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Florian Engl

  

Directory

o Trippy thought experiments 2 – 10

o What's the most powerful/inspirational quote you've ever heard? 11 – 14

o What is the wisest piece of advice a teacher has ever given you?

15 – 17

o What is the most amazing fact about the

universe? 18 - 23

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Trippy thought experiments

magine you have a ladder and you have a garage. You've never put the ladder in the garage because the ladder is too long. You'd either have to open the front door and let the end of the ladder hang out into your driveway, or the

back door, and let the other end of the ladder spill out into your back yard. One day, a friend of you says that he can put your ladder inside your garage, albeit briefly. You see, as objects approach relativistic speeds, they undergo length contraction. So if you're sitting in your garage, and your friend - who's an old guy but has a good set of legs - runs through, the ladder will appear to be shorter than it is when it's standing still. If you have a garage door opener that closes both doors simultaneously (and quickly), the ladder will fit inside.You decide to test it out. You'll sit in the garage, and just as your friend runs through, you will shut both doors at the same time. Then you'll open them back up again at the same time, so he doesn't run into the door. This should allow you to see if the ladder fits. You go through the experiment and, amazingly, the ladder fits. When you meet up with your friend outside, he asks why you didn't close both doors simultaneously. You tell him that you did, and he says you didn't. You were right, he says, the garage was way too short. The only reason why the ladder didn't crash into the doors is they didn't close at the same time. The door to the back yard closed first, as he was approaching it. The ladder hung out into the driveway. Just as he was going to crash into the back door, it opened again. The ladder started moving out into the back yard, and just as it cleared the door to the driveway, that door closed and then opened again. At no point, your friend says, was the ladder completely in the garage with both doors closed.

As it turns out, both of you had a completely different experience, due to both length contraction and relative simultaneity. If you are standing equidistant from two light bulbs connected to the same switch, and someone flips that switch, you will see both light bulbs going on at the same time. Someone standing next to one light bulb, and far from the other, will see the one near them come on, and then, later, the other one come on. There's no way to say which one is first. Nothing travels faster than light - not even door molecules. Which means that both you and your friend were right. The doors did and did not close simultaneously, and the ladder both did and did not fit in the garage.

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very second that goes by is the past, every second ahead of us is the future.  We have only the present.  But in this present, who are we? Are we just the past that is already gone never to be seen again, something

without form or substance, a shadow?  Are we the plans for the future which may never be, imagining a world inhabited by our body our friends and relatives, mountains, the night sky, the beach all with us an actor and a participant; something as vague as the past, but without memories?  What are we in the fraction of a second when we are actually something?

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onsider the Pi (3.14159265...). It consist of never ending digits (or they couldn't find any pattern in it so far) and therefore a never ending combination of digits. Considering every film and book and music could be

encoded into and decoded from a combination of digits, we CAN extract every masterpiece (that has a digital form) which is created or will be created from the Pi. Everything is in Pi.

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hink about this : You never know when you are meeting a person for the last time. You have already met a lot of people for the last time in your life, and you don't even know about it.

Creepy, isn't it?T

ave you ever noticed that the characters in our dreams are only capable of seeing and hearing everything happening in their surroundings. They can, although, touch things in dreams, but we cannot feel this in our real world.

Altogether with that, these characters cannot smell things. We (through our characters) are, by and large, capable of perceiving only two senses out of five. But these characters with two senses think that they have 'life'. And there is also possibility that these characters dies when we wake up. Which brings me to another thought that we might also be a character in someone else's (a higher order specie) dreams. And we can only perceive 5 senses. But the original beings (our higher order dreamers) might have more than 5 senses.  Like we sleep for around 6-9 hours a day, these species sleep for, like, 50-80 years. And we are dead once these higher order specie wake up from their sleep.

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magine every person in the world owns a box. No one can peek into the box of another person, only into their own. Each box contains something that the owner of the box would call a "beetle," and each person has learned what the

word "beetle" means solely by looking at what is in their box.Now suppose two people are having a conversation and the following dialogue occurs:

IPerson A: "I love my beetle."Person B: "I love my beetle too!"It's possible that they're not talking about the same thing, since each box may contain different things or nothing at all. This means that the word "beetle" cannot refer to the beetle in their respective boxes, since it is impossible to know whether they are talking about the same thing.Here's the "trippy" part of this thought-experiment: The object in the box is irrelevant to what is expressed in natural language.

o out on a dark starry night, preferably away from lots of lights. Look up and realize that while you can only see some 6500 stars, there are billions upon billions of stars shining on you. That's pretty cool by itself.

