Hi all.
Still trying to get my head around this skin of the balloon theory, so I visited the HUBBLE Site and reviewed some of their findings. (Listed below) Anything in brackets are my questions, and believe me I have plenty of them.

(I have come across the term 2d space used to explain the present state of the universe – sometimes even referred to as flat space – or the probability that if we could travel straight enough for long enough, we would end up were we started off. But if this were so then how could so much matter occupy such an apparently unwinding universe?)

January 15, 1996
STScI-1996-01
Hubble's Deepest View of the Universe Unveils Bewildering Galaxies across Billions of Years
Representing a narrow "keyhole" view stretching to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of the sky only about the width of a dime located 75 feet away. Though the field is a very small sample of the heavens, it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks largely the same in all directions. Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution.

(In all directions – does this then include the center of the universe? If so, then perhaps this is more representative of some which is growing – not merely expanding.)

Harry Ferguson, one of the HDF team astronomers added: "One of the great legacies of the Hubble Telescope will be these deep images of the sky showing galaxies to the faintest possible limits with the greatest possible clarity from here out to the very horizon of the universe."

(This statement verifies that we, or the galaxy of which we are such a small part, is indeed far far away from the outer reaches of the galaxy. And that is the outer reaches of a galaxy as it was 11 to 12 billions of years ago. How much bigger is it now?)

Essentially a narrow, deep "core sample" of sky, the HDF is analogous to a geologic core sample of the Earth's crust. Just as a terrestrial core sample is a history of events which took place as Earth's surface evolved, the HDF image contains information about the universe at many different stages in time. Unlike a geologic sample though, it is not clear what galaxies are nearby and therefore old, and what fraction are very distant and therefore existed when the universe was newborn. "It's like looking down a long tube and seeing all the galaxies along that line of sight. They're all stacked up against one another in this picture and the challenge now is to disentangle them," said Mark Dickinson of the HDF team.

(Surely the tunnel analogy is the one thing most representative of Three Dimensional Space. To travel through our galaxy or even from our galaxy to the Andromeda Galaxy is to travel through Three Dimensional Space – therefore traveling to any destination in the universe would be the same.)

Follow-up observations will be conducted by a variety of ground and space-base telescopes at other wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, from X-ray through radio. An infrared camera scheduled to be installed in Hubble during the 1997 Servicing Mission will likely image the field to search for even farther primeval galaxies, whose light has been shifted to the infrared region of the spectrum by the expansion of the universe.

(And lastly – what exactly is the universe expanding into – I have read that it is created time and space as it expands and that we may never know what lays beyond – mostly because of the vast distances involved. But whatever lays out there – cause and effect tells me our universe may just be one of many)

Damn, I’m getting an headache – I’m off to take some pills.
Perhaps if I sleep on it, it might seem a little more logical when I wake up. Some hope.