edit: nvm
That depends on what you define the universe as being doesn’t it? If you’re defining the universe as stars and planets and galexies, then yes it is finite, there is a furthest point from the origin of the big bang where debris has reached which you could define as being the edge of the universe. But if you sensibly define the universe as being simply space, since it is in essence nothing at all, it can and most probably does extend infinitely far because it does not consist of anything.
Some people have trouble imagining endless, empty space… if you want a good idea of how it is, go into noclip in a game and go outside the map, you can travel infinitely far out of the map in the void which is nothing at all.
No, actually. Space isn’t infinitely large. It doesn’t have any borders, but it’s not infinitely large. According to Stephen Hawking, anyway.
He may have said that… I don’t recall A Brief History of Time word for word… But that is something of a contradiction. Space is empty and only definable by a point of reference. Space exists (or doesn’t depending on how you look at it) within the universe, and space is infinite in size because it has no limit, as it’s nothing it has no constraints to adhere to. If it were made of something it would have physical limits just like light does.
The universe is as infinite as space but includes things which are not space, it’s like infinity +1. You can’t pour an infinite amount of water into a glass of finite capacity.
The earth has no borders, no boundaries, but it’s not infinite either, is it?
I explicitly remember A Briefer History of Time saying that you can picture the universe as being like a torus, and you travel on its surface. You’ll never come across any boundaries, but it has a finite size.
Space is curved by gravity, just like the earth’s surface (the surface we walk on) is curved by gravity.
What if it was like one of those old games where you go to far and you suddenly end up on the opposite side.
That would be weird. :retard:
…
This thread makes me wanna play spore. :3
Everything is infinite. There is no limit to how close you can zoom in on something. You can zoom in forever and the detail just keeps getting finer, and you keep finding smaller particles. Infinitely.
The reverse is true as well. You keep zooming out, you will keep finding more and more to the universe. More stars, more galaxies, until you find that all of these galaxies are in large groups, super galaxies, or whatever. And those super galaxies make up other groups.
It never stops. Space is as irrelevant as time. You can try to justify it to your hearts content, but it will still exist beyond your grasp, outside your comprehension. You don’t need to understand it for it to be true. You don’t even need to believe in it. It still exists. It still goes on forever in all directions, outside and inside, in all directions of time. It doesn’t begin. It doesn’t end. It just is, and that is the way it is.
The spacetime dimensions are estimated to be 150 billion lightyears in diameter, it has been said before in this thread: the dimensions are finite, the stuff around it is infinite. I can’t really call it stuff because there’s no time nor space but I have to use some kind of word to describe it.
I think I’ll go by what Stephen Hawking says, thank you.
So you are trying to tell me that only one set of matter had one big bang? How do you know this? Are you absolutely positive that two matter sets didn’t have two big bangs 500 billion lightyears apart? The problem here, is that you and I don’t know, and I doubt there are calculations even at the highest levels that could answer that question right now. I wouldn’t be surprised is this has happened billions upon billions of times across the universe, with billions of lightyears in between. I also wouldn’t be surprised, if those big bangs made up larger patterns that make up even larger patters.
Finite thinking is so finite…
We’re talking about this universe, not some other one. Sure, there might be countless other universes with their own big bangs, but that’s not really what we’re talking about.
You can’t know the size until you overcome the challenge of seeing light that is not moving fast enough to pass the speed of its relative redshift.
nobody knows how big the universe is because it would take more matter than there is in the universe to built a tape meassure long enough. and it would surpass lightspeed when you reeled it back in
Well I doubt we’ll ever know but the idea of multiple universes is becoming increasingly more popular, string theory for one suggests there is a multiverse in a higher dimensional space.
Once humanity thought the Earth was everything, then the solar system, then the milky way galaxy and now the hundreds of billions of galaxies.
Who knows where it will stop? Science will eventually reach its limitations, but I refuse to support religious beliefs.
Says who? Once again you’re thinking finitely. There is no way to know whether there are limits to our science and all current patterns indicate we could learn indefinitely.
My head hurts.
There’s a possibility that the universe by now can be over 150 billion lightyears in diameter, it is impossible (even at the speed of light) to reach to these locations. We are limited to what’s called the “visible universe”, any light that is further away will never be seen by human eyes due to the fact that it’s moving away at insanely high speeds.
Another fact is that humanity will never be able to explore the galaxy, let alone the universe using normal transportation (fastest way to get from A to B is a straight line) because the universe is so extremely large. Even at the speed of light which is ~300.000 kilometer per second it would take 2 million years just to reach our neighbouring galaxy.
It would take todays fastest satellite about 60.000 years to reach the nearest star to the sun, a trip that would take approximately 2 years if travelling at the speed of light.
Science will reach its end one day, because one day there will be no more hydrogen gas to spark the creation of new stars - stars as you may know are the reason we are here. They fuse together hydrogen atoms to create heavier elements (nuclear fusion), bigger stars create even heavier elements such as iron and oxygen. When these stars explode they leave behind a huge “junkyard” full of heavy materials, from this planets will form like the Earth and that’s why we find raw materials in the ground.
Don’t worry about it though, it won’t happen for another 10^100 years according to scientists.
There can be nothing outside or before the universe because the vary nature of being as we know it is to exist in this universe. Anything outside of it would simply not exist because the Universe encompasses all that CAN exist by the standards to which we define existence.