Minecraft is one of the most popular computer games today. If you literally translate the word that the name of the game means "Mining craft". Minecraft is an indie game whose genre is defined as a "sandbox", which contains elements of survival and an open world. If we talk about the style of the game, then it consists entirely of the so-called blocks, which include mobs, landscape, objects, and finally the player himself. For texturing, the game uses a special kind of low-resolution texture, in computer terms, the resolution is 16 * 16 texels.

The Minecraft computer game was developed by the Swedish programmer Markus Persson, better known under the pseudonym Notch. The game was originally conceived as a clone of the Infiniminer game, however, Mr. Person expressed a desire to make the game similar to Dwarf Fortress. The Minecraft game was written for the Java platform using the LWJGL library.

The development of Minecraft lasted about one week, only after that its creation was first announced on forums like TIGSource. On this forum, the topic of creating a Minecraft game caused a stir among users, after which a special forum was created, which was entirely dedicated to the Minecraft game.

From the data provided by analysts of the "Market Leader" magazine, we can say the following:
1. The most popular "Minecraft" on the Internet is in the following states:
-, in Yandex they enter "Minecraft" 100.09 times per 1000 people;

When you first start the game, your character finds himself in a world that is in many ways similar to the real one: around green lawns that give way to forests, mountains and deserts. Through all this flow rivers that flow into large seas and oceans. However, there are quite unusual creatures in this world, you can find strange materials, but otherwise it is quite ordinary. And the players believe that he is the only one. This is a rather serious mistake, because in reality they lose a lot. Indeed, in Minecraft there is far from one world. There are two more parallel ones that you can get to using portals. Also, additional locations are added using mods. In this article, you will learn in "Minecraft" in a world different from the initial one. After all, portals are the only way to move between worlds, so you have to learn how to create them.

Portal to the Nether

The very first extra world you will be able to visit is the Nether, which most players simply refer to as "Minecraft" to the Hell world? The recipe for success is very simple, but you may have some problems getting materials. The fact is that the portal must consist of obsidian, which is not generated in the world upon creation. And you can't craft it. How then to get it?

Here you need to know one trick. You need to make sure that flowing water gets on the lava source, otherwise you will end up with ordinary cobblestones instead of obsidian. To create a portal, you will need fourteen blocks of obsidian, and if you have already got them, you can start building the portal itself. The passage in it should be two by three blocks, that is, in the end you will get a rectangle with an empty space in the center. To fill it, you will need a lighter, which is crafted from flint and an iron ingot. You need to activate the lighter next to the portal, then the void inside it will be covered with a purple layer, through which you can already get into Hell. However, this is not the only option available to you. Learn how to make a portal in Minecraft to the world of End.

Portal to End

The second world that exists in the original version of the game is the End. If you are thinking about how to make a portal in Minecraft to the world of End, then you should think twice. The fact is that the journey will be one way: the developers added this world so that players who are tired of playing do not abandon the process, but complete it by teleporting to the last world and killing the main boss - the dragon. You do not need to build this portal - you only need to activate it. To do this, you will need to kill Endermans and Blazes in the Lower World in order to combine eyes and powder, from which the very elements that you should insert into the holes on the portal will be obtained. You can find it in the dungeons - these are natural structures, and you will activate the portal immediately when you insert the received stones.

Portal to paradise

The most popular world added by the mod is Paradise. A portal to it is created in much the same way as to Hell, only instead of obsidian you will need to find glowstone - a material that can only be mined in the Lower World. After creating the same arch, you will need to pour water into it. A blue veil will appear, through which you will have to go to find yourself in a new world.

Other worlds

You can also make a portal to the world of Herobrine in Minecraft - this is just one of many examples. All of them are unofficial and are added to the game through modifications. But you can choose what you like the most, download, install and start traveling through unknown locations. Add a portal to the world of Endermen and many other interesting and fascinating worlds to Minecraft!

If, out of curiosity, we pick up a reference book or some popular science manual, we will certainly stumble upon one of the versions of the theory of the origin of the Universe - the so-called "big bang" theory. Briefly, this theory can be stated as follows: initially, all matter was compressed into one "point", which had an unusually high temperature, and then this "point" exploded with tremendous force. As a result of the explosion, atoms, substances, planets, stars, galaxies and, finally, life were gradually formed from a super-hot cloud of subatomic particles gradually expanding in all directions.

