I mean if I drop a rock into a lake, its makes circles and the outermost circles are the oldest. Or if I blow something up, the furthest debris is the oldest.
In: Physics
It is a common misconception that the Big Bang occurred at a single point and everything spread out from that. The Big Bang wasn’t explosion. It wasn’t a small bomb that sent shrapnel everywhere from a central point.
The Big Bang happened everywhere all at once. It’s hard to comprehend, we aren’t used to thinking in infinities but to the best of our knowledge that’s ehat happened. It also happened incomprehensibly fast. During the Inflationary Epoch, which lasted a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a second the universe expanded by a linear factor of at least 10^26, possibly more.
Imagine if in less than a blink of an eye you had a one nanometer string that suddenly was 10 light years long. That’s how fast it happened.
And it happened everywhere.
Imagine you have a sheet of graph paper where you each square is 1cm by 1cm. Now imagine that graph paper is infinite. You can move up or down, left or right, it doesn’t matter. Every where it’s the same. Endless 1cm^2 squares. Now, imagine positioning yourself above a square, right above the center. Let’s zoom in on that square so it appears the square is 1 m by 1 m. From your perspective it seems like everything moved away from you right? The square to your left was 1cm away now it’s 1m away. Same on your right or above or below. So you are at the center and everything else moved right? Nope. If you were to have started at any other square and done the same thing, you would have seen the same result, everything would have appeared to move away from you there too.
That’s what happened (and continues to happen) for the universe. Space itself is expanding. Not the stuff in space, the thing that stuff is in.
But all the evidence so far tells us there is no center.
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