The nature of "space"

Note: I'm not a physicist. Wait for cavediver or Son Goku for the real deal. What's North of the North Pole?Your question is the result of attempting to apply human experience to the Universe as a whole. "Space" is a property of the Universe and makes sense only in the context of the Universe itself, much like the direction North makes sense only within the context of a globe. Again, this question misrepresents the actual expansion of the Universe. The Universe is finite and expanding, but it has no boundary. The best available analogy would be to compare the Universe to an expanding balloon, with all three spacial dimensions represented only by the 2-D surface (ie, there is no "up"). As teh balloon expands, the space between two given points increases. The surface is finite, but it has no boundary - there is no "place where the Universe has not expanded yet." It's more like the existing, finite amount of space stretches in all directions at once, much like an expanding balloon. The farther away two points are, the more expanding space exists between them, and so the more rapidly the two points will move apart. Nothing is being "created." Further, space is a set of three dimensions - asserting that "width" can be "created" misrepresents what dimensions are. There's more to it than that...but Ill leave that to cavediver and Son Goku, as I won't be able to comment on it with any degree of accuracy.I'll say only that space is also affected by mass - mass warps space. This generates the phenomenon of gravitational lensing (and in fact all of gravity). Warped space can change the final direction of a ray traveling in a straight line without causing the ray to bend (an unbent straight bar can be made to have both ends touch, for example). There's a lot more to space than just "void." Your analogy is flawed because it posits that there is an "outside" to the Universe. Space, matter, energy, time, all of these are properties [i]of[/]i the Universe. There may well be additional dimensions that our Universe exists in, much the same way the 2-D surface of the balloon or globe exists within the additional spacial and time dimensions, but "space," like "time" has no real meaning outside of the context of the Universe, in exactly the same way that "North" has no meaning outside the context of a globe.That help at all?

That would be the "aether" model that was held in the middle ages. It's not really very accurate, though "common sense" makes it feel that way.The problem is that human beings perceive the Unvierse in a very particulay way, and that perception is extremely limited. We don't see things on the subatomic scale, or on the scale of galactic clusters in our everyday lives, and so our perception is flawed.Our concept of "time" is similarly messed up, and can be even more confusing - time is nothing mroe than a dimension, no different in any way from width or length except in our perception of it.The Universe is pretty frakking odd to human common sense. Only math starts to make it comprehensible...really complex, long, intricate math. You could say that.It would be more accurate to say that the universe is a discrete entity, and that matter/energy and the spacial/time dimensions are all properties of that entity. We are experiencing time as a linear chain of events in the direction of increasing entropy because the electrochemical processes in our brains that constitute thoughts require increasing entropy to function. If you picture the entire Universe as a globe, with the vertical axis represented by time and the 2-D surface as the 3 spacial dimensions, you can start to see what I mean - the North pole would be the "beginning" of time, where the entire Universe existed in a small, hot, dense state. At "later" time coordinates (meaning farther South) the Universe has "more space," meaning that there is greater distance between any two given objects. Questions like "what came before the Universe" or "what's outside the Universe" don't make a lot of sense, given that those questions refer to dimensions that only exist in the context of the Unvierse itself.