At the same time, the expansion of the Universe continues, and it is not known how long it will continue: perhaps someday it will reach its borders.

The conclusions of cosmology are based both on the laws of physics and on the data of observational astronomy. Like any science, cosmology in its structure, in addition to the empirical and theoretical levels, also has the level of philosophical premises, philosophical foundations.

Thus, modern cosmology is based on the assumption that the laws of nature, established on the basis of studying a very limited part of the Universe, most often on the basis of experiments on the planet Earth, can be extrapolated to much larger areas, ultimately to the entire Universe.

This assumption about the stability of the laws of nature in space and time belongs to the level of the philosophical foundations of modern cosmology.

The emergence of modern cosmology is associated with the creation of a relativistic theory of gravity - the general theory of relativity by Einstein (1916).

From Einstein's equations of the general theory of relativity follows the curvature of space-time and the relationship of curvature with the density of mass (energy).

Applying the general theory of relativity to the universe as a whole, Einstein discovered that there is no such solution of equations, which would correspond to a universe that does not change with time.

However, Einstein imagined the universe as stationary. Therefore, he introduced an additional term into the obtained equations, which ensures the stationarity of the Universe.

In the early 1920s, the Soviet mathematician A.A. Fridman was the first to solve the equations of the general theory of relativity for the entire Universe without imposing stationarity conditions.

He showed that the universe, filled with gravitating matter, must expand or contract.

The equations obtained by Friedman form the basis of modern cosmology.

In 1929, the American astronomer E. Hubble published an article "Relationship between distance and radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae", in which he concluded: "Distant galaxies are moving away from us at a speed proportional to the distance from us.

This conclusion was obtained by Hubble on the basis of the empirical establishment of a certain physical effect - redshift, i.e.

an increase in the wavelengths of the lines in the spectrum of the source (shift of the lines towards the red part of the spectrum) compared with the lines of the reference spectra due to the Doppler effect in the spectra of galaxies.

Hubble's discovery of the redshift effect, the recession of galaxies, underlies the concept of an expanding universe.

According to modern cosmological concepts, the Universe is expanding, but there is no center of expansion: from any point in the Universe, the expansion pattern will be the same, namely, all galaxies will have a redshift proportional to their distance.

The space itself seems to be inflated.

If you draw galaxies on a balloon and start inflating it, then the distances between them will increase, and the faster, the farther they are from each other. The only difference is that the galaxies drawn on the ball themselves increase in size, while real star systems throughout the Universe retain their volume due to the forces of gravity.

One of the biggest problems facing the proponents of the "big bang" theory is precisely that none of the scenarios they propose for the emergence of the universe can be described mathematically or physically.

According to the basic theories of the "big bang", the initial state of the universe was an infinitely small point with an infinitely high density and an infinitely high temperature. However, such a state goes beyond the limits of mathematical logic and cannot be described formally. So in reality, nothing definite can be said about the initial state of the Universe, and the calculations here fail. Therefore, this state has received the name "phenomenon" among scientists.

Since this barrier has not yet been overcome, in popular science publications for the general public, the topic of “phenomenon” is usually omitted altogether, and in specialized scientific publications and publications whose authors are trying to somehow cope with this mathematical problem, about the “phenomenon ” are spoken of as scientifically unacceptable, Stephen Hawking, professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge, and J.F.R. Ellis, professor of mathematics at the University of Cape Town, in their book “The Long Scale of Space-Time Structure” indicate: “ Our results support the concept that the universe began a finite number of years ago.

However, the starting point of the theory of the origin of the universe - the so-called "phenomenon" - is beyond the known laws of physics.

How was the expansion of the universe discovered?

Then we have to admit that in order to justify the "phenomenon", this cornerstone of the "big bang" theory, it is necessary to admit the possibility of using research methods that go beyond the scope of modern physics.

A "phenomenon", like any other starting point of the "beginning of the universe", involving something that cannot be described by scientific categories, remains an open question.

However, the following question arises: where did the “phenomenon” itself come from, how did it form? After all, the problem of the “phenomenon” is only part of a much larger problem, the problem of the very source of the initial state of the Universe. In other words, if the Universe was originally compressed into a point, then what brought it to this state? And even if we abandon the “phenomenon” that causes theoretical difficulties, the question still remains: how did the Universe form?

In an attempt to circumvent this difficulty, some scientists propose the so-called "pulsating universe" theory.

