Originally posted by meteor
Me!. I believe that the Universe is finite and has a center
I like this idea becuse I can provide an explanation for the appearance of the universe: a quantum fluctuation (or something akin).
The idea of an infinite universe appearing from nothing has no explanation-therefore I don't like the idea
I've noticed that here many people is scared of the idea of a boundary.Why?
I can't give any prove of that a finite universe is correct. It's only my hunch. I can be totally wrong
I for one am not SCARED of the idea of a boundary. It is just an unnecessary complication. It is "extra baggage".
I do not need a boudary to space in order for things to make sense.
To get away from my own personal views, as far as I can tell the mainstream picture of cosmology (what the experts say they tentatively take as working assumptions) also involves no boundary to space. The consensus assumption seems not to be spatial flatness---essentially regular Euclidean space---on large scale.
I don't think "appearing out of nothing" is a good picture. It does not fit what cosmologists are talking about.
the last paper I looked at had an extension to before the time-zero singularity. Space was infinite in extent before time-zero and at time-zero and after.
It was (actually several papers) concerned with using a quantum analysis to remove the singularity that occurs at time-zero in the 1916 GR model.
Quantum mechanics does not in any way depend on having space be finite!
So it seems that people can deal with time-zero, or at least are working on it and getting preliminary results
and there is no "nothing" before that moment
what is before is infinite but different and some kind of
radical change happens but the evolution of it is governed by equations and does not involve
divergences (divergent curvature was why the 1916 GR model broke at time zero). Here the parameters stay under control. It is not
conclusive but it is promising.
I did not see any mention of a "quantum fluctuation" in these recent papers. Am not sure how that would work to create space.
But anyway in the most recent stuff I've read (Bojowald, Ashtekar, Lewandowski and others) there is no "nothing" before the timezero transition and the U did not appear out of nothing
and there was no original "quantum fluctuation" in the model.
All this stuff is unknown----a total terra incog----so ultimately we may prefer to believe the Hindu model that it came out of a lotus that grew from Shiva's navel as he slept upon the 7 headed cobra that was in turn floating on the (infinite) ocean. Seriously. It aint so bad as a model either.