It’s hard for me to comprehend the idea that space never ends. Is there really no boundary to space? How do scientists know this?
In: Planetary Science
Instead of viewing the universe as a finite shape try imagining it as an “instance” in eli5 terms basically what your thinking is a never ending “concept” but the universe has things that “end” in it as far as dissipation of energy. Theres no other side to black holes it’s better name for them would be a singularity. These singularitys can bend space time, so a good way to look at it is a “non-finite entropical shape.” lot’s of scientistst believe this universe exists inside of a black hole. While the idea of wormholes would give credence to the theory of a never-ending universe, their only theoretically possible. The confines of the universe IMO is time and not orientation. So while the bending of space time allows for more rooms it doesnt necessarily mean that theres infinite amounts of it.It’ss just eating itself over and over. IMO This loss of energy isnt possible so from my inferrence the “big bang” is a star super-nova that turned into a black hole and that’s why we see that from the beginning of time every direction we look because that’s very possibly what creates our universes. and all the pressure kept matter that was sucked through to initially be hot and under pressure. Over time, that pressure leveled off as what we consider to be gravity and the heat dissipated to allow nuclear bonding. Space is big so even if this theoretical black hole we’re in dissipates/gets gobbled by another black hole, we wouldnt notice anything because of the extreme time-dialtion that occured in my theory of how the universe started. We exist in the concept of that star exploding, and physics breaks down the closer you are to the singularity. Have you ever seen the ditto poke-mon? That’s probably the shape of our universe and that our universe is made up of light and the transfer of energy but not energy itself.
We don’t know and no credible scientist claims to. Maybe it loops around, the same way that if you fly west long enough on earth you’ll get back to the same spot. Maybe there’s a wall or something. We will likely never find out, because due to some factors there is a known limit to how far we can look.
Kurzgesagt did a cool video on this: https://youtu.be/isdLel273rQ
We do not know this at all. And we’re unlikely to ever know. We cant see the entire universe, and it’s not because our tools arent powerful enough. You cant see light that hasnt reached us.
We don’t truly know if it never ends but if space is really infinite then things can get really weird when you think about it too much.
people are talking about a hard edge and how it wouldn’t make sense for there to be a hard stop to the universe, but i want to specifically address “how do scientists know this?”
if it makes no sense to assume a hard edge to the universe, there is still a way for there to be a finite universe. the 2D equivalent is a globe. there’s no hard edge on that globe, but there is still only a finite universe.
similarly, even if we don’t directly see a hard edge to our universe and also it doesn’t make sense to assume such, we can still have a “spherical” universe; it’s hard to visualize but what it essentially means is that if were in such a curved universe, and you are immortal and go on a spaceship away from earth in a straight line, you would eventually after many eons “loop around” and come back to earth.
so scientists spend a lot of time trying to measure the curvature of spacetime in much the same way some clever ants could figure out that they’re on a globe and not a flat sheet of paper if they did some very sophisticated measurements; yeah it’s very very hard to visualize, we’re talking about 4d spacetime bending. scientists have been able to measure the curvature of spacetime with increasing levels of accuracy through some pretty clever experiments and analysis. So far, our estimates on the curvature of spacetime is extremely consistent with the most likely explanation of spacetime being flat, which would imply an infinite universe. While scientists have not computed an exact curvature (and probably never will be able to), if there is a positive curvature to spacetime, the “spherical”-ness of spacetime would have to be very very incredibly vast, even when talking on a cosmic scale
there’s some things we just don’t know. Honestly I’m kinda glad that we can’t see a barrier of some kind cause wtf would be beyond it? That would freak me out. For a lot of things similar to space, everything we know insinuates that it is infinite. So until we find counter-evidence, the theory is that it IS infinite.
There are a lot of things that we consider to be fact that are just agreed hypotheses. They don’t contradict anything but we only know what we can prove or disprove. Since we can’t reach that boundary in space and have seen no proof of its existence, we have to assume it’s not there until we find evidence supporting it.
It’s just as difficult for me to comprehend limited space. Limited by what? Why can’t we keep going forever?
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