Is there an end to the entire universe? ?
It is hard to explain but my theory is this: The universe does go on for ever, it’s just that we can’t see it. Light takes time to travel, 8 minutes from the sun to the earth, so if a planet was 1 million times the distance from the earth to the sun then it would take 8 million minutes for us to see the planet after the big bang. Now let’s say, for example, the big bang (when the universe was created) happened 1 billion years ago. Then if the time it takes for the light from a planet to reach us is 1.5 billion years, then we would not be able to see it for another 0.5 billion years. So there is sort of a ‘bubble’ surrounding the earth, which is becoming increasingly bigger, and we can only see inside this ‘bubble’. It is hard to get to grips with, but it is one way of looking at it!
No, there is no end to the universe. There are no edges. The universe is a finite, unbounded area. Addendum: A lot of people seem confused about this. If you want to picture the universe, imagine an ant walking around the outside of a spherical balloon that is constantly being inflated. The surface of a balloon, like the universe, is a *finite* and *unbounded* area. That means that the universe is *not* infinite, and it has no *boundaries*. An ant can walk around the surface of a balloon forever in any direction, they will simply end up where they started. The fact that they can travel infinitely far without reaching an edge does not imply that the surface of the balloon is infinite in area. The surface area is in fact quite finite. The universe is exactly the same way, except instead of a two-dimensional plane that is wrapped around a third axis, the universe is a three-dimensional volume wrapped around a fourth axis.
The universe is constantly expanding and so is in effect infinite, we could never get to the ‘edge’… it sure makes the mind boggle, as the infinite is hard for our human minds to comprehend. There are three main shapes the universe could be according to current science: spherical, flat and hyperbolic. According to NASA it is most likely flat. Here is some more info: http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_sh… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_th… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Univers… Have fun boggling your mind!
