I recently learned what it really means when people say space is constantly expanding. At first I thought it just meant more matter is getting created on the outer areas of the universe or something. But it’s moreso space in the spacial sense is expanding between everything, like a balloon being inflated. This opened up a realm of stuff I hadn’t thought about, with my brain struggling to comprehend how there is finite ‘space’ in that sense. Like how does existence itself have a limit to size? For distance as a concept to exist, the space between atoms has to be finite, and doesn’t break down infinitely. But my brain can’t comprehend this, similar to how it can’t comprehend there being nothing before the big bang. It obviously can’t be infinite because there’d be no existsnce as we know it, but how can it be finite and exist at all?
I guess the question is, how is there a limit to the space between atoms?
In: 127
I don’t understand the exact problem you want to understand – but yes, there very likely was something before the big bang. The universe didn’t just pop out of nothing (do not mix it up with “out of nowhere”, this is possible).
Space is relative, and I mean this in a very absolute sense, like time. Time is just the relation of processes: It takes you twice the time to count to 10 than it takes you to count to 5. There is probably nothing more than this concept, that some processes are faster than others, meaning quantum mechanically “more likely to happen next”. And there you go with the connection between energy, space and time.
So space is just something you can measure, for e.g. by the time it takes light “to process through from A to B”.
It doesn’t matter if the space is finite or infinite between two things. All that matters is the relation of that space to other measured spaces, the speed of light and so on. In fact the space between two atoms can be infinite, but how would you know if you are infinite yourself? This is all normalized by the speed of light (or any other thing that you define as “1”, e.g. a foot).
By the way:
Very likely (in my opinion) is that the universe does not expand “by itself”, but that the expansion is simply a property of the matter in the universe. This is why it expanded so fast in the beginning out of that dense matter. You can also see this behaviour when falling into a black hole, which is more or less equivalent to an instantanious start of expansion of the space around you. Probably the big bang was just the formation of a black hole (that is called black hole cosmology).
By the way II:
There is a nice theory, that all fundamental particles (like an electron) are black holes themselves. Maybe it is a whole universe itself! So there isn’t much more than nested black holes at all to build the whole universe. Does this expand your imagination of infinite/finite things?
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