Not the typical centre of the Universe question.

[K3ny0n]

... Re-think

Rob

[Ronnie67]

I rather believe in alternative universes, a black hole for instance, no one really knows what lies on the other side, I truly think something exist on the other side, but unfortunately there is no way of telling as yet, but I see it as a worm hole to another universe, similar to our own, but in a different surrounding if you get my drift. How do we know there is not hundreds, millions even of Earths quite like our own, but each trapped in a different time zone. Wow, that means there maybe hundreds of me, oh no!!. That is my theory and one I have come to believe, no I am not daft but very much curious to what is out there in that every increasing void.

[Vlad]

Does there really have to be a centre? By making a centre, we also build a wall around the "Universe", in other words we must call it finite. Perhaps if we had a telescope with optics as large as the distance between here and the Andromeda galaxy, maybe we would see ....more galaxies, with still no end in sight? Is there an end, or even a beginning? So many questions, no truly reliable answers as yet.

[ollypenrice]

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.

As James says, this is not at all what is observed. One of Hubble's key observations was that the galaxies were receeding not only in all directions but with a recession velocity linearly proportional to their distance. So if there is a centre it has to be us and the Copernican principle rejects that idea.

Olly

[Cath]

Whether there's a center or not is not the question I have. The question I have is how can anything exist at all? .. how does something come into existence from nothing?

Even if we do come up with a believable theory for where our universe came from, where did the original source come from, and so on, and so on .. that's the bit that blows my mind really.

Yes you can say their was no beginning and their is no end etc, but that just says to me we have an awful loooong way to go before our way of thinking starts to resemble the truth of the matter.

[ollypenrice]

Yes, the question, Why is there anything? is a tickler. But the question Why...? is a very human one and may not be one that the Universe has any need to answer.

Back to the OP's question, I think that the answer is psychological. Whenever we try to conceive of physical things in the abstact we stand outside them to look from a distance. So if I say to you, Think of Africa, you are likely to think of the map of Africa, no? Or if I say, Think of a Ferrari, you will think of it as seen from the outside, instinctively, not the inside. We like to get a handle on things by observing from the outside. This is tricky in the case of something which does not have an outside.

Hmmm, but then think of your sitting room. You'll think of it from the inside because it does not in any real sense have an outside. ANy 'outside' that it has is something you would call your house, not the outside of your sitting room.

Words are strange things and impose their own logic on our minds.

Olly

[symesie04]

Recently, there has been a lot of work on this. See

http://arxiv.org/fin...n/0/1/0/all/0/1

erm...........can you just sum it up instead please