ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[David Morris]

On 4/5/07, Lawrence Bryan <lebryan at speakeasy.org> wrote:
>
>  > And we're talking about travel through universal  space relative to some starting point?
>
> No. There is no such thing as a starting point. That is the hardest part to grasp, for me, anyway. The universe has no edge. At least that is the situation currently. Perhaps tomorrow or next week cosmologists will hypothesize an edge and a starting point.

Hmm...  I was under the impression that the starting point of the
universe was the "spot" where the Big Bang occurred, and that Hubble
allows us to peer back in time to the early days after that Bang
(although I've no idea what direction one should point the telescope).
 I was also under the impression that the universe does have an edge,
like a great big expanding bubble, and that until recently one working
theory was that at some point the expanding point the universe would
stop expanding and begin to contract, until it was once again a single
mass waiting to do another Big Bang, thus forming an eternal
expand/contract cycle.  But the current thought is that it will only
continue to expand and cool, with Entropy ruling all.  The funny thing
about this current single Big Bang theory is that it implies (to me)
that there was/is some Creator that started it all.  The previous
expand contract cycle theory implied (to me) that "Nature" was eternal
and needed no Creator.

David Morris