On the size of the Universe
Sven Gelbhaar
31 October 2008
With the advent of General Relativity we have come to define the universe
as one cohesive manifold (1) that is expanding outward at an apparently
accelerating rate as per the Big Bang Theory. This, however, presents us
with a unique set of problems, even beyond those I’ve already pointed out
in previous papers.
[Figure 1]
One possible counter-argument can best be illustrated by the picture above,
which obviously isn’t to scale so please bear with me. Say there’s a
planet at the very edge of the universe. Just outside the atmosphere to
one side of the planet is the ‘end of the world’. Now let us conjecture
that the inhabitants of this planet built a space-program which is trying
to send a probe directly away from the center of the universe. What would
happen to the probe as it tries to leave the atmosphere? At this point our
current model of the universe would throw a singularity, if you’ll pardon
the Computer-Science/Physics pun.
Before you object that we’re nowhere near the edge of the universe, the
same problem would arise if we send a probe from here that happens to miss
other celestial bodies as it travels in the opposite direction of the
Genesis Point. Would the probe end up on the opposite side of the
universe? Does it just loop around like the popular 80’s game Asteroid?
If so, how and why? This would conceivably break our principle of
locality. (2)
Another problem is why should one assume that there isn’t anything (to
include the vacuum) passed all observable bodies of mass. We’ve made this
sort of assumption before, before we knew the Earth was more-or-less
spherical in shape and thought that there was an edge of the planet you
could fall off of. This assumption turned out to be false, and even though
we have taken the spherical nature of the observable universe into
consideration the same underlying principle remains.
One cannot make the case that something does exist outside of our
observations; that wouldn’t be in keeping with the scientific process.
However, we can also quite easily flip the argument and say that one cannot
at present prove that such a thing as the edge of the universe exists
either, and that this is a baseless assumption. I will leave it to my more
philosophically inclined readers to argue which is the more viable
argument.
I would venture to say that it is much more intuitive to hypothesize that
the probe in the previous counter-argument would just keep going further
away from the center of the universe; that this is the default assumption.
Infinite regress should only be applied to bodies of mass, traveling for
finite amounts of time, and as such there isn’t even a philosophical reason
not to assume this. Dimensions are inherently boundless spatial and
temporal dimensions follow suit.
References
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universe 31 October 2008
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_locality 31 October 2008