In their opinion, the Universe is infinite, over and over again, it shrinks to a point, then it expands to some boundaries. Such a universe has neither beginning nor end, there is only a cycle of expansion and a cycle of contraction. At the same time, the authors of the hypothesis argue that the Universe has always existed, thereby seemingly completely removing the question of the “beginning of the world”.

But the fact is that no one has yet presented a satisfactory explanation of the mechanism of pulsation.

Why does the Universe pulsate? What are the reasons for it? Physicist Steven Weinberg in his book "The First Three Minutes" indicates that with each next pulsation in the Universe, the ratio of the number of photons to the number of nucleons must inevitably increase, which leads to the extinction of new pulsations.

Weinberg concludes that in this way the number of cycles of pulsation of the Universe is finite, which means that at some point they must stop. Therefore, the "pulsating Universe" has an end, and therefore has a beginning.

In 2011, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Supernova Cosmology project participant Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as members of the High-z Supernova research group Brian P.

Schmidt of the Australian National University and Adam G. Riess of Johns Hopkins University.

Three scientists shared the prize for discovering that the expansion of the universe is accelerating by observing distant supernovae. They studied a special type of Type Ia supernovae.

These are exploded old compact stars heavier than the Sun, but the size of the Earth. One such supernova can emit as much light as a whole galaxy of stars. Two teams of researchers managed to detect more than 50 distant supernovae Ia, whose light turned out to be weaker than expected.

This was proof that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The study repeatedly stumbled upon mysteries and complex problems, however, in the end, both teams of scientists came to the same conclusions about the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.

This discovery is truly amazing.

We already know that after the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, the universe began to expand. However, the discovery that this expansion is accelerating startled the discoverers themselves.

The reason for the mysterious acceleration is attributed to hypothetical dark energy, which is estimated to make up about three-quarters of the universe, but still remains the biggest mystery of modern physics.

Astronomy

Astronomy->Expanding Universe->

Online testing

material from the book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinov "The Shortest History of Time"

Doppler effect

In the 1920s, when astronomers began to study the spectra of stars in other galaxies, something very interesting was discovered: they turned out to be the same characteristic sets of missing colors as the stars in our own galaxy, but they were all shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. , and in the same proportion.

To physicists, color or frequency shift is known as the Doppler effect.

We are all familiar with how this phenomenon affects sound. Listen to the sound of a car passing by.

Expanding Universe

When it approaches, the sound of its engine or horn seems higher, and when the car has already passed by and began to move away, the sound decreases. A police car traveling towards us at a speed of one hundred kilometers per hour develops about a tenth of the speed of sound. The sound of his siren is a wave, alternating crests and troughs. Recall that the distance between the nearest crests (or troughs) is called the wavelength. The shorter the wavelength, the more vibrations reach our ear every second and the higher the tone, or frequency, of the sound.

The Doppler effect is caused by the fact that the approaching car, emitting each next sound wave crest, will be closer to us, and as a result, the distances between the crests will be less than if the car was standing still.

This means that the wavelengths of the waves coming to us become shorter, and their frequency becomes higher. Conversely, if the car moves away, the length of the waves we catch becomes longer, and their frequency becomes lower. And the faster the car moves, the stronger the Doppler effect manifests itself, which allows it to be used to measure speed.

When the source emitting waves moves towards the observer, the wavelength decreases.

On the contrary, when the source is removed, it increases. This is called the Doppler effect.

Light and radio waves behave in a similar way. The police use the Doppler effect to determine the speed of vehicles by measuring the wavelength of the radio signal reflected from them.

Light is a vibration, or wave, of the electromagnetic field. The wavelength of visible light is extremely small - from forty to eighty millionths of a meter. The human eye perceives light waves of different wavelengths as different colors, with the longest wavelengths corresponding to the red end of the spectrum, and the shortest - related to the blue end.

Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting light waves of a certain wavelength. The length of the recorded waves will be the same as that of the emitted ones. But suppose now that the light source began to move away from us. As in the case of sound, this will increase the wavelength of light, which means that the spectrum will shift towards the red end.

Universe expansion

Having proved the existence of other galaxies, Hubble in subsequent years was engaged in determining the distances to them and observing their spectra.

At the time, many assumed that galaxies were moving randomly and expected that the number of blueshifted spectra would be about the same as the number of redshifted ones. Therefore, it was a complete surprise to discover that the spectra of most galaxies show a redshift - almost all star systems are moving away from us!

