The trouble with infinity...

For a few years I've been troubled by the idea that the universe goes on infinitely.

But as troubling as that idea is, I'm even less comfortable with the idea that it could have a limit. That would equate to a 'flat earth' idea.

I have never studied astronomy or astrophysics but I have read some books by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Bill Bryson and our own Fred Watson trying to pick up some snippets or what the current thinking is on "life, the universe, and everything."

But never in my readings have I found anything that addressed this worry of mine about the nature of infinity...

Every now and then during my readings, I get a niggle, a feeling that I'm on the cusp of an 'a ha' moment of my own, of pulling the pieces of several of the current puzzles together into some solution that everyone's been missing. But who to share this with, to sound out or tease out the idea?

I could take it up as study, but I wonder whether studying up could be counter-productive - whether it could constrain my thinking and prevent those niggles and possibly new ideas?

Tonight I went to one of the wonderful free (and frequent) lectures given at ANU by a leading scientist. This astrophysicist Dr Paul Francis talked about the big bang, black holes, the speeding expansion of the universe, dark matter, dark energy - all of the big mysteries. And he took a lot of questions throughout, which was refreshing and an opportunity of which I availed myself!

Then he talked about on dark matter and dark energy, describing that galaxies don't appear to have enough mass to stop themselves flying apart, leading to theorising about the whole E=mC2 (that's squared when you don't have a superscript format) needing dark matter equating to 23% of the total, dark energy needing a whopping 72%, against all the atoms measely 4.6%.

He talked about a problem that dark energy appears to get stronger as the bodies in the universe get further apart from each other - the opposite of what you'd expect of any energy. I got a niggle...

I asked "could it be possible that it's because these bodies are actually getting closer to each other by dint of the universe actually folding back on itself in another dimension that we are not aware of, like a flower that funnels out from it's centre but curling right back on itself (or like going arond the outside of a donut only to end up back in the hole), so that eventually everything in the universe will be spat back out of the funnel again as another big bang?"

He said what I had described was precisely what was proposed in a  theory (I think he meant that in the populist mode rather than the scientific mode, which would be 'hypothesis') by someone whose name I couldn't quite hear but am sure I had never heard of before.

I was pretty chuffed that one of my niggles turned out to be the same as some learned physicist had used to solve one of our biggest (literally) mysteries. Felt very Sheldon...