michael cyrek:
"Our universe is finite in dimension but infinite in light travel time. The light keeps bouncing (or reflecting) off the edge of this BB and just keeps on circulating."

JS Princeton:
"Actually, michael, this is exactly wrong. There is no "reflection" because we're fairly certain that the horizons are an observational limit and not a physical limit. In other words, somebody looking at the universe 10 billion light years away will not see the same parts of the universe as we will."

Chip comments:
Yes. If we could magically jump instantaneously to a planet circling a star in a galaxy 10 billion light years away from us, and brought along a telescope, we'd see stars and galaxies in different arrangements, but we'd also see on the largest scale, a universe expanding away from us at the new location, (just as we do from the old location - earth.) Our distant "deep field" and cosmic background views from the new location would be just as remote in time, as they are from earth, and would show distant earlier stages, and high red shifted galaxies. We might even find the Milky Way, as it looked 10 billion years ago.

(By hypothetically "jumping" instantaneously in the mind's eye, I'm also muddying the waters of comprehension a bit by actually adapting a single observer coordinate frame set up just between the distant location and us, and thereby setting up an arbitrary, hypothetical universal "now" separate from the distances and the light cones between us. But I was just trying to clarify that based on current observations and physics, the universe has no "center" yet does have a "beginning" in the past, and is expanding as well as finite-yet-unbounded.)


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Chip on 2003-02-14 15:24 ]</font>