[Guest]

Or maybe I can reinterpret what I said and think outside the box a little more. Maybe our universe is actually extremely small. We just think it's big because we think of our universe relative to us. Maybe there are things seemingly infinitely bigger than our universe. Or maybe our universe is actually some kind of computer simulation. Maybe our universe is just somebody's snowglobe of some kind. And what do they live in? You know, the things controlling or building our simulation of whatever kind? Do they live in a universe? Or maybe something totally different? And these things... creatures or whatever... maybe their intelligence is so big, they can instantly know and understand everything that ever happened in our universe as easily as we can answer 2 + 2, which is their "normal", meaning it's not that they are really smart, it's that we aren't as special as we think of ourselves.

heh...

[Guest]

The universe can only be finite if it's closed (Like a sphere or sth) because in any other scenario there will be so-called edges and because space is presupposed in our understanding of universe (and it exists because of the universe) then space is determined by extension of universe so that space is present when there is universe and because that's our boundary then it's infinite; if you don't understand this I can make it clear with an example that uses our arbitrary boundaries (which was, I think, first provided by Hawking): when you ask if universe is infinite, the question is equivalent of another more analysed question: "Is there anything beyond universe?" You may think that universe could still be finite if there wasn't anything beyond it; but that's only a mistake of grammar. Universe is all that there is and space is one of its properties (well if we're talking conventionally and not in terms of general relativity) so to say that space is finite is to say that it ends somewhere and to say that it ends somewhere requires that something else begins where it ends but universe is all that there is so nothing begins after universe so it doesn't end anywhere and anything that doesn't end and have no edges is infinite. To think otherwise is just failing to understand the meaning of words and that's just an illusion of common sense; like you wouldn't ask "what is south of the south?". If "the universe is shaped exactly like the earth, and if you go straight long enough you end up where you were" then you would know that it's finite but it isn't because it's been proved that it's flat meaning that it's expanding and it will expand infinitely just to approach a stillness as it's limit. This results have been established through observing Type Ia Supernovae and nuances in Cosmic Microwave Background radiation and calculations of space curvature in Euclidean system (presupposed geometrical system of a global geometry as opposed to local one which can be explained consistently in Minkowskian system through general relativity) which itself results in a flat universe and Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Saul Perlmutter, Brian P. Scmidt and Adam Reiss two years ago partly for this discovery.

[AlexZangari]

[sp4cetiger]