So I’ve been going through the dangerous rabbit hole of wondering how everything came to be and, obviously, the leading theory is the big bang theory. Where an infinitely dense spot of matter exploded and created every single thing in existence, including the ever-expanding universe. So, if the ever-expanding universe started expanding from an infinitely dense spot that exploded, wouldn’t that spot be the “center of the universe”, since it’s the starting point of said expansion?
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> the leading theory is the big bang theory
The big bang theory doesn’t really explain “how everything came to be” – it merely explains how the universe has changed since a certain point in time. And I don’t think “leading theory” is strong enough – there aren’t really any serious alternatives, and it has copious amounts of supporting evidence.
> Where an infinitely dense spot of matter exploded
This is a misconception. The big bang theory describes how the universe has expanded and cooled since a point in time at which it was an extremely hot, dense, uniform “soup” of subatomic particles. If you extrapolate the equations even further back in time, you end up at a point where the entire universe was infinitely dense, but there are good reasons to believe that those equations can’t be extrapolated back that far. It’s not really clear that the idea of an “infinitely dense spot” is physically meaningful – certainly, in the past, whenever theories predicted that anything was infinite, they eventually turned out to be incomplete.
Anyway, we can only measure our position in the universe relative to other things in the universe. It’s not like there are some axes in the background telling us where zero is. On the largest scales, the universe looks essentially the same in all directions – there doesn’t appear to be any particular star or galaxy that everything revolves around. So there is no apparent “centre”.
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