Infinity

“To Infinity and Beyond”

  The quote above from Buzz Lightyear sounds good, right?  But could you possibly say anything more meaningless? To infinity? If a thing is infinite, by definition you could never reach it. It has no borders. And to not only reach it but go beyond, well that’s just absurd to the max.  As we speak, the whole question of infinity is still being debated when it comes to the size of the universe. To me that’s a little absurd, too, as by definition when you say universe you mean all of the cosmos. Is there anything else? But here’s the essence of the debate. Some cosmologists believe or have believed that the universe is infinite going out in every direction infinitely (no end or beyond anywhere). They essentially call this the flat or level universe. Modern day cosmologists and proponents of the so called “Big Bang Theory” envision a curved or round universe that expands, carrying space along with it, into a larger (who knows how large?) volume of nothing. The word universe comes from Latin where uni means one and verse (versus) which means turn into. So literally it means “turn into one”. Which is another way of saying everything we see out there is one thing. I’ll give you that with reservations. Anyway, I have a problem with the whole Big Bang concept in that it is described like a balloon inflating with a bunch of dots all over the surface of it. The dots (each one representing a galaxy) all get further and further away from each other as the balloon continues to inflate.  And what we think of as space is carried along with this expansion. Since we can only travel through space we could never go “outside” of this growing bubble to check and see what’s there (by their definition there is nothing there…no thing…not even space.) I often wonder that as we travel outward, what is left behind? The volume in the middle of the balloon…is it now space too or does it return to being nothing? If we had an unimaginably fast ship could we travel across this area and go directly to the opposite side of the expanding bubble from us? Or do we have to travel the circumference and go all the way around to get to the same point? And if we’re on the surface of the expanding bubble, when we look away from the center of the bubble, why don’t we see nothing but, well…nothing? Looking back towards the center we see the earlier versions of the universe as it was in the past supposedly. But if that’s the case, and as they say the light from that point has taken billions of years to reach us across such vast distances, then are we traveling faster than light essentially outrunning our own shadow? I thought Einstein said that wasn’t possible? As it stands today, it seems that when you point a telescope in any direction you find galaxies. Countless billions of them! They say that when you peer deep enough into space you start seeing things like quasars and proto galaxies and it is said you are seeing the past of our universe as it was many billions of years ago. Maybe. In that case how do we even know for sure what the universe looks like right this minute? Is it even still there as we speak? No way to tell for sure. We could just be riding along on a spark like an ember from a fire rising up into the dark night sky. Everything we see around us is just afterimages of similar sparks that have already faded into oblivion. The question is how long do we have before our spark too fades into nothing? The following passage is from Wikipedia:

 “If, on the other hand, the universe were not curved like a sphere but had a flat topology, it could be both unbounded and infinite. The curvature of the universe can be measured through multipole moments in the spectrum of the cosmic background radiation. As to date, analysis of the radiation patterns recorded by the WMAP spacecraft hints that the universe has a flat topology. This would be consistent with an infinite physical universe. The Planck spacecraft launched in 2009 is expected to record the cosmic background radiation with 10 times higher precision, and will give more insight into the question of whether the universe is infinite or not.”

I guess we will just have to wait and see what the evidence tells us. But for my money, I’m betting on the flat infinite model.