Even more surprising was the fact discovered by Hubble and published in 1929: the magnitude of the redshift of galaxies is not random, but directly proportional to their distance from us. In other words, the farther away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is receding! It followed from this that the Universe cannot be static, unchanged in size, as previously thought.

In fact, it is expanding: the distance between galaxies is constantly growing.

The realization that the universe is expanding has made a real revolution in the minds, one of the greatest in the twentieth century. When you look back, it may seem surprising that no one thought of this before. Newton and other great minds must have realized that a static universe would be unstable. Even if at some point it would be stationary, the mutual attraction of stars and galaxies would quickly lead to its compression.

Even if the universe were expanding relatively slowly, gravity would eventually put an end to its expansion and cause it to contract. However, if the expansion rate of the universe is greater than some critical point, gravity will never be able to stop it and the universe will continue to expand forever.

Here you can see a distant resemblance to a rocket rising from the surface of the Earth.

At a relatively low speed, gravity will eventually stop the rocket and it will begin to fall towards the Earth. On the other hand, if the speed of the rocket is higher than the critical one (more than 11.2 kilometers per second), gravity cannot hold it and it leaves the Earth forever.

In 1965, two American physicists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, were debugging a very sensitive microwave receiver.

(Microwaves are radiation with a wavelength of about a centimeter.) Penzias and Wilson were worried that the receiver was picking up more noise than expected. They found bird droppings on the antenna and eliminated other potential causes of failure, but soon exhausted all possible sources of interference. The noise differed in that it was recorded around the clock throughout the year, regardless of the rotation of the Earth around its axis and its revolution around the Sun. Since the movement of the Earth sent the receiver into different sectors of space, Penzias and Wilson concluded that the noise comes from outside the solar system and even from outside the galaxy.

It seemed to come in equal measure from all sides of the cosmos. We now know that wherever the receiver is directed, this noise remains constant, apart from negligible variations. So Penzias and Wilson stumbled upon a striking example that the universe is the same in all directions.

What is the origin of this cosmic background noise? Around the same time that Penzias and Wilson were investigating the mysterious noise in the receiver, two American physicists at Princeton University, Bob Dick and Jim Peebles, also became interested in microwaves.

They studied the assumption of George (George) Gamow that in the early stages of development the Universe was very dense and white-hot. Dick and Peebles believed that if this was true, then we should be able to observe the glow of the early universe, since light from very distant regions of our world is only now reaching us. However, due to the expansion of the Universe, this light must be so strongly shifted to the red end of the spectrum that it will turn from visible radiation into microwave radiation.

Dick and Peebles were just preparing to search for this radiation when Penzias and Wilson, hearing about their work, realized that they had already found it.

For this discovery, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1978 (which seems somewhat unfair to Dick and Peebles, not to mention Gamow).

At first glance, the fact that the universe looks the same in any direction suggests that we occupy some special place in it. In particular, it might seem that since all the galaxies are moving away from us, then we must be in the center of the universe.

There is, however, another explanation for this phenomenon: the universe can look the same in all directions from any other galaxy as well.

All galaxies are moving away from each other.

This is reminiscent of the spreading of colored spots on the surface of an inflated balloon. As the size of the ball increases, the distances between any two spots also increase, but in this case, none of the spots can be considered the center of expansion.

Moreover, if the radius of the balloon is constantly growing, then the further apart the spots on its surface are, the faster they will be removed during expansion. Let's say the radius of the balloon doubles every second.

Then two spots, initially separated by a distance of one centimeter, in a second will be already at a distance of two centimeters from each other (if measured along the surface of the balloon), so that their relative speed will be one centimeter per second.

On the other hand, a pair of spots that were separated by ten centimeters will, one second after the start of expansion, move apart by twenty centimeters, so that their relative velocity will be ten centimeters per second. The speed at which any two galaxies move away from each other is proportional to the distance between them.

Thus, the redshift of a galaxy should be directly proportional to its distance from us - this is the same dependence that Hubble later discovered. The Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedman in 1922 managed to propose a successful model and anticipate the results of Hubble's observations, his work remained almost unknown in the West, until in 1935 a similar model was proposed by the American physicist Howard Robertson and the British mathematician Arthur Walker, already in the wake of Hubble's discovery. expansion of the universe.

