Is there a middle to our Universe?

Dear Fellows;
I have often wonderd if there was a " Big Bang" as they say in the beginnng of our Universe. I surmised the explosion should have dispersed in all directions equally. So when we look from our perspective at space which side are we on ? Or are we in the center the side or the back end. When they say they can see 15 billion years back in time what is on the other side? I believe that we don't know for sure where the end is and where our planet is in relation to the center if there is one. I welcome your input and information anyone has to offer on this subject.

Sincerely, Machiaventa:shrug::shrug:

 

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I agree with James R, although my flights of fancy would have me believe there is a singular point where space has a center I know him to be correct

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Let's see, what he's talking about is dimension, originally they think upwards of 10 dimensions existed all accessable to eachother, but for some reason they cracked and the 3 dimensions were formed. Long story, look into hyperdimensional physics for more :\ Anyway I recall reading Scientific American and they had a new more interesting theory but I forgot what it was

 

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As James R was saying there is no single center, but it could be said that everything is the center of the universe.

We can look at any direction of the sky, and big bang would be there. How can that be if we look at opposite directions? We are the center, as is everything else. In our view the universe is a gigantic bubble, with the Big Bang all around the surface of that bubble (look up this which is the background radiation from the Big Bang taken from every direction of the sky) and we hanging in the exact middle of that bubble.

We don't know what the universe looks like at that distance, we can only see what it looked like eons ago! It's a difficult subject...because space has expanded (and we with it) the light that reaches us from very distant galaxies (in the order of billions of lightyears) could have travelled only a couple of hundred million lightyears, as the universe was smaller then, or so I read, but I only read from credible sources, I'll find it if you want.

Of course the Big Bang DOES have a center if you look at the scenario in a fourth dimension. If you apply 'time' as that dimension then of course the Big Bang happened at a singular time and thus could be seen as a center (like this or like this or like this)

 

Jezz... do I have to make it abundantly clear you imbeciles...

I AM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE! EVERYTHING REVOLVES AROUND ME AND MY EGO, err, I mean INTELLECT! FEAR ME!

Thou must obey the all-caps

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Except 'explosion' is itself a word defined by space!!!

 

Except 'expanded' is itself a word defined by space!!!

 

I used to find this extremely confusing, and the picture that helped me understand it the best was something like a a raisin cake being baked. Before it is baked, the dough is a small size with raisins evenly (approximately) distributed through it. As you cook it the dough expands and the raisins all move away from each other, so if you were embedded in the dough along with the raisins then everything looks like it is moving away from you. Extrapolating this process backwards until the dough shrinks to nothing gets you something vaguely analogous to the Big Bang picture

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.

Of course the dough does have a middle, even though you couldn't talk about it as having expanded from there. The analogy breaks down somewhat here. It is commonly hypothesised that the universe is infinite, in which case it has no middle. If it isn't infinite I guess it has to have a middle (unless it has some crazy closed geometry with no boundary, like a circle, in which case there wouldn't be a middle either), though we have pretty much no hope of determining it since we can't tell anything about this hypothetical 'middle' from the expansion of the universe.

 

Ah, so we need to develop a language which is not defined by our everyday experience?

You start!

 

I had never considered this topic before but now that I think about it, I do remember thinking that the universe has a central point of origin. I thought this mainly because I had read that the universe was expanding and galaxies were moving farther apart. An example of this would to put multiple dots on a baloon (representing galaxies of coarse) and inflating to represent the expansion of the universe. Somewhat simplistic and childish, nevertheless if galaxies were to expand away from each other in this manner, it would mean that this universe has a central point.

Now a real (problem?) with this idea is that, what happens when you reach the edge?

I have not considered this before. Interesting.

 

machiaventa. The big bang fails for a number of reasons in it's first second. A singularity origin just does not work so better to have an origin over billions of cubic light years at least.

Expansion would have no original bias since it would presumably be a uniform start and it is expanding into literally nothing (so no need for inflation for homogeneity).

If space expanded in three dimensions, there is a centre which if we could work out all trajectories, we could eventually find it.

We see 15 billion years back in time, we see things as they were 15 billion years ago and of course, everything has changed hugely since that time, in an expanding universe, or even in a steady state universe (SS does not mean everything is immobile. Just that the boundaries of the universe are not expanding).

 

What is space that it can expand from quantum size to it's present size without changing in any way? How can DE affect it in such a way as to cause it to expand even faster?

 

A singular point would have near infinite density so be ultimately stable. It is not going to inflate or expand any more than a black hole is.

There was said to be 26 dimensions at one time but that was knocked down to 10 physical and one time. However no one has yet proved more than 3 physical and unless you take Dr Who as evidence, there is no time dimension.

There is a number theories since at best we have speculation based on evidence.

 

You sound like a bog-standard politician.

 

That one cannot ascribe qualities to space which are themselves defined by space.

 

-=-

Define space.

Scientists do not think all galaxies are moving away from each other but that all galaxy groups are.

 

Isn't James R quite wrong here? We can easily see over 13.5 billion years away. I thought this was due to the expansion of space?