Drakkith
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ptalar said:If this is the case then why does space expand faster than the speed of light?
A few things about this. First, expansion is measured by a RATE, not a speed. By that I mean that it doesn't make sense to talk about the speed of expansion because that speed will change depending on how far away your two points of comparison are. For example, galaxies recede from each other at an increasing velocity of about 70 km/s for every megaparsec (Mpc) they are apart. So two galaxies 10 Mpc's apart will be receding from each other at approximately 700 km/s.
However, the RATE of expansion does not change in this manner. The time it takes for the distance between them to double is the same whether they are 10 Mpc's apart or 10,000 Mpc's apart.
Also, it gets us nowhere by talking about the expansion of "space itself". In reality, expansion is measured by comparing actual objects that exist within spacetime.
If the Universe is 13.8 billion years old we should only see back in time to 13.8 billion light years. Yet the visible Universe is roughly 46 billion light years.
There is no contradiction here. We CANNOT see back further than 13.8 billion years because light has not had time to travel any longer than that. (A little shorter than 13.8 billion years actually. Light wasn't free to travel until after Recombination occurred around 378,000 years after the big bang and the universe became transparent to EM radiation)
However, we have measured the radius of the observable universe and it is indeed approximately 46 billion light years from Earth to the edge, making it about 92 billion light years in diameter. Note that years is a measurement of time, while light years is a measurement of distance.
Understand that to measure the radius of the observable universe requires us to understand how expansion works, otherwise we would get the wrong value. In a non-expanding, static universe, the diameter of the observable universe would only be about 13.8 billion light years, increasing by one light year ever year. However, in an expanding universe, the galaxies we see now have actually receded from us since their light left them, making the observable universe larger than it would appear to be if you only consider the time that light has had to travel.
The argument is that space can expand faster than light because it is nothingness. Nothingness does not follow the laws of physics. But you said space includes matter and energy. Which is it?
That is not the argument. Our primary theory for understanding the universe on its largest scales is General Relativity. Under the rules of GR, the expansion is the result of dynamic geometry, not the result of space expanding as if space were something that was actually moving. Space is not moving. The concept of space being something that can move does not even apply under GR. We can set up frames of reference at different points within spacetime and watch the effects that this dynamic geometry has on them, but we cannot see "spacetime itself" nor can we assign a frame of reference to it since it is the underlying framework upon which everything occurs.