Edit: Also, if we are moving through space, does everything move the same direction? (For instance all moving away from one point or towards one point)
I was thinking about this tonight and started getting really confused.
Can you clarify if, as far as we know, was the big bang an explosion or just the focal point for all of our existence?
Are we moving through space, or is the universe just expanding so it appears we are moving through space? Like a dot on a balloon that is being blown up. It appears to be moving, but really isn’t.
And does everything rotate the same direction?
In: Physics
> For instance all moving away from one point or towards one point
This is the main thing right here. There is no one point that everything is moving relative to or positioned relative to. It’s a fundamental property in physics, that there is no one correct reference point, which makes the question “are things, in general, moving?” meaningless. To make it a meaningful question, you have to change it instead to, “is this thing moving relative to that thing?”
Example: Two cars driving opposite directions pass each other on the highway. Their speedometers both read 60mph. If you choose a person standing next to the road as a reference point, both cars are going 60 mph (or one is 60mph and the other is -60mph if you’re keeping track of directions). If the driver of one of the cars is the reference point, then the other car is going 120mph.
>Can you clarify if, as far as we know, was the big bang an explosion or just the focal point for all of our existence?
The big bang was the expansion of space itself, which carried matter outward as it expanded. It wasn’t so much an explosion of matter, but of space.
>Are we moving through space, or is the universe just expanding so it appears we are moving through space? Like a dot on a balloon that is being blown up. It appears to be moving, but really isn’t.
The expansion of the universe is like dots on a balloon. Objects do however move within space also, so the dots on the balloon are spreading out as the balloon inflates, but they also move around the surface of the balloon at the same time.
>And does everything rotate the same direction?
No. Galaxies will tend to have most things in them rotate in the same direction, because they formed from giant disks of dust and whatnot. As all that dust collapsed under gravity, it keeps the spin from before, because of conservation of momentum and the collisions between all that stuff knocking things going the wrong way into going the same way as other particles in the disk. There is however a chance for individual objects to rotate opposite or at some other angle. Individual galaxies can all have different directions of rotation.
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