Now... think about the incontrovertible fact that every single one of those billions upon billions of stars, both that you can see and that are invisible to the naked eye, *cast a unique different shadow of you*. There are billions upon billions of shadows following you around everywhere.You can prove this to yourself. Just hold your hand up and cover up a few stars. That's a shadow of your hand. Move your head a little. That's a different shadow cast by some different stars.Furthermore, the fact that it is night is incidental to this. Those billions of stars all cast shadows of you during the day as well. You just can't see them since the sun overshadows (haha) them.

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magine replacing each neuron, one by one, over the course of many years, with a tiny Nano-machine designed to behave exactly the same as the original. When your entire brain has been completely replaced, are you still you? If not,

at which point did you stop being you? If you believe in a soul, at which point does your soul cease to be tied to this modified version of you?

Now stop and think about what is naturally happening in your brain already. Neurons are constantly dying and being replaced -- not by identically behaved ones, but by new ones in new places doing entirely different things. Add to this the fact that your existing neurons are constantly being rewired to act differently than they did before. Even the memories you have of old times are modified and

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rewritten every time you remember them. (This is not conjecture. Recent research on memory actually backs this idea up.) Now, as you grow older and your old neurons are modified or replaced altogether, does there come a point where you stop being you? What if through life-extending technology, you were to live long enough for every neuron in your brain to be replaced? Are you still you? If not, at which point did you stop being you? If you believe in a soul, at which point does your soul cease to be tied to this modified version of you?

Go back and think about the first paragraph. Have your answers changed?

ark matter is a matter which does not interact with light or normal matter but we infer it is there because it interacts with gravitational force. If it did not even interact with gravitational force then we cannot detect it and we

won't even know that it exists. Even if it passes right through us!DSuppose there are other kinds of energy/matter in the universe occupying the same space as we do but they do not interact in any way with any force that we can detect/know. Then they may interact with another such kind of matter/energy and they may form another 'set' in the same universe.

Then we can think that there is an alternate configuration of matter and energy which is occupying the same space as we do but completely undetectable to us. Suppose it too results into another kind of galaxies with stars & planets (occupying the same space as "our" galaxies but completely undetectable to us because those galaxies do not interact with any matter/energy of 'ours') and it fosters life in those planets. All content of that alternate configuration occupy the same space as we do but we'll be completely unaware of it. It forms another 'set' of the universe apart from ours. We'll be forever unaware of that set and life (if any) in that set will be forever unaware of us.

Suppose there are multiple sets of such configurations. Then there are multiple kinds of matter/energy occupying the same space, but not interacting with one another so completely unaware of each other’s existence.

Suppose there are infinite such sets. That is, infinite sets of energy/matter but each completely ignoring all other sets but all of them occupying same space. Infinite configurations of the universe, occupying the same space but completely disjoint with one another

Further, we can theorize that when big bang happened, it resulted in infinite types of energy/matter. Those which could interact with others together formed a set. One such set is our observable universe. There are infinite such sets.

This is also another way of imagining multiverse without help of a new dimension.

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o let's take a paper. A paper can be considered as a 2-dimensional plane.Imagine a 2-dimensional world. A person is living in this 2-dimensional world, inside the paper.

Hence, he will be able to see in the directions left, right, up or down. But can never see outside the plane of the paper or behind it.

Now let's cut a diamond (tilted square) shaped object from another paper.Now, imagine if this diamond shaped cut-out is being passed through the paper. What will the person see?

Initially, he will be able to see a point. Then it would expand into a line and increase in length. And then decrease, and then become a point again and then disappear. (As the cut-out is slowly pushed through the 2-D paper)He wouldn't have realised what the object really was. All he could see was a line which increased in length and decreased in length.

Now imagine a sphere, a 3-dimensional object being pushed through the 2-D paper. The person will first be able to see a dot, and then a curved line. (The centre of the line will appear nearest, while its ends will appear farther). This line would increase in length and then decrease as the sphere passes through and then becomes a point and again disappears.Now too, he couldn't have possibly realised what the object really was.

So, a man living in a 2-D world can't possibly comprehend a 3-D object. He wouldn't even be able to imagine a 3-D world. Much like how we, living in a 3-D world can't possibly imagine how a 4-D world would look like.

Also, if 4-D objects were passing through our world, we wouldn't realise it.

Just think.

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here does a thought go once it is forgotten?"Short, sweet, and super interesting."W

f our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.''I

Think about yourself.

You are one person. Try to envision each of these things in turn...

There are 13 major organ systems in your body.

One of those is a skeleton. There is a creepy skeleton inside you. There's a skeleton inside everyone you know.

Of those 13 systems we can break it down into 78 major organs in the human body.

