**Ask a monkey a physics question thread**

[MadMojoMonkey]

Do I get a gold star for making you think so hard?

Incorrect. This is the same as saying one plus a half plus a quarter plus an eighth plus a sixteenth etc equals infinity. It doesn't, it equals two. The "infinite" perimeter is only infinite in the fractal sense, like a circle having an "infinite" number of sides while having a finite circumference.

That's a convergent series. The perimeter of a Koch under finite iterations is a divergent series, as you've noted below.

The Koch snowflake is self similar, the universe is not. Take the Mandlebrot set for an example.. there's a fractal that is *nearly* similar at different scales.

I'm not sure how this point relates to the greater discussion.

The latter.

This is a different statement than your original position, "That's how I see universal expansion... infinity bounded."
"The latter," is unbounded expansion.

Are you changing your position?

Meanwhile, the area of the snowflake remains constant. If the volume of the universe is increasing due to expansion, what remains constant? Net energy? It must, but this implies an ever decreasing density. It's 9.30am and I'm already beginning to get exhausted myself thinking about this!

Everything for which we have a conservation law is a viable candidate for the "constant area."
Net energy, net momentum, net charge, etc. There are others, but those are pretty solid.
The momentum and charge conservation laws are perhaps the most robust statements in physics, with no known violations existing on any scales. The same cannot be said for energy, depending on your interpretation of the following uncertainty law:
{delta_E}*{delta_t} >= h/2pi
The uncertainty in the energy associated with a quantum interaction times the uncertainty in the time it takes for that interaction to happen is always greater than or equal to some finite value (Plank's reduced constant). Some physicists interpret this to mean that particle interactions can "borrow" energy from the quantum vacuum, provided they pay it back really quickly.
This is a hand-wavey explanation to me. It tends to come up when discussing Feynman diagrams and virtual particles. There are energy imbalances within the diagrams (unobservable), but never outside the diagrams (observable).

Weird. I would expect the opposite to be true... photons are "at rest" for all intents and purposes, since they have the same velocity to all observers.

I'd like to think that the one thing you know about photons is that they are never at rest, but always (ALWAYS!) moving at c, for all observers.
How do you go from a statement that all observers agree it's moving, to the conclusion that it is at rest?

Nice start to the day.

Yeah.