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Not the typical centre of the Universe question.

K3ny0n

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Capricorn

Capricorn

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Suspect that it is owing to the way we think or see things.

In a "normal" 3D universe there would be a position somewhere that we would consider the epicentre.

Problem here being that the universe is not normal 3D so our thinking and the universe dop not match.

The other no doubt being the old "we are at the centre" idea/belief.

Whereever we look it all looks pretty symetric and the same.

Look up and the galaxies there are moving away, look down and thay are moving away, look forward and thay are moving away, look down and they are moving away, look left and they are moving away, look right and they are moving away. The edge of the universe appears equidistant from us immaterial of the direction we look.

Simple answer: We are at the centre.

Not so simple answer: The universe is plain weird and distances mean little with regards to shape.

Final offering: It is something to look for - beats DSO's hunting hands down for difficulty and think of the Nobel Prize at the end.

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acey

acey

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People find it hard to imagine something which has finite volume but no centre. So they ask where the centre is.

"The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it. We may enlarge our conceptions beyond all imaginable space; we only produce atoms in comparison with the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere, the centre of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." Blaise Pascal, Pensees (1670).

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freeflyjay

freeflyjay

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The way i see it is every where is the centre, as the big bang was the start of space-time so nothing existed before . since then space - time has been expanding due to inflation so as such no centre at all or everywhere is the centre depending on how you look at it.

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Earl

Earl

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Why does everyone want to know if there is a centre to the Universe?

Are they expecting there to be something there? Just a curious question.

Rob

I think its all about perspective, we visually see from our own perspective that's how we are made, so everything we do is from our center our body been that point.

Thinking outside of that is quiet an alien perspective / concept for us as we technically don't know any different. Even if you imagine yourself outside of your own body, the imaginary point becomes a new center and your body another point in relation to this.

Hence its not an easy concept to get our heads around as it is not how we are wired.

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JamesF

JamesF

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I'm not sure that everyone does want to know :) From a scientific and cosmological point of view however, knowing for definite whether there is a centre or not would allow the "standard model" to be refined and may lead to further understanding of the universe. For the moment, as there's no evidence that appears to indicate that there is a centre, we assume there isn't one. My understanding is that if such evidence does exist, theory suggests that it will be outside the observable universe anyhow, so it may be that the universe does have a centre but that we can never know it :)

James

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K3ny0n

K3ny0n

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Thanks for the replies guys, I was just curious to as why this question gets asked very often. It must be that as people have said we live in a 3d world so people expect there to be a centre of the "3d Universe" but as we know its my as simple as that.

Its a question similar to saying, "Which place on the Earth's surface is the centre?" London, Paris? Timbuktu? They all are, and none are.

I like that explanation, something that we can all relate to and imagine ourselves.

Rob

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Cath

Cath

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All very good answers.. I like them :)

It seems to me that .. the more questions we ask about where we really are, what we really are, why we really are, etc .. the stranger it all seems get.

We are asking questions that we cannot realistically ever get a true answer too, which in itself is very thought provoking, though we still continue to ask these apparently unanswerable questions, ever hoping that just maybe, one day, we will get an answer to our deepest questions.

I'm guessing that the one question that eventually rises above all other questions, is "why" ? .. which I think has got to be the most openly asked questions we have when we are children - ask any parent and they will most likely tell you that.

"Bump" .. oh well, back down to Earth, it's time for a nice cuppa I thinks lol.

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JulianO

JulianO

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It has to be one of the most mind blowing things, trying to understand things outside your normal experience.

I wanted to know at school if light was a particle or a wave. Come on it can't be both, make up your mind, which is it. I wanted it to be a particle because that seemed easier to imagine.

Well, nature doesn't cooperate, and light is what it is. It's neither particle, or wave, but something else which exhibits bits of each depending on how you look at it.

At some point you have to accept "This thing, (light, the universe, quantum theory, ...), just isn't like anything else in my everyday world." Sometimes it might look a bit like something familiar, but it's a bit like trying to explain ice to someone who has only ever lived in the sahara.

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JamesF

JamesF

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At some point you have to accept "This thing, (light, the universe, quantum theory, ...), just isn't like anything else in my everyday world." Sometimes it might look a bit like something familiar, but it's a bit like trying to explain ice to someone who has only ever lived in the sahara.

This is the first thing people should learn when they start to ask about "stuff" outside the limits of everyday human perception. I have recently been reading "The Elegant Universe" which brings this home in spades. Well, I say recently... I'm approaching the end of the book now, but I started it eighteen months ago and I still can't say I understand half of it.

I'm sure I've said something similar before, but when you start looking at the incredibly large, or the incredibly small, intuition based on normal human experience is almost completely useless.

James

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Alastair Rae

Alastair Rae

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Let's assume the universe has a simple, everyday geometry and the Big Bang happened at a single point. If everything is accelerating outwards from a centre then, no matter where you are, everything seems to be getting further away from you. You are pulling away from points nearer the centre; points equidistant from the centre are moving sideways from you; points further from the centre are pulling away from you too. So everything you can see is moving away from you which gives the illusion that you are at the centre of the universe. But that illusion does not mean that there isn't an actual centre from which everything is expanding.

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JamesF

JamesF

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That situation would give rise to evidence that (as I understand it) we don't see.

In the situation you suggest, if we looked at three other points, one some distance d closer to the centre than us, one the same distance ahead, and one relatively close and equidistant to the centre, then at some future point in time it might be the case that we're 2d from the point closer to the centre, 2d from the point further out, but we'd still be relatively close to the one that was equidistant from the centre because it's moving on a broadly similar path. That would indicate that there was a centre and that it was somewhere else.

What we actually see is more along the lines of at some point in the future all three being distance d further away, which makes it look like we're the centre. But in fact the same applies to any point you choose. They all give the appearance of being the centre because "everything is moving away from everything else" (except where gravity gets a look-in).

James

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johnb

johnb

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Remember the ballon model with dots,as you inflate the balloon every dot move away from its adjacent dot so it's all relative to your prospective, even if there were a centre (and there is not) it would not be centre for long because everything is expanding

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pwalsh61

pwalsh61

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All we "know" is that the universe is apparently 13.5 -14bn years old. I say "apparently" because that is the limit of the _observable_ universe. What's to say there aren't more stellar objects further out and their light/radiation simply hasn't reached us yet?

What if we think of our universe as a galaxy of galaxies, with other universes beyond detection?

Off for a lie down before my head explodes!

Sent from my GT-I9100P using Tapatalk 2

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cfpendock

cfpendock

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I have thought long and hard about this question and have come to the following conclusions: The universe is the universe, i.e. everything. So by definition there can be no other universes. The universe has no finite geometric size and therefore can have no centre. Similarly, time cannot exist - it is merely a useful dimensional tool. So what was there before the Big Bang? Just energy? Even if it was just energy, perhaps this energy came from a previous complete collapse of the universe. I am still working on this......

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