Those organs collectively are made up of ~100,000,000,000,000 cells. You have 100 trillion cells each with copies of your DNA inside you. Try to visualize yourself made up as 100 trillion living cells each doing their own thing and collectively they become you.

Each of those cells is made up of ~200 trillion atoms. 100 trillion cells with 200 trillion atoms per cell is ~20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms in your body. That is 20 Octillion atoms in your body. Try to imagine 20 Octillion little atoms bouncing wiggling and moving in your body.

There are ~7,068,924,030 people on earth. Those human beings are made up of ~1.413784806*10^38 atoms. That is ~140 undecillion atoms that make up all of humanity.

There are more atoms in humanities bodies than stars in the entire universe.

Each of the atoms in your body was once (in some form or another) inside a star.

"It is full of stars..."

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psychologist walked around a room while teaching Stress management to an audience. As she raised a glass of water, everyone expected they’d be asked the “half empty or half full” puzzle. Instead, with a smile on her face,

she inquired: “How heavy is this glass of water?”

Answers called out ranged from 8 oz. to 20 oz.

She replied, “The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long I hold it.

If I hold it for a minute, it’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my arm. If I hold it for a day, my arm will feel numb and paralyzed. In each case, the weight of the glass doesn't change, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

She continued, “The stresses and worries in Life are like that glass of water. Think about them for a while and nothing happens. Think about them a bit longer and they begin to hurt. And if you think about them all day long, you will feel paralyzed – incapable of doing anything.”

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You will never hear about the truly perfect crime.

f the entire humanity were blind, would we somehow realize the existence of light?"

And, assuming the above statement, is there something we don't know just because we are incapable of perceiving its existence, given the limitation of our senses, condition that leaves us without the trigger of curiosity?

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our personal field of gravity expands hundreds of trillions of miles into space, and will continue its journey millions of years after you die.Y

In a way, we're all sort of eternal. We all have gravity.

Any object with mass exhibits a gravitational field. So basically the day we are born our gravitational field becomes distinct, and begins to propagate out   into space in an ever-growing sphere at exactly the speed of light.

Gravity eternally deflates. Our gravity field weakens over distance, but never reaches zero. Profoundly pervasive little infinitesimal waves expanding through space at light speed. 8.3 minutes after we're born, our field of gravity is touching the surface of the sun. 5.5 hours later it reaches Pluto.

By one year of age, our field of gravity extends in a sphere around Earth with a total diameter of 11.8 trillion miles.  At a little over four years old, our gravity field is brushing the surface of our nearest known star neighbour, Proxima Centauri. By the time we're 30 years old, our gravitational field extends some 300 trillion miles around us into space.

Still feel small?

But the really crazy part is that when we die, our gravity will continue to exist forever, infinitely stretching out into the universe, passing through Andromeda millions of years from now, and beyond.

Everyone you have ever known, alive or not, is traveling right now through the depths of space. The gravity of our most distant ancestors, and everyone that has ever existed in the history of the world, faithfully hurtling out into the universe, eternally diminishing into nothingness but never truly disappearing.  Like a glass of water that you pour, and pour, and pour but it still always has just one drop left to give.

I'd like to think when we go, our souls might hitch a ride on that wave of gravity and we can all spend eternity cruising the cosmos together.

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n a clear night, go lie in your back yard and gaze up the stars.

At first, you will have the familiar sensation of comfortably resting on a stable earth looking up at the stars twinkling in the sky.

But keep this in mind. We're not really "down here" and the stars aren't really "up there." That's all an illusion.

We're actually stuck to the side of a sphere that's hurling through space at an amazing speed. You're not looking up at the stars, you're looking out at the vastness of space, almost as if you were in the cockpit of a gigantic spaceship. We're totally alone and there's no stable ground.

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What's the most powerful/inspirational quote you've ever heard?“A

ship is safe in harbour, but that's not what ships are for.”

- William G.T. Shedd

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he idea is to die young as late as possible."

- Ashley Montagu

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he fool didn't know it was impossible, so he did it."

- Unknown

mean, they say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time.""I

 - Banksy

f you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.""I

- Antoine de Saint Exupéry

always wonder why birds stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on earth. Then I ask myself the same question.""I

- Unknown

"If opportunity doesn't knock... build a door."

- Milton Berle

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"A

smooth sea never made a skilled sailor."

- Unknown

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ne day your life will flash before your eyes. Make sure it's worth watching"

- Gerard Wayr

mpossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible

is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.”

“I- Muhammad Ali

uccess is like being pregnant, everybody congratulates you, but nobody knows how many times you were fucked" "S

- Unknown

"Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but of playing a poor hand well."