As the universe expands, galaxies are moving away from each other.

Over time, the distance between distant star islands increases more than between nearby galaxies, just as it happens with spots on an inflating balloon.

Therefore, to an observer from any galaxy, the rate of removal of another galaxy seems to be the greater, the farther it is located.

Three types of expansion of the universe

The first class of solutions (the one found by Friedman) assumes that the expansion of the universe is slow enough that the attraction between galaxies gradually slows it down and eventually stops it.

After that, the galaxies begin to converge, and the Universe begins to shrink. According to the second class of solutions, the universe is expanding so rapidly that gravity will only slightly slow down the recession of galaxies, but will never be able to stop it. Finally, there is a third solution, according to which the universe is expanding just at such a rate as to avoid collapse. Over time, the speed of the expansion of galaxies becomes less and less, but never reaches zero.

An amazing feature of Friedman's first model is that in it the Universe is not infinite in space, but at the same time there are no boundaries anywhere in space.

Gravity is so strong that space is curled up and closes on itself. This is somewhat similar to the surface of the Earth, which is also finite, but has no boundaries. If you move along the surface of the Earth in a certain direction, you will never come across an insurmountable barrier or edge of the world, but in the end you will return to where you started from.

In Friedman's first model, space is arranged in exactly the same way, but in three dimensions, and not in two, as in the case of the Earth's surface. The idea that it is possible to go around the universe and return to the starting point is good for science fiction, but has no practical value, since, as can be shown, the universe will shrink to a point before the traveler returns to the beginning of his journey.

The universe is so big that you need to move faster than light to finish your journey where you started, and such speeds are forbidden (by the theory of relativity). In Friedman's second model, space is also curved, but in a different way.

And only in the third model is the large-scale geometry of the Universe flat (although space is curved in the vicinity of massive bodies).

Which of Friedman's models describes our Universe? Will the expansion of the Universe ever stop, and will it be replaced by contraction, or will the Universe expand forever?

It turned out that answering this question is more difficult than scientists initially thought. Its solution depends mainly on two things - the currently observed rate of expansion of the Universe and its current average density (the amount of matter per unit volume of space).

The higher the current expansion rate, the greater the gravity, and hence the density of the matter, is required to stop the expansion. If the average density is above some critical value (determined by the rate of expansion), then the gravitational attraction of matter can stop the expansion of the universe and cause it to contract. This behavior of the Universe corresponds to the first Friedman model.

If the average density is less than the critical value, then the gravitational attraction will not stop the expansion and the Universe will expand forever - as in the second Friedmann model. Finally, if the average density of the universe is exactly equal to the critical value, the expansion of the universe will slow down forever, getting closer to a static state, but never reaching it.

This scenario corresponds to the third Friedman model.

So which model is correct? We can determine the current rate of expansion of the universe if we measure the rate at which other galaxies are moving away from us using the Doppler effect.

This can be done very accurately. However, the distances to galaxies are not well known because we can only measure them indirectly. Therefore, we only know that the rate of expansion of the Universe is from 5 to 10% per billion years. Even more vague is our knowledge of the current average density of the universe. Thus, if we add up the masses of all the visible stars in our own and other galaxies, the sum is less than a hundredth of what is required to stop the expansion of the universe, even at the lowest estimate of the expansion rate.

But that's not all.

Our own and other galaxies must contain a large amount of some kind of "dark matter" that we cannot directly observe, but whose existence we know due to its gravitational influence on the orbits of stars in galaxies. Perhaps the best evidence for the existence of dark matter comes from the orbits of stars at the periphery of spiral galaxies like the Milky Way.

These stars revolve around their galaxies too fast to be kept in orbit by the gravity of the galaxy's visible stars alone. In addition, most galaxies are part of clusters, and we can similarly infer the presence of dark matter between galaxies in these clusters by its effect on the motion of galaxies.

In fact, the amount of dark matter in the Universe far exceeds the amount of ordinary matter. If we take into account all the dark matter, we get about a tenth of the mass that is needed to stop the expansion.

However, it is impossible to exclude the existence of other forms of matter, not yet known to us, distributed almost evenly throughout the Universe, which could increase its average density.

For example, there are elementary particles called neutrinos that interact very weakly with matter and are extremely difficult to detect.

