The end of the universe

[Kishimo]

Does the universe end?  if so, where?  Surely it can't go on and on forever, it has to end somewhere.  But what's there if it does end?  its all so confusing!

[Skids]

Try to be a little more like the rest of us and live a hum-drum, uninteresting life where we are in blissful ignorance of the universe around us, and don't even know what's outside our own town let alone outside the universe. Its much less confusing that way.

[El D]

This is as much philosophical as anything else. Given that as our knowledge expands so do our horizons I would imagine that so would our picture of existence. The universe must end - energy cannot be created or destroyed which would imply finiteness. Whether ours (ego) is the only universe is completely beyond our knowledge. Personally I think that considering such questions opens our minds to other possibilities. We simply do not know so your imagination can run riot.

[bernardo]

It is possible for the universe to be finite in size and for it not to "stop" anywhere.  It doesn't have to have any edges.  It might be the 3-dimensional surface on a 4-dimensional hypersphere (i.e. curved round).

What this means is that if you blast off in a rocket into outer space and carry on for ever, you will eventually find yourself going back to Earth from the other side (just like an explorer going round the world will eventually get back to the continent he started from) without falling off any edge and without having changed direction.

[adydb]

But if the Universe is growing then it has to grow into something...So What's this something that didn't exist 'till the Universe actually got big enough to be there?

Aww I hate these Q's.....Gets the brain on Over-Time!!!

[Hammer]

Following on from Bernardo, imagine explaining to someone from a flat 2-D world how the earth works. He couldn't imagine walking in a straight line and ending up where hw started from, whereas we can easily.

The universe is similar in that it has an extra dimension that we can't easily comprehend. If you kept flying in a straight line you would eventually get beck to where you started.

The universe is constantly expanding, therefore it must be finite.

[jake-the-peg]

Flatland - a romance of many Dimensions by A. Square (otherwise known as Edwin Abbott) written in 1884.

Richard Feynman was a fan of this I believe

http://www.eldritchpress.org/eaa/FL.HTM

[QmunkE]

If the universe is constantly expanding then you would have to change direction to reach earth on your universal round trip., since the the bit of space you left from would have moved by the time you got back. Also gravitational effects of other universal bodies would distort your flight path, just to be picky.

The "contents" of the universe may be expanding into an already infinitely large expanse of "nothingness", I suppose that if you define universe as "everything that exists" then does this emptyness strictly count as the universe?

[tracymort]

Yes this idea started doing my head in when i was about 7! Then when i was checking out universities i went to a lecture about superstrings. It was mentioned how could we possibly imagine and totally understand something with more dimensions than our brain has. That kind of helped!

[kylertz]

This might be a really dumb ?, but anyways. What, if anything, is the universe in? Is it in another type of dimension. And if so how can we get out if we were able to. Is it through wormholes. wouldn't it be impossible to ever sense or percieve other kinds of dimensions if we even traveled to one.

[BoroughGal]

I'm sure I'm definetely being dumb, but if the universe is finate, what's at the other side of it's "finate-ness"? Surely it's just more space, making the universe never ending??  Surely there can't be an end to it, because it is just space anyway?