Excuse what is clearly a primitive and basic philosophical inquiry, but I am curious whether anyone has a logical way of explaining their way through the following conundrum:
Is there a physical border to the universe? If not, how can it go on forever? If so, what lies just beyond?
It seems to be a head-scratching conversation stopper. The best I usually get is, “yeah, totally.”
there is no limit to the universe. there is just a imaginary dividing line as to where there is matter, and where there is not matter. and this imaginary line moves outwards every moment of every day.
Thank you for your opinion, and I understand that no one can truly have the answer, but do you care to put a little more meat on them bones?
There is another point of view at the below web site:
metaresearch.org/cosmology/D … inning.asp
Hi f7u2p,
Thanks for posting that link. I’m always interested in alternative theories, but before Mr. Flandern can say,
he ought to address more of the evidence than just the expansion of the universe. That is, he should also address the current abundance of hydrogen and helium as well as the cosmic background radiation.
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb … mo.html#c1
Hello philosophile and Frighter,
The edge of the visible universe is roughly 12 to 14 billion light-years away from us (every observer is at the center of their visible universe), though most physicists seem to think that the universe might be much larger than that.
It’s my current belief that the universe is finite (perhaps finite - yet unbounded). Olber’s Paradox, while intriguing, doesn’t carry the force of a knockdown argument for me. My belief is based more on the following argument:
In an infinite universe there is no event whose possibilty of occurence is so small that it could never happen. If our universe (in which human life is possible) were infinite, then not only would I have to exist, but beings exactly identical to me would have to exist an infinite number of times. In an infinite universe there is only one possible ontological state: the unavoidably, infinitely repeated.
In an infinite universe there would be an infinite number of beings identical to me just as there will be an infinite number of beings only slightly different than me. Some of these near-duplicates will differ only in that they’ve arrived in the world earlier than I have, while others will arrive after I have died. But since there are so many overlapping versions of me, it follows that I could never leave the universe. The moment I die here, some quasi-duplicate of me will be waking-up on another planet; a planet that appears exactly like this Earth and one whose English speaking inhabitants just so happen to call the “Earth.” If there are an infinite number of exact duplicates of me floating around in this infinite universe, then why wouldn’t my consciousness pass freely among them? When some people speak of “infinity,” what they seem to refer to is a very large number. Of course, infinity is not a number. Infinity is a fuzzy idea that we can’t quite seem to get our finite minds around; at least I can’t. The implications of an infinite universe are staggering.
This idea has some similarities to the notion of the Multiverse, which has been put forth for other reasons by John Leslie, Martin Rees, et. al… There are, however, critics of the belief that the “fine tuning” of this universe implies a Multiverse. See for example, some of Nick Bostom’s work on Anthropic Bias at:
As well as this paper by Roger White of NYU:
nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/facu … s/ftmu.pdf
The idea that something might exist beyond the edge of the universe is self-refuting. If we define the universe as containing all that exists then there simply is no “something else.” We can’t logically claim that the universe is all that is, and then ask about something else outside this universe. There is no “something else.”
Michael
Reply to Polemarchus
You say: “he ought to address more of the evidence than just the expansion of the universe. That is, he should also address the current abundance of hydrogen and helium as well as the cosmic background radiation.” Yes, I agree. Of course, the abundance and radiation observations do not have much meaning in and of themselves except in the context of an exploding universe conjecture. That is, they are proof (or evidence) only if the universe is in fact exploding.
In regard to your other comments: I like to conjecture and share those conjectures, but as long as they remain conjectures and the probabilities are also conjectures, it is futile but fun to debate which conjecture is best. As for me, I prefer the Star Wars intro: “Long long ago in a galaxy far far away…” and then just let the imagination and special effects run freely.