Over the past few years, different groups of researchers have studied the smallest ripples in the microwave background that Penzias and Wilson found. The size of this ripple can serve as an indicator of the large-scale structure of the universe. Her character seems to indicate that the universe is still flat (as in Friedman's third model)!

But since the total amount of ordinary and dark matter is not enough for this, physicists postulated the existence of another, not yet discovered, substance - dark energy.

And as if to further complicate the problem, recent observations have shown that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accelerating.

Contrary to all Friedman's models! This is very strange, since the presence of matter in space - high or low density - can only slow down the expansion. After all, gravity always acts as a force of attraction. The acceleration of cosmological expansion is like a bomb that collects rather than dissipates energy after the explosion.

What force is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the cosmos? No one has a reliable answer to this question. However, Einstein may have been right after all when he introduced the cosmological constant (and the corresponding anti-gravity effect) into his equations.

Einstein's mistake

The expansion of the universe could have been predicted at any time in the nineteenth or eighteenth century, and even at the end of the seventeenth century.

However, the belief in a static universe was so strong that delusion held sway over minds until the early twentieth century. Even Einstein was so sure of the static nature of the universe that in 1915 he made a special correction to the general theory of relativity by artificially adding a special term, called the cosmological constant, to the equations, which ensured the static nature of the universe.

The cosmological constant manifested itself as the action of some new force - "anti-gravity", which, unlike other forces, had no definite source, but was simply an inherent property inherent in the very fabric of space-time.

Under the influence of this force, space-time showed an innate tendency to expand. By choosing the value of the cosmological constant, Einstein could vary the strength of this trend. With its help, he managed to exactly balance the mutual attraction of all existing matter and get a static universe as a result.

Einstein later dismissed the idea of ​​a cosmological constant as his "biggest mistake".

As we shall soon see, there are reasons today to believe that Einstein might, after all, have been right in introducing the cosmological constant. But what must have upset Einstein most of all was that he let his belief in a stationary universe override the conclusion that the universe must expand, predicted by his own theory. It seems that only one person saw this consequence of the general theory of relativity and took it seriously. While Einstein and other physicists were looking for ways to avoid the universe being non-static, the Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedman, on the contrary, insisted that the universe is expanding.

Friedman made two very simple assumptions about the universe: that it looks the same no matter where we look, and that this assumption is true no matter where we look from.

Based on these two ideas and solving the equations of general relativity, he proved that the universe cannot be static. Thus, in 1922, a few years before the discovery of Edwin Hubble, Friedman accurately predicted the expansion of the universe!

Centuries ago, the Christian church would have recognized it as heretical, since church doctrine postulated that we occupy a special place at the center of the universe.

But today we accept Friedman's assumption for almost the opposite reason, a kind of modesty: we would find it completely surprising if the universe looked the same in all directions only to us, but not to other observers in the universe!

UNIVERSE(from the Greek "oecumene" - inhabited, inhabited earth) - "everything that exists", "comprehensive world whole", "totality of all things"; the meaning of these terms is ambiguous and is determined by the conceptual context.

There are at least three levels of the concept of "Universe".

1. The universe as a philosophical idea has a meaning close to the concept of "universum", or "world": "material world", "created being", etc. It plays an important role in European philosophy. Images of the Universe in philosophical ontologies were included in the philosophical foundations of scientific research of the Universe.

2. The Universe in physical cosmology, or the Universe as a whole, is an object of cosmological extrapolations.

In the traditional sense - a comprehensive, unlimited and fundamentally unique physical system ("The Universe is published in one copy" - A. Poincaré); the material world, considered from a physical and astronomical point of view (A.L. Zelmanov). Different theories and models of the Universe are considered from this point of view as non-equivalent to each other of the same original.

Such an understanding of the Universe as a whole was justified in different ways: 1) by referring to the “presumption of extrapolation”: cosmology claims precisely to represent the comprehensive world whole in the knowledge system with its conceptual means, and until the opposite is proven, these claims should be accepted in full ; 2) logically - the Universe is defined as a comprehensive world whole, and other Universes cannot exist by definition, etc. Classical, Newtonian cosmology created an image of the Universe, infinite in space and time, and infinity was considered an attributive property of the Universe.

It is generally accepted that Newton's infinite homogeneous Universe "destroyed" the ancient cosmos. However, scientific and philosophical images of the Universe continue to coexist in culture, mutually enriching each other.

