I think its a good question for the philosophy section. What is your opinion? I think the universe came from something that can be called Nothingness, and is expanding into that same Nothingness. I do not think the human brain can grasp or understand the nature of this nothingness. When the universe expands into this no-thing-ness, that nothingness becomes thingness, or the universe. As nothingness became thingness with the big bang. So what do you think the universe expands into? Or is the question itself, nonsensical?
The Universe is expanding from locker 237 into locker 239. Everybody knows this. We are not expanding into locker 238 because that is the locker below us and we all know that universes do not expand down.
I'd say the question is nonsensical. What's outside of the universe doesn't exist in a similar way to the ground north of the north pole not existing. If you do the maths for the space outside the universe, you get similar answers to when you do the maths for the latitude of the earth on a position in which the earth doesn't actually exist, so it becomes nonsensical.
Well the simple answer is that we do not know yet. We probably never will unless we can either catch up to the edge of the expansion (impossible) or witness another universe being created, or view it through some sort of time warp.
I would need a lot more pot to contemplate this, but I'm on a weed hiatus, so it will just have to wait.
It is expanding into nothing as the universe has an edge but nothing beyond. Einstein explained it reasonably well with his description using a 2D world on a sphere. A 2D person could accept there was a edge, but no matter how far they travelled they could never reach the edge and would merely come back to where they started
It all depends on what assumptions you make about the universe. If you believe that the universe is infinite, then the question is irrelevant, since an infinite plane does not need anything to expand into. But if you believe that the universe is actually a multi-verse, then our universe is expanding into the larger multi-verse. Of course, we dont know for sure which assumption is correct, and we may never know.
Yes, we will always have to imagine,conjecture...for perhaps the human brain is limited, and this lies outside what it can discover. That is,thought, as a tool is too limited and not capable of knowing the answer. But we do not like being told our thought is limited.
Is the analogy you used, applicable to this question? I doubt it. For the north pole is not moving into nothingness, while the universe, if expanding has to expand. So, it is not nonsensical as the question of what lies north of the north pole. We chose to use a point on the globe to designate as the north pole. So there is no north of the pole. But there is a universe that as we speak expanded, moved. It is doing something where the idea of a north pole is doing nothing.
Ah you brought up something very important. Our knowledge has as its ground, an assumption. So, the philosophical materialists on which science was originally grounded, and still is, except QM, ASSUME that the ground of this universe is matter. On the other hand, philosophical idealists think that consciousness is the ground, and matter comes forth from this consciousness, that consciousness is creating the universe. So when you look at the question I posed, there is a materialist manner of looking, and an idealistic manner of looking. I am looking from the assumption that consciousness is the ground, the fundamental. The multiverse idea is assuming matter is fundamental. And in order not to have to change assumptions from materialism, into philosophical idealism, they had to conjecture the multiverse so they could retain the philosophical materialism assumption.
idealism is dumb. there's ample evidence for materialism--it's called modern particle physics--and they already found the higgs boson, so it's a done deal. consciousness is simply a higher order property of matter. This has been demonstrated by neuroscience. People who study "idealism" are wasting their time. If you want to study how matter can result in consciousness, then you should study neuroscience, But based on current neuroscience experiments, it has been established that consciousness is simply just a property of matter that has obtained a sufficient level of complexity.
Not quite. It's only our human, Newtonian understanding of space that tells us that expansion must happen into territory which previously existed but was unoccupied, just like our human understanding (or rather, the understanding of people who are used to cartesian coordinates on a map) breaks down at places like the north pole, where there isn't anything more north of it. Should one decide to use the understanding of space as suggested by a combination of general relativity and the big bang theory (and maybe other things), it does not presuppose there being anything outside of the universe. In fact, these ideas and the conclusion they force one to draw is the reason we consider the universe to be expanding in the first place. The very fact that we determine the universe to be expanding builds on axioms which also mean that the space outside the universe does not exist. If one goes through the maths, it will give you similar numbers as trying to figure out the radius of a cross section of the earth at a point at which the earth isn't, ie. nonsensical.
