James of Silver Spring, MD asked: The universe is everything. And the universe is expanding. What is the universe expanding into if the universe is everything?
Thank you for the question, James. This is indeed proof that I don't know everything. I am still stuck on the question "what was there before the universe that allowed something to go 'bang!' in the first place?".
Personally, I like the universe-in-a-grain-of-sand theory of everything. It is infinite both ways with no beginning or ending.
3 comments:
I'd like to suggest the book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It covers, well, everything you could want to know about our earth and the universe. Amazing stuff. It doesn't have all the answers, but it has some nifty theories.
Actually, the premise is itself fallacious, which is guaranteed to give you a wrong answer before you even ask the question:
The universe is NOT everything.
The MULTIVERSE is.
Which means, the world we live in right now, and your favorite food, and the temperature that water boils, and the chemical content of our blood, is but one possibilty in an almost infinite set of universes.
And YES, the universe IS expanding, but recently scientists have shown that it ain't doing that as much as we used to think. It DID expand a whole lot in the first nano-seconds of its birth, and from that point on is groing just a little more than staying stable. It is also not expanding uniformy--tthe universe is lumpy!
Now maybe our universe is butting up against other universes in the Multiverse, and will cancel each other like matter and antimatter in "Star Trek"?
Actually, this is theoretically possible. BUT, besides there beinmg an qamazing array of "flavors" of universes, there are also at least 10, not 2 or 3, but 10 dimensions to hold them all. So, mathematically, the odds are very small we'll bump into another universe OR that exact opposite one that has our exact anti-matter to make us explode.
And don't forget those tasty theories about ghost and spirits "crossing over" from another universe...
Science is verrrrry cool, and I'm so glad you're asking these questions!
Thanks for responding to my question, Christopher. It is actually a recycled question I heard on the radio a while ago. The radio host, who may not have been an expert on the subject but did know a lot about science, first tried to evade the question but then admitted he couldn't answer it. As far as multiple universes, I don't think anyone can yet prove that there is only one or more than one universe (so I should have said the universe might be everything). But I am definitely not an expert, just a guy with recycled questions.
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