented throughout historical literatures, but it's just that our common mortals haven't noticed it until someone else reminded us about them. In the universe that we live, nothing is really motionless. For instance, any person or any object sitting quietly on earth is rotating on the surface of the earth at a rather high speed, or in Chinese language this is called 坐地日行八万里. Even any star hanging in the day or night sky and appear to be anchors of the universe, are also moving along with their parent galaxies such as our very own Milky Way.

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