whp.blue said:Damocles said:Current scientific evidence from WMAP suggests the Universe is flat, which implies it to be infinite.
Some head scratching answers in this thread.
Three things to add:
1. The Universe being infinite in size does not imply that every possible thing has happened in it. I'm not sure why people think it does.
2. Infinity isn't a mind blowing concept and you deal with it every day. How many numbers are between 2 and 3? How many decimals are in pi?
3. The Universe doesn't need a beginning and an end. I explain this all the time on here and it's a bit mind bending, but the idea that something needs a beginning and an end is something called causality which is a law of physics. You cannot break causality because then information would be able to travel faster than light which would break a different law of physics. The law of causality only holds true when time flows forwards - if time were to flow backwards then the idea that everything had to have a creator would be a strange idea. Now remove the concept of time entirely and nothing needs a creator. This is because causality, the idea that things need a beginning and an end is actually a law of physics that only holds true of time is flowing and is flowing in the direction that we think it should be. The moment of the Big Bang was the moment that time was created and started flowing. Causality is a law of the Universe and thus in the moment of creation of the Universe doesn't apply. There is no need for a beginning.
I always thought that there was a point shortly after the big bang that things moved faster than the speed of light?
it was during few split seconds of the initial expansion of the universe
Great observation actually. You're correct that the expansion of the Universe seems to have gone faster than the speed of light.
However the speed of light is only the speed limit of objects within the Universe that hold mass. The Universe itself was the thing expanding. The important thing is that expansion of something is different from movement/motion of something.
If you make an obstacle course made out of bouncy castles and set a speed limit of 5 mph, those castles can inflate or deflate without changing your speed limit. The distance between the beginning and end may have changed but the points themselves have not really moved relative to the bouncy castle. It's sort of like how some galaxies are getting further away from each other; they aren't moving away in terms of motion but the spacetime fabric that is between them is expanding