Monday, July 18, 2011

Which is the real universe as far as we're concerned?

We observe the radius of the universe to be about 13,7 billion light years based on the age of the universe being 13.7 billion years. Other commentators suggest the figure 'now' corrected for light lag is about 46,5 billion light years radius, if the word 'now' has any real meaning in this context. And then of course there is Alan Guth's Inflationary Theory, which suggests the universe is many orders of magnitude greater still because space expanded many orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light in its earliest moment (far less than a second) and for the briefest of moments (far less than a second), and has since slowed. 'Now' space appears to be accelerating again due to mysterious 'dark energy', increasing the radius of the inflationary universe which might already be 10^120 times greater than the observable universe. So, which is the real universe; the one we can observe, the one we observe but has moved on, or the one we extrapolate to be far far greater still?

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