Starship Asterisk*

I have yet to see any answer to my question. The closest thing to an answer offered here seems to be that it is the current theory that it was a sigularity in the beginning. I know that, hence the question in the first place. But, besides an inference from regresion, why a sigularity? All that follo...

I don't follow the logic that just because the universe is expanding it must have been infintesimly small in the past. The logic follows that it must have been smaller and smaller in the past, but who's to say how small it was when the big bang occured? Why could it not have been, say, the size of t...

I asked my brother-in-law ( physics Phd student at Harvard) the initial question regarding the idea of a universe surrounded by matter instead of a void. I got the same answer chris provided. Almost to the letter. He used the "isotropic" nature of our observations as well as Gauss's law of...

My backround is philosophy, not physics. I started this topic out of a dissatisfaction with the alternatives of a "big rip" or a "big chill". This is a philosophic dissatisfaction. I would be ok with the big crunch, but I understand that at the moment the observations of accelera...

Yes, I see what you mean.

How does the theory of dark energy explain these observations without placing us at the center?

Why would this place the earth at the center of the universe? The galaxies are all moving away from eachother, not just away from us. What does this have to do with our relative position in all this?

If we assume the known Universe is surrounded not by a vacuum, but by matter, does this not explain the acceleration of the expansion of the universe without needing to resort to the positing of a mysterious dark energy? In fact, the force that would seem to be in opposition to gravity would simply ...