What if it's E=MC360? What if time isn't a straight line to infinity? What if it's a circle? Or more precisely, a bubble? And what if that bubble popped? Wala!...the big bang!
I've heard that God invented time to keep everything from happening all at once. But what if the big bang was God's consciousness, and that invented time and all that is?
Just a few thoughts that I have when I wake up at 3am. This will surely get the religious nuts, and the fundamentalist quantum physicists to look down their noses. eh.....
Time keeps going and going and going and going. No one knows how the universe began, how big it is, and if it even has an ending. No one has seen the edges, or even if it has edges. And if it does, no one knows what's beyond that. Today's technology doesn't allow us to examine those possibilities. We are very limited, thus the guess work involved when trying to determine the origin, the expanse, and the entire makeup. Scientists have theorized warping time, and I believe some experiments have been conducted. But, in order to actually have manned deep space exploration, warping time would have to be a lot more than theory and experiments in the lab.
Our place in the known universe has already been mapped, and we're discovering new places beyond previous limits. The deepest darkest outer reaches of the universe are still many decades away from being seen and understood. We're presently in the very early infant stages of space exploration, and unknowns will remain unknowns until advances are made that will enable us to venture far beyond guess work and lab tests. Understanding time and space requires technology beyond what we know now, and it may be next century before we reach the next level of time warping, manned deep space travel, mapping universes, looking into the deepest darkest places at the edge or end of space, and if there is an edge or end.
Universe is substantially different that people think of it. There's two universes in a manner of speaking, the "observable" universe, and the rest of the universe. Because the universe is about 13.5 billion years old, but during the early expansion expanded in excess of the speed of light (some think about 10,000 times lightspeed,) the actual diameter is a lot more than just 13.5 billion light-years. Current guesstimate is about 80 billion light-years in diameter. But because the light from the earliest universe is still travelling to our eyes, because it's only been travelling 13.5 billion years, we can't see further than 13.5 billion light-years. Then there's the whole 'fog' of the earliest universe presenting a visual barrier we can't see through as well.
There's no edge to the universe. While I understand this is going to annoy people, or at least disturb them, the universe's beginning during the big bang wasn't an explosion like we think of explosions. Rather the time-space that is "space" in teh universe itself expanded and continues to expand even now. A conventional explosion would suggest the universe began at a single point and began expanding in all directions. Not quite. Rather it's more like an inflating balloon. If you imagine ourselves on the surface of a balloon being expanded, then anywhere we look along the surface of the balloon is expanding, but with noa ctual starting point. This is what we see through telescopes. Everywhere in the universe is expanding away from any fixed reference point equally. So there's no 'center of the universe' and no edge either. Anywhere you'd put a starting point is expanding away from that point evenly.
More disturbing still is regions of the universe are 'drifting' towards a point "beyond the universe." According to what we know about gravity, they shouldn't be heading the direction they in fact are. So some have hypothesized they're being attracted by something of greater gravity as with another universe. So instead of the universe being a single balloon, there may be other balloons resting against one another like soap bubbles. And while the soap bubble analogy suggest an edge or end to each universe, because our's and perhaps all universes continue to expand, and since time-space is curved, any direction you travel in means you'll eventually come back to your starting point. Thus no edge.
This seeming contradiction brings to mind a favourite quote of mine, "If after studying the sciences, you aren't then deeply disturbed, you didn't understand a damned thing."
