A layman's questions about universes

Nope. There are infinities within infinities, and infinities that contain infinities.

By "curving back on itself". It's analogous to the surface of a ball, which is also unbounded but finite in extent.Your claims about what can or cannot be, and what must or must not be, are based solely on your extremely limited knowledge and incredulity. Not a good basis for practicing, learning, or questioning science.This message has been edited by JonF, 06-22-2004 03:26 PM

No, it's not psuedoscientific doublespeak, but it isinadequate to convey the reality of the situation. For that you need to learn the math. Only the math can convey it correctly.Your ravings are, sad to say, psuedoscientific doublespeak about a subject about which your are ignorant. Nothing inherently wrong with that; most people lead perfectly happy lives being ignorant of cosmology. But before you attempt to comment on or criticize cosmology you should learn somehting about it rather than just making stuff up as you go along. You shouldn't put words in other people's mouths, especially when you are so far from understanding the argument. It's an analogy, and a valid one ... but (like all analogies) it doesn't have a one-to-one correspondence between all aspects of the ball and all aspects of the universe. Sigh. Space itself is expanding, there's no need for anything to "expand into". Ah, yes, the standard response of those who refuse to believe that their "common sense" is not the be-all and end-all of all knowledge. What do you know of my education and abilities? It's in some ways analogous to a ball, but in more dimensions. It's not a ball. Almost certainly false. It's virtually certain that the the Universe does not have a surface, and the concept of taking a picture of the universe from a great distance from it is meaningless becasue there's no such thing as "distance away from the universe". Reality is not affected by your inability to comprehend it. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Buz, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (with apologies to W. Shakespeare).

Agreed ... but I'm not sure it really makes sense, in a down-deep-gut-feeling-visualizable-and-explainable kind of way, to anybody. I understand (or at least once understood) the math, and I understand its implications, but I'm not positive it makes sense.Of course, why should the Universe make sense? Feynman said (referring to QM, but I think it's apropos here):

quote:

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Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?' because you will get "down the drain" into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that.

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I didn't do non-Euclidean geometry in high school in '62-'64.

Well, as NN said (somewhat cryptically IMHO), you can in some sense consider light rays and a brick as the same; they're both mass-energy and E = mc².But saying that gravity and space are one and the same is not an arbitrary decision; it's a conclusion forced on us by the evidence. The only thing anybody has come up with that fits all the evidence (and fits it exceptionally well) is relativity, in which time and space are inherently different-appearing aspects of one thing: space-time. [joke]It's kind of like the Trinity[/joke]