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On thinking about the grenade analogy, and indeed the balloon analogy which you mentioned in your reply, these don't, in my opinion explain how space can be expanding. Both of these refer to matter, be it shrapnel or rubber.
OK. The grenade idea was yours, though I named it. You propose an explosion in space, much like a grenade. This does not produce anything like what we see. Go back and read that post. This is the reason why your idea that the BB was an ordinary explosion in space is wrong. The balloon analogy is a popular visual. It isn't a proof. The proof is... well, we'll try again...
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If, as I believe, the big bang was a localised phenomenon dealing not with space, but with matter within the space, this doesn't have to have affected the whole universe.
Ordinary explosions do not produce the patterns we observe. This cannot be the answer. It does not match observation.
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If indeed the big bang is what caused all of the matter that we are able to observe to move away from us (or away from a point close to us), that would surely explain the moving of galaxies and other matter in an outward fashion.
If we assume that the Earth is at the center of hundreds of millions of galaxies, then you are at step one of making the idea work. This is pretty hard to swallow. But it doesn't matter anyway, because that doesn't solve the problem. An explosion will produce a dense shockwave of matter moving outward from the point of detonation. We know what ordinary explosion look like. They look like
this .mpg ( warning: large file ) . See that ring, or shell? We don't see that in the universe on a large scale. It can't be the result of that type of explosion in space.
Now, if we assume that we are living in the very early days of the explosion and thus are living prior to the formation of the shell, we have another easily observable, but by no means the only, problem. If it were an ordinary explosion, everything would be moving away from us at just about the same speed. That is not what we observe. The further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is moving. In other words, imagine that you measure all of the objects that are one foot away from you and find they are ALL moving away from you at 1 foot per minute. All of the objects two feet away are moving two feet per minute. All of the objects three feet away, and so on... See the pattern? You are adding to velocities, as if each object were pushing off of the nearer objects. You can solve this by postulating some weird and undetected force that causes objects to accelerate at faster and faster rates as distances FROM WHERE YOU STAND increase, or you can accept that space itself is expanding. This is exactly what we'd expect to see if space were expanding. This is what the visual of the balloon was intended to help you see.
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The use of a solid material to demonstrate the behavior of space is hardly going to be accurate.
Bloody hell! Its a freaking analogy. It is intended to give you an idea. It isn't proof. The proof is mathematical and observational.
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I don't believe that space itself has stretched, simply the distance between the galaxies has gotten larger due to the movement of the galaxies within the space.
What is the force causing them to accelerate? You can't answer, "The explosion." Why? Because the explosion is gone. We don't see it anymore. In a normal exploson, once the initial detonation ceases, things stop accelerating.
Oh. And then there is redshift. Cosmological redshift is a directly measurable effect of light travelling through expanding space.
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So far, to be honest, I have seen no evidence, at least not in this forum.
Do you want the math? Start browsing
Eric Weisstein's World of Physics.
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What I have seen is contradiction after contradiction and analogies which simply don't make sense.
The analogies aren't proof. They are explaination. If you want proof, you are going to have to study the physics.
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That is what I am after here.
I am really beginning to wonder.
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I want someone to give me solid, non-contradictory evidence that the universe is indeed finite.
The stars? White sky? Remember? That is the best single bit evidence against an infinite, in space and time, universe. What more do you want? Do you see a blinding white sky at night?
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If this were presented to me in a way that doesn't blur the lines, or is not full of contradictions and useless non-related analogies, then I would be happy to change my point of view.
Then learn the math. If you don't want the analogies, which are an attempt to make four and more dimensions palpable, then you have no choice.
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