The Newtonian Universe destroyed the image of the ancient cosmos only in the sense that it separated man from the Universe and even opposed them.

In non-classical, relativistic cosmology, the theory of the Universe was first constructed.

Its properties turned out to be completely different from Newton's. According to the theory of the expanding Universe developed by Friedman, the Universe as a whole can be both finite and infinite in space, but in time it is, in any case, finite, i.e.

had a start. A.A. Fridman believed that the world, or the Universe as an object of cosmology, “is infinitely narrower and smaller than the philosopher’s world-universe”. On the contrary, the vast majority of cosmologists, on the basis of the principle of uniformity, identified models of the expanding Universe with our Metagalaxy. The initial moment of the expansion of the Metagalaxy was considered as the absolute "beginning of everything", from a creationist point of view - as the "creation of the world". Some relativistic cosmologists, considering the principle of uniformity as an insufficiently substantiated simplification, considered the Universe as a comprehensive physical system of a larger scale than the Metagalaxy, and the Metagalaxy only as a limited part of the Universe.

Relativistic cosmology has radically changed the image of the Universe in the scientific picture of the world.

In ideological terms, she returned to the image of the ancient cosmos in the sense that she again connected man and the (evolving) Universe. The next step in this direction was anthropic principle in cosmology.

The modern approach to the interpretation of the Universe as a whole is based, firstly, on the distinction between the philosophical idea of ​​the world and the Universe as an object of cosmology; secondly, this concept is relativized, i.e. its scope is related to a certain level of knowledge, cosmological theory or model - in a purely linguistic (regardless of their object status) or in an object sense.

The Universe was interpreted, for example, as "the largest set of events to which our physical laws can be applied, extrapolated in one way or another" or "could be considered physically connected with us" (G. Bondi).

The development of this approach was the concept according to which the Universe in cosmology is “everything that exists” not in some absolute sense, but only from the point of view of a given cosmological theory, i.e. a physical system of the greatest scale and order, the existence of which follows from a certain system of physical knowledge.

This is a relative and transient boundary of the known mega-world, determined by the possibilities of extrapolation of the system of physical knowledge. Under the Universe as a whole, not in all cases the same "original" is meant. On the contrary, different theories may have different originals as their object, i.e. physical systems of different order and scale of the structural hierarchy. But all claims to represent the all-encompassing world whole in the absolute sense remain unsubstantiated.

When interpreting the Universe in cosmology, a distinction must be made between potentially and actually existing. What today is considered non-existent, tomorrow may enter the field of scientific research, will turn out to exist (from the point of view of physics) and will be included in our understanding of the Universe. So, if the theory of the expanding Universe essentially described our Metagalaxy, then the most popular theory of the inflationary (“inflating”) Universe in modern cosmology introduces the concept of a set of “other universes” (or, in terms of empirical language, extra-metagalactic objects) with qualitatively different properties.

The inflationary theory thus recognizes a megascopic violation of the principle of uniformity of the Universe and introduces the principle of the infinite diversity of the Universe that is additional to it in terms of meaning.

The totality of these universes I.S. Shklovsky proposed to call the “Metauniverse”. Inflationary cosmology in a specific form revives, therefore, the idea of ​​the infinity of the Universe (Metauniverse) as its infinite diversity. Objects like the Metagalaxy are often called "miniverses" in inflationary cosmology.

Miniverses arise by spontaneous fluctuations of the physical vacuum. It follows from this point of view that the initial moment of the expansion of our Universe, the Metagalaxy, should not necessarily be considered the absolute beginning of everything.

This is only the initial moment of evolution and self-organization of one of the space systems. In some versions of quantum cosmology, the concept of the universe is closely linked to the existence of an observer (the "participation principle"). “Generating at some limited stage of its existence observer-participants, does not, in turn, the Universe, through their observations, acquire that tangibility that we call reality? Isn't this the mechanism of existence? (A.J. Wheeler).

The meaning of the concept of the Universe in this case is also determined by a theory based on the distinction between the potential and actual existence of the Universe as a whole in the light of the quantum principle.

3. The Universe in astronomy (observable or astronomical Universe) is a region of the world covered by observations, and now partly by space experiments, i.e.

"everything that exists" from the point of view of the observational means and research methods available in astronomy. The astronomical universe is a hierarchy of cosmic systems of increasing scale and order of complexity, which have been successively discovered and studied by science. These are the Solar System, our star system, the Galaxy (the existence of which was proved by W. Herschel in the 18th century), the Metagalaxy discovered by E. Hubble in the 1920s.

