• Question: if the universe is always expanding then there must be an end to it, whre is that and what is there?

    Asked by aldodougie to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 17 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Zara Gladman

      Zara Gladman answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      Hi aldodougie!

      This is the sort of question that makes my brain fry! Physics is very interesting but also confuses me a lot (I prefer biology… although it can be confusing sometimes too!). Then again, maybe this is more a philosophical question than a physics one. 🙂

      If you search ‘end of the universe’ on google, lots of pages come up… with some different ideas… but at the end of the day, nobody really knows!

      There might not even be an end to the universe… if there is, then I guess at the end of it there is nothing. Absolutely nothing!

      I suppose there will always be some things that we just can’t answer. It blows my mind if I think about it too much!!

    • Photo: Edward Codling

      Edward Codling answered on 17 Jun 2011:

      This is a really interesting question! But hard to answer… 🙂

      One theory says the way you should try and visualise the universe is like a balloon. Imagine you only live on the 2-d surface of the balloon. If you marked some points on the balloon and then blew the balloon up these points would all start to move away from each other. This is what is thought to be happening with our universe – why every point in space is moving away from every other point. Of course what this means is that there is no ‘edge’ to the balloon – if we keep going in one direction on its surface then we would eventually come back to where we started. Some scientists think this would really happen with our universe as well!

      However our universe is 3-d not 2-d like in the example above! So in the same way that the universe on the surface of the balloon is a 2-d universe that expands to fill 3-d space, our 3-d universe is filling a fourth dimensional space – that we can’t see.

      A description and picture of this idea is here:
      http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/balloon0.html

      Don’t worry this is all very confusing and I don’t understand a lot of it myself!

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