Through observation with the world's largest telescopes, It has been established that aside from small random deviations among the motions of individual galaxies, all galaxies appear to be receding from our location in the universe at speeds that increase in direct proportion to their distances from us. This observation has given rise to the concept of the Expanding Universe, now widely accepted among cosmologists. Attempts to explain these observations have given rise to what is now popularly known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

This theory posits the universe as having suddenly come into existence at a single point somewhere in space a long way back in time and as having been expanding since then into the universe in which we find ourselves today. Modern physics has enabled cosmologists to run the picture backward in time to see how it seems to have all started. In this picture, we extrapolate current observational data back to a time when the entire universe was compressed into an almost inconceivably hot speck of pure energy. Via data extracted from an orbiting satellite called WMAP, standing for "Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe", it has proven possible to extract convincing evidence that this initial creation event occurred some 13.7 billion years ago. Only theologians suggest how this creation event might have come about.

In the following, I offer a description of the present SHAPE of the universe that seems consistent with observation. There is not and probably never will be any way to prove or disprove its validity.

The universe appears to be so vast that we can see only a tiny porton of it even with the largest telescopes that can ever be built. The part we see now appears to be homogeneous and isotropic. Homogeneous means essentially the same as viewed from anywhere in the universe. Isotropic means essentially the same no matter the direction from which it is viewed from anywhere in the universe. This also means that we do not envisage the universe as having a boundary beyond which there is nothing.

This raises two questions: (1) How can the universe have been expanding at only a finite rate of speed and for only a finite period of time without there being a boundary beyond which there is nothing? (2) In what direction in the night sky to look to see the point from which the universe burst into existence?

To understand what appears to be the only plausible answer to these questions, it helps to resort to analogy. Our universe appears to be three-dimensional. That is, at any point in space, there are just three directions: forward and backward, left and right, up and down relative to the direction in which you are facing. Suppose that instead of being three-dimensional, our universe were only two-dimensional, like the surface of a sphere, with the only directions being forward and backward, right and left, but no up and down. All objects in such a universe would be two- instead of three-dimensional. The earth would occupy a circular area on the surface of that sphere with no thickness whatever. We would exist as much smaller two-dimensional objects on the edge of the disk. Without mechanical aids, we could move only backward and forward along the edge of the disk. With aircraft, we could move only as far away from the edge of the disk as there existed air to support us. With spacecraft, we could leave the disk altogether and visit other worlds, also disk-shaped like the earth. With tunneling equipment, we could burrow slightly toward the center of the disk-shaped earth. But we could move neither toward nor away from the center of the sphere. We would, in fact, have great difficulty in even perceiving the possibility of there even being such a direction.

With two-dimensional telescopes, we could see that the universe contains all of the objects that we have found in our actual three-dimensional universe, but we would find them to be two-dimensional. We could also use the telescopes to discover that our two-dimensional universe was expanding because all galaxies seen through our telescopes would be seen as moving away from our own location. It would be very difficult for the inhabitants of our disk-shaped world to conceive of the possibility that our universe is merely the surface of an expanding sphere. They would tend to think that they lived on a flat infinitely large surface.

The second of the above lquestions was: In what direction must we look in the night sky to see the point from whichi the expansion of the universe began? The above analogs should lead us to the conclusion that the direction to that point is not anywhere in the night sky but in a direction in which we cannot point. It must correspond to the center of the sphere in the two-dimensional universe on the surface of the three-dimensional balloon. Inhabitants of that universe would not be able to look in the direction of the center of the sphere. They might learn that the center of their universe is at right angles to any direction in which they can look. through analogoius reasoning, we must conclude that the center of our universe is in a direction in which we cannot point and that that it is at right angles to any direction in which we can point. It is at the center of curvature of the three-dimensional "surface" of the four-dimensional hypersphere that comprises our universe.