At present, the objects of the Universe are available for observation, remote from us at a distance of approx. 9–12 billion light years.

Throughout the history of astronomy up to the 2nd half.

The concept of an expanding universe.

20th century in the astronomical Universe, the same types of celestial bodies were known: planets, stars, gas and dust matter. Modern astronomy has discovered fundamentally new, previously unknown types of celestial bodies, incl.

superdense objects in the cores of galaxies (perhaps representing black holes). Many states of celestial bodies in the astronomical Universe turned out to be sharply non-stationary, unstable, i.e. located at bifurcation points. It is assumed that the vast majority (up to 90–95%) of the matter of the astronomical Universe is concentrated in invisible, yet unobservable forms (“hidden mass”).

Literature:

1. Fridman A.A.

Fav. works. M., 1965;

2. Infinity and the Universe. M., 1970;

3. Universe, astronomy, philosophy. M, 1988;

4. Astronomy and the modern picture of the world.

5. Bondy H. Cosmology. Cambr., 1952;

6. Munitz M. Space, Time and Creation. N.Y., 1965.

V.V. Kazyutinsky

The increase in the rate of expansion of the universe is not so shocking - it has been talked about for some time. New estimates reduce the possibility that this is just some kind of coincidence to 1 in 5,000. In other words, the world needs new, intelligent ideas to explain it.

After six years of measurements, based on data from the Hubble telescope, astronomers calculated the expansion rate of the universe with an error of only 2.3%. We know that space is expanding. What pushes it, whatever it is, is determined by a number - the Hubble constant, calculated in kilometers per megaparsec. Naturally, the tools used to determine this number lead to slightly different answers. Most believe that the universe is at a speed of 70 (km/s)/Mpc. But one tool produced a different result.

After analyzing the CMB - a light echo still piercing through space 13.8 billion years later - the Planck space observatory came up with a number close to 67.8 (km/s)/Mpc. The difference doesn't seem like much, but it made astronomers stop and think.

"The community is really struggling to understand the significance of this discrepancy," said Adam Riess, lead researcher for the latest study, from the Space Telescope Science Institute and Johns Hopkins University.

" alt="(!LANG: Variations from individual epochs of Cepheid photometry that have undergone phase correction before the epoch of average intensity / Adam G. Riess/The Astrophysical Journal" src="/sites/default/files/images_custom/2018/07/expansion.jpg">!}

Variations from individual epochs of Cepheid photometry that have undergone phase correction before the epoch of average intensity / Adam G. Riess/The Astrophysical Journal

Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt and Nicholas B. Sunzeff came to the conclusion in the 90s that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down - on the contrary, it is accelerating. The Hubble and Planck results only confirm that the universe has expanded more slowly in the past. However, physicists and astronomers do not like to play with "probabilities". They are looking for even more ways to figure this figure, in the hope of deriving a single answer, or discovering something that has eluded them before.

Riesse's team used Hubble to collect data on Cepheids, or variable stars. Cepheid starlight is believed to be reliable enough to determine the distance to distant objects. To clarify the relationship between apparent brightness and distance, scientists first studied the Cepheids in the Milky Way. The data was based on a small number of variable stars only 300 to 1600 light-years from Earth.

Today, scientists have decided that they can improve the results - and have decided to use Hubble to the best of its ability to collect information on Cepheids at distances from six thousand to 12 thousand light-years from us. To accurately measure the distance, they observed the changing positions of the stars as the Earth moved around the Sun. They studied the position of each star a thousand times a minute every six months for four years.

“You measure the distance between two stars not just at one point on the camera, but over and over again, thousands of times, eliminating errors in the calculations,” Riess says.

Armed with new data on Cepheids, scientists have arrived at a result close to 73.45 ± 1.66 (km/s) Mpc, these stars in distant galaxies, with an error of a record 2.3%. Riess plans to collect data on another 50 Cepheids and improve the accuracy of the calculations.

This new study greatly reduces the likelihood that the difference in measurements of the age of the universe is a coincidence. Something is definitely happening. Maybe it's a mysterious dark energy? Or maybe it's time to change the established understanding of the shape of the universe? Could this be dark radiation?

Whatever it is, physics will have to come up with new - crazy and contradictory - theories in search of an answer.