B What Space Does the Universe Occupy?

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The discussion centers on the question of what space the universe occupies, with an emphasis on the idea that the universe is everything that exists. Participants note that there is no evidence of anything beyond the universe, and all scientific models operate under the assumption that the universe is self-contained. The concept of spacetime is highlighted as potentially infinite, suggesting that there may not be anything outside of it. The conversation touches on the philosophical implications of this inquiry, acknowledging the difficulty in reconciling scientific and philosophical perspectives. Ultimately, the understanding that the universe is not "inside" anything else helps clarify the concept for participants.
HailSagan
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Greetings, all. Please forgive my ignorance, but this is a question which has been on my mind for many years:

What space does the universe occupy?

To clarify what I mean: I'm in a building which is in the city of Hillsboro, which is the county of Washington, which is in the state of Oregon, which is in the United States, which is on the North American continent, which is on earth, which is in our local solar system which is in the Milky Way Galaxy which is in the universe which is in...?

I realize there is likely no definitive answer to this question and likely that there never will be but does anyone who is more intelligent than I have any thoughts on this admittedly obscure question?
 
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It isn't in anything. The universe is everything there is. More precisely, there's no evidence of anything outside it and all of our models work to remarkable accuracy on that basis.
 
Ibix said:
It isn't in anything. The universe is everything there is. More precisely, there's no evidence of anything outside it and all of our models work to remarkable accuracy on that basis.
Thank you for your reply. I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around this concept and would like to followup with further questions but I can't think of a way of doing it without leaving the realm of scientific inquiry and entering that of philosophical inquiry. That being the case, I'll leave it at my thanks for your reply.

PS: I see this thread was moved to a different sub-forum; apologies to the mods for posting in the wrong location.
 
Well, look at it this way: if the universe is inside something, what's that inside? And what's that inside? And...? It's either turtles all the way down, or the sequence stops somewhere. As far as we're aware, the sequence stops at spacetime. And that's not unreasonable - our best models suggest that spacetime is infinite in extent, so it's kinda hard to have anything outside it.
 
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Thank you, explaining it in that way makes it much to easier to grasp.
 

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Thread 'Rutgers finds a transparent Einstein Cross - apparently a dark matter "halo".'

The formal paper is here. The Rutgers University news has published a story about an image being closely examined at their New Brunswick campus. Here is an excerpt: Computer modeling of the gravitational lens by Keeton and Eid showed that the four visible foreground galaxies causing the gravitational bending couldn’t explain the details of the five-image pattern. Only with the addition of a large, invisible mass, in this case, a dark matter halo, could the model match the observations...
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Thread 'Big Bang and Infinite Universe'

Hi, I’m pretty new to cosmology and I’m trying to get my head around the Big Bang and the potential infinite extent of the universe as a whole. There’s lots of misleading info out there but this forum and a few others have helped me and I just wanted to check I have the right idea. The Big Bang was the creation of space and time. At this instant t=0 space was infinite in size but the scale factor was zero. I’m picturing it (hopefully correctly) like an excel spreadsheet with infinite...
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