- Robert L. Stevenson

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veryone is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.""E

- Albert Einstein

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What is the wisest piece of advice a teacher has ever given you?C

hildren, I don't care if you end up being a cobbler in your life but you should strive to be the best cobbler in the world.

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y singing Guru's response to my despondent question.

Me: "Sir, I am getting this bad feeling that after all this practice, my singing has actually become worse..."

Guruji (smiling): "Don't worry. You always sang like that. Now you have begun to understand it."

I did not know whether to laugh or cry. But yes, it was a step forward. Understanding where I was wrong was the first step towards making it right.

uring my 8th standard, our class teacher gave us a piece of advice which is still fresh in my memory and gives me a new thinking approach each time I feel sad, she said:D

"If you want to stay happy, never think 'Why should only I suffer?' rather think, at least nobody else should suffer what I have suffered"

ever wait for being fully prepared for a test. You'll never. Just appear for the test with your best and then learn from the results.N

unior year of high school I took a public speaking class for easy credit. The students piled in and sat down, but the teacher remained at his desk like he was deep in thought. All the sudden he sprang up with an energy that took

over the room and demanded attention.J"Who wants this?" he said, holding a twenty-dollar bill.

Hands shot up.

"Who wants this?" He repeated pacing in front of the class.

"I do!" "Me!" Students shouted almost completely out of their chairs.

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It went on that way for a few more beats until, finally, a brave girl sprung from her seat and snatched the twenty from the teacher’s hand. He smiled and she went back to her seat twenty dollars richer.

"Now, what was the point of that?" He asked the class. "All of you sat and asked-- none of came up and got it. Now, could I have made her look foolish? Yes. I could have pulled the money back and embarrass her in front of the whole class. She was willing to take that chance. The point is, in my class, in life-- take a risk because no one gets remembered for the things they didn't do."

teacher puts a jar on the table and says, "This jar is like your life, it can only hold so much". The teacher then proceeds to fill the jar with large rocks and asks, "Can your life hold any more?" and the class says "no, the

jar is full." AThe teacher then pours in a sack of gravel that fills up all the space between the rocks and again asks, "Can your life hold any more?" This time the students yell out, "yes" so the teacher, smiles and pours in a bag of sand that takes up all the little spaces between the gravel.

Again the question, and this time the class seems uncomfortable with their answer, so the teacher pours in a pitcher full of water, filling all the space between the sand grains.

Finally, the teacher asks the class for the moral of the story. One of the students says, "In life, there is always room for more."

The teacher replies, "Very clever, but only if you start with the big rocks."

I heard the story in a time management class around 10 years ago and it's been a guide for me ever since.

years back (pre google age), there is this young Science teacher who is new to our school. Whenever we asked a tough questions, she would say, "I don't have the answer now, but I can get back to you in

the next lesson? “ In the next science class, she would revisit the questions asked and let us know the answers. Naturally, we learnt a lot through our Science class and kept her busy with many tough questions!

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Here's what I have learnt:

Teachers, do not know everything. In fact, no one in life knows everything.

Admit you don't have the answer now but you will try to find the answers.

When you are given more time to think about a question, you may be able to come out with better answers.

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Do not make up an answer even though you have the power to.

Fulfil your promises to earn your respect.

Her method of handling tough questions is stuck with me now. I use it to handle my interviews, client's enquiries, etc. Works most of the time.

Teachers are role models. Honestly, they don't have to give the best advice, but their actions affect the children they come in touch with.

ou can either party for 4 years and work the rest of your life, or you can work hard for 4 years and party the rest of your life.""Y

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hat's this?

Is your answer - BALL?

Well, ball is what we call it.

In English, it is ball.

In French, it is balle.

In Japanese, it is boru.

In Chinese, it is qiu.

In Hindi, it is gend.

In Russian, it is myach.

Do you know:

That it is easier to catch if thrown at you.

It occupies volume of 4/3 * pi * cube of its radius.

It is widely used in sports for its amazing properties.

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It is orange-yellow colored, (i.e. if kept in sunlight for more than an hour along with a white one, this would be more heated than the other)

Every planet has this shape, because it is rounded by its gravity.

It has some value, e.g. for fitness use, it can be purchased on amazon along with pump for £7.75.

Just like that, there are too many things to list down, and everyone has a different understanding of what it is given to them. An artist, physicist, business person, or any other person, observes differently, and understands differently. So, when we know things, we have to make sure that,

"There is a difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something"

y maths teacher used to say: "Never be afraid of failing, be afraid of not learning anything from your failures."M

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IWhat is the most amazing fact about the universe?

f you distribute the time from the Big Bang to the present in a single year then-

January 1st -The Big Bang occurred.

