Impossible to answer?

[theone_one]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG73W3Jx2FE Yes this is me asking a question.

[dood gone krazee]

I've never really thought of that, good observation. I wonder how scientists are going to answer this.

[Afrobean]

Your understanding of the Big Bang theory is a little wonky and I sincerely doubt you fully understand string theory.

To answer your question: no one knows. The question has been asked, but it is an unknowable thing. The easiest answer I can venture is that it's the absence of anything. Not "vacuum", not "space", absence of even that. Think of the difference between the number zero and the value null. Zero is what makes up empty space, null is what is beyond the edge of the Universe.

That's my thought on the matter anyway. Others would probably guess at things like other universes or parallel dimensions, but to be honest, I would say that any such things as that would exist at the SAME place in the 3rd dimension, but another place in the FIFTH. One should not be able to reach an alternate Universe by traveling in the third dimension, but I suppose it isn't unreasonable to guess that there might be other "universes" within our reality (thus nullifying the singular value implied by calling it a "universe").

[bluguerrilla]

Although I'm sure you're not the first person to ask what the stuff the universe is expanding into is, I doubt you will find anything but useless postulation as we can't know and I'm not about to hazard a guess.

[Adamaja456]

around 1:56, trust me, this question has been asked. you are not the first person to ask what is beyond outside the universe. i have a random book with puzzles, philosophy, etc and there is a short passage talking about it. I don't know the answer to the question but its not impossible to answer. We can come up with an explanation to address the question just like we came up with theories to address the creation of the universe. My two cents after watching your vid is there is nothing outside. By nothing, i mean, absolutely nothing. No atoms at all. Just as the universe started with an extremely dense and extremely small singularity, what was surrounding that? I would say absolutely nothing. Waiting for smarter users to post but thats what my thoughts are. Rubix and Dev post soon please =]

[korny]

Ugh, I was just arguing this question recently with my friend richard. There can't be NOTHING. There's no such thing as true nothingness. Put simply, a question like this currently beyond human understanding and will more than likely forever remain so.

[Izzy]

Originally Posted by korny

Ugh, I was just arguing this question recently with my friend richard. There can't be NOTHING. There's no such thing as true nothingness. Put simply, a question like this currently beyond human understanding and will more than likely forever remain so.

Why not... There is no evidence to support that blatant claim.

[SM0K3D_0UT]

The one true 'nothingness' is oblivion -- the loss of the brain's ability to cognate.

The idea that empty space is 'nothingness' is false as it is truly 'space' and 'real estate' in the terrestrial sense of the world's nations claiming the 12-mile limit of their coast-lines to be their sovereign territory (Russia and some others claim 200 miles.) .

If outer space was nothing, then there wouldn't have been any place for the stars and planets to evolve ( just as your house needs a lot to exist on).

The concept of our cosmos being a nothingness defies logic.
If it were, we would be imaginary as we could not exist in a nothingness just as, contrary-wise, Alice couldn't really exist on both sides of a mirror. Similarly, the theory of 'expansion' boggles the mind as it would postulate that the 'expansion' created its own 'new' space to expand into. If the 'expansion' created its own new space then was there a huge wall to push out of the way? What was behind the huge wall? Already existing nothingness? Hmmm.

[kmay]

If there is something out there, we would never be able to see it. My physics teacher told us that the rate at which the universe is expanding is faster then the speed of light, which means something is there that we 100% can't see, but we will never be able to know what it is unless we can somehow get out there and grab some of it. Considering we can't come close to the speed of light that's not going to happen.

[korny]

Originally Posted by Izzy

Why not... There is no evidence to support that blatant claim.

There is, and never will be any evidence to support either claim. That is the point I'm really trying to make. In the end it doesn't really matter because we will more than likely never know.

[Izzy]

This is the first i've heard that the universe is expanding at the speed of light.

[SM0K3D_0UT]

Astronomers do not know for sure the value of the Hubble constant. (which tells us how fast the objects appear to be moving away from us as a function of distance).

[richhhhhard]

Originally Posted by korny

Ugh, I was just arguing this question recently with my friend richard. There can't be NOTHING. There's no such thing as true nothingness. Put simply, a question like this currently beyond human understanding and will more than likely forever remain so.

We DID just have this exact argument!

I don't see what is hard to understand about this at all. Think about putting something in a container, In order for it to go into the container there has to be "space" within that container. In other words, in order for something to be in a position in the universe, it has to be occupying empty space, causing that space to no longer be empty. What makes sense to me is that the universe is infinite empty space, not "darkness" though that is how we would perceive it because there is no light, it is just nothing, but can be occupied by matter. When the universe "expands" the constant amount of matter, that is never created nor destroyed, is just spreading out to occupy more of this space than it did previously. When it contracts, say in a black hole, it is condensed to take up much less of this space. That really doesn't affect the "space" though, just how the matter in the universe is arranged within it.

