Mercury wrote:Dr. Shades wrote:Mercury wrote:Nephi wrote:Heh... really cool. It would be cool if that was redone with modern ideas, like the idea that you couldn't "zoom out" and see all the galaxies. As far as we know, there is no end.
[SNIP!]
. . . I am implying that hanging out in the physics common area does not "osmotically" bestow upon you an understanding of cosmology. Get some core concepts down and then maybe I can take your analysis of science seriously.
Okay, Mercury, if you're contradicting Nephi's "there is no end" assertion, then it appears that you believe there is an end. Which makes sense, since if it's expanding, then it had to have been smaller before, and therefore not be entirely infinite even now.
So, will you please explain, for my benefit at least, the reason you dispute Nephi's "there is no end" assertion?
(I'm not challenging you here. I really, truly don't know.)
Honestly, the Universe might have no end. But the Microwave Background radiation tells us that the universe was once at a point, a singularity in which all observable matter was collected which then began expanding into the known universe.
Be careful though, the whole universe was only a point for closed models such are where space has positive curvature (like a 3-sphere).
For a flat model the whole universe did not begin as a point (but the observable universe did).
You should also not confuse the entire Universe with the observable universe, which is a sphere centered on us, with a radius of the horizon distance, which is the length that light could have traveled since the Big Bang. The observable universe is finite. The entire Universe may or may not be finite. The current evidence points to a flat universe, in which such case, it would be infinite. This also relates to common confusion regarding the Big Bang. The observable universe gets larger as time goes on, and thus began as a single point, but if the entire Universe is infinite, it was always infinite, and was not a single point at the Big Bang.