January 10th -The first Star was born.

January 13th - First small galaxy.

March 15th - The Milky way formed but not the Sun.

August 31st - The Sun was born (4.5 billion years ago)

The Earth was born from a disk of gas and dust orbiting the new born Sun. Repeated collisions produced a glowing ball. The Earth was quite unstable in the beginning. But

Sept 21st - Life began (3.5 billion years ago)

November 9th - Life was Breathing, Moving, Eating. We owe a lot to those early microbes. They invented SEX or Sexual reproduction.

December 17th - Life came from water to land.

December 28th - The first flower blossomed.

6:24 am December 30th - An asteroid hit earth and wiped out Dinosaurs that could endanger the survival of Homo sapiens on earth (60 million years ago)

For the first time in the history of the universe the conditions were just good enough for Humans.

11:59:46 pm December 31st - All of the recorded history occupies these last 14 seconds. We learned how to cultivate crops, taming animals, Astronomy, Mathematics, Paintings. About 13 seconds ago we invented writing.

Moses was born 7 seconds ago.

Buddha - 6 seconds ago.

Jesus - 5 seconds ago.

A second ago we discovered that Earth is not the centre of the universe.

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And just when that second was about to finish we reached the Moon.

Voyager 1 crossed our solar system. We discovered that our universe started with Big Bang (January 1st).

Every person you have ever heard of, met, loved, hated and kissed lives in those 14 seconds.

he highest recorded temperature in the known universe is about 5.5 trillion Kelvin. Also, the coldest place in the known universe was also achieved here on Earth, in a laboratory, mere billionths of a Kelvin.T

What's so special about that?

Well, it was measured in a LHC experiment. On Earth. Yes, right here!

Think about it. We tiny little humans, living on a tiny little speck of the universe, have somehow managed to generate more raw power than every known physical phenomenon out there. More power than anything we have yet witnessed!

That and the fact that every Miss Universe title has been won by a contestant from earth. Insignificant? I don't think so.

So humanity, give yourselves a pat on the back!

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nly about 0.0000000000000000000042% of the universe contains any matter.O

In other words, if the universe were a cube 30 billion light years on a side, the matter in it would constitute a cube 1 thousand light years on a side.

The number is an authentic attempt at an estimate. It's admittedly imprecise, and you have to make some specific assumptions to get there.

Here's how that goes.

How big is the universe?

Some would say limitless. That makes the calculation above difficult to do. So you take an approximation. A lot of institutions have different views, but the Hubble telescope is finding things 10-15 billion light years away. If you assume just that in each of the cardinal directions, you end up with a cube 30 billion light years on a side. How Hubble Space Telescope Works - HowStuffWorks

How much matter does the universe contain?

Again, if you don't know how large it is, this is tough to figure out. But we can start with NASA's process ( Ask an Astrophysicist), and using that process you'll come up with an estimate of 1.6E+60 kilograms (here it is worked out www.rostra.dk/louis/ Holistic Quantum Cosmology with Decreasing Gravity. )

When you measure all the matter, what average density do you want to assume?

When you cram all the matter into one place, the tighter you pack it, the smaller space it takes up. So you need to assume some standard density. This is pretty arbitrary. Let's say the density of the sun, or 1,410 kilograms per cubic meter which is about 50% more than the density of water which is 1,000 kilograms per cubic meter.

If you're willing to accept all those assumptions, you can actually make the calculation we want. And you discover that space...has a lot of space. In fact, it's about 99.999999999999999999999958% space.

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here is the centre of universe?IF anyone ask this question to you say to him ''the same spot I am standing.

We all are at the centre of our own observable universe.

Observable universeit is the universe that we are able to see until now since we doesn't know what lies beyond, we only talk about observable universe.

Since universe is 13.8 billion years old so no matter which direction we look we see light from object that are 13.8 billion light year away that’s the radius of our observable universe.

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THINK it like this, climb to a tower and the most distant you can see is your observable earth. But that's not whole earth what it is a part of whole earth, but that doesn't mean that there is nothing beyond. Same case with universe there is universe beyond observable universe but it is not within our reach.So we call universe what we see by our eye i.e. a circle o radius 13.8 billion light.

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In fact our observable universe is increasing as we are seeing light from region farther away our observable universe is increasing at rate of 3 light sec.

Whether I go on mars, on Saturn, on New-York I will BE AT THE CENTRE OF UNIVERSE. IN FACT EVERYONE IS AT CENTRE OF OBSERVABLE UNIVERSE. JUST LIKE EVERYONE climbing at the top of tower will be at centre of observable earth.

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