I don't see how you can say "there can't be NOTHING", and it is *not* beyond human understanding. We understand it every time we fill up a cup that is empty, or pack a suitcase, or anything similar. The only difference is that on the scale of the universe we let our earthly experiences overpower common sense. Because on Earth when you fill a cup or a suitcase, it was not *truly* empty. There was air, oxygen molecules ect, filling that container. When we place something in such a container it displaces those molecules, basically filling something that was already full with something else. Even the "space" around our planet is not empty. There is light and other forms of matter filling that space. So when we try to imagine *true* space it is harder to imagine. But clearly in all of these situations the matter IS occupying something right? There has to be empty space for something to be able to occupy it.

At the most fundamental level the universe consists of empty space and the matter that has always occupied it. If there was NO empty space that matter could never change because everything would be trapped in place because there would be no *room* for anything to do anything. In order for time to progress, for matter to change form, there has to be room for such reactions to occur.

There is no "edge" or end to the universe, just locations where matter is and where matter is not.

[SM0K3D_0UT]

It's clear that there is no true "nothingness."

[richhhhhard]

Originally Posted by SM0K3D_0UT

It's clear that there is no true "nothingness."

Is it?
Please explain how the universe "expands" then.
Or how anything ever changes.
Clearly you believe that there is *somethingness* so explain how if there is no "space" for this something to move in, it is able to move at all.

For convenience sake, imagine a universe that is a 5x5 grid. If this grid is *completely* occupied by matter, then nothing can change, or move, or react. Now imagine the same universe, but that is not limited by the grid. Which one makes more sense?

[devonin]

If the universe is infinitely large, there is always more room for expansion because matter can never come up against any sort of hard barrier. And even if it did come up against a hard barrier, the question becomes "what is on the other side of the barrier" and no matter how you try to answer that question, it becomes turtles all the way down.

The logical basis for "An infinite universe" is simply the idea that even if the answer is 'nothing' the question is automatically begged either "How much nothing?" or "What's on the other side of -that-?"

[SM0K3D_0UT]

Everythingness in nothingness.
EX: The zero and the whole, the nothingness and the all, the emptiness and the absolute are two names of the same thing. They are interchangeable; they mean the same. The zero is also the whole. The emptiness is also the wholeness. The nothingness is also the everythingness.


"expanding" isn't really the best word to describe what is happening to the universe, although that is the word that is often used - a word choice which I think leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion regarding what is already a difficult topic! A more accurate word for what the universe is doing might be "stretching".

The difference between "expanding" and "stretching", for me at least, is that an "expanding universe" conjures up an image where there is a bunch of galaxies floating through space, all of which started at some center point and are now moving away from that point at very fast speeds. Therefore, the collection of galaxies (which we call the "universe") is expanding, and it is certainly fair to ask what it is expanding into

[devonin]

Well that makes just about no sense at all. Care to elaborate how mutually exclusive concepts are actually synonyms?

[korny]

While your theory sounds seemingly simple enough and logical to a degree richard, with no way to fully understand the expansion of our universe, it is unclear as to how you can determine what it is expanding into, or what it's expansion is even doing if that makes sense. To expatiate into true nothingness is just as illogical, as it is logical. Basically, we just don't know and can't ever hope to comprehend it, regardless of whether you believe “we let our earthly experiences overpower our common sense.”

[SM0K3D_0UT]

The collection of galaxies that make up the universe is moving through space; therefore, the universe is expanding into even more space than it already encompassed. In our new picture, though, the galaxies are just raisins spread throughout the dough - their presence is largely irrelevant to the question of the universe's expansion. What we really care about is the dough, and whether or not it has a boundary.

If the dough does have a boundary, then it is legitimate to ask what is beyond the boundary that the dough expands "into". But for our universe, that is a very complicated question to ask. The boundary at the edge of the dough represents the "edge" of space. By definition, we exist within space and have no way to leave it. So we don't think there is any way to observe or measure what is beyond, unless it had some effect on us that we currently don't know about. It would be really weird to imagine reaching the "end" of space. What would it look like, for example? These are questions that we have no way to give a scientific answer to, so the simple answer is that we don't know! All we do know is that based on our current understanding of theoretical cosmology, the universe does not have a boundary - it is either infinite or it wraps around itself in some way. Observations seem to agree with these predictions in the sense that if the universe does have a boundary, we know that the boundary is so far away from us that we can't currently see it and it doesn't have any effect on us.