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I do not claim to be a particle physicist, nor do I claim to be a wacky
futurist, ok maybe a little. I am simply a concerned citizen of the universe,
wary of faults made by our historical cosmologists.
The first red flag that pops up in my mind while reading pla's assertment
of the "causal radius" scenario is the phrase "perfect sphere." Remember
how Galileo's
peers believed the their universe to be a perfect sphere? Well, Galileo then proved, although
in quite a posthumous manner, that the planets do not
move around the earth in perfect circles. Instead, the path of the planets are irregular.
Taking only that historical experience into account, why should I believe that the
universe, a system of great girth and complexity, would ever expand in a
uniform shape... a sphere, nonetheless. What about the fact that light is
subject to gravity? The light which is supposedly carving out our perfect
spherical universe at the speed of itself is also bending around all over the
place. As long as a single photon strays from it's original course as a ray from
the point of the big bang, the universe is no longer a perfect sphere.
In fact, as Einstein predicted early in the 20th century,
scientists have verified that light in fact bends great distances when subject
to enough gravitational influence. In 1979, British Astronomers verified theories
about the relationship between light and gravity Einstein had put forth in his
1936 essay "Lens-like Action of a Star by the Deviation of Light in the
Gravitational Field." Although photons do not have mass, scientists
noticed that a large cluster of galaxies between us and a far away quasar was
successfully bending the light coming from the quasar. The apparent "binary
quasar" was just an optical illusion. Think of all the other large clumps
of matter in the universe, and all the light that it is bending.
I'm sure some plastic mind out there is thinking that perhaps
the light which is racing at the edge of the universe is out of matter's
gravitational reach. But this light came from the same spot as a universal
amount of matter. Surely a major amount of this gravitationally induced
light-warping came nearer to the birth of the universe than farther.
http://www.scibridge.sdsu.edu/coursemats/introsci/sysinteractions/grav_lenses/
Update:I must say that I meant to argue against the fact that the shape of the matter and light in the universe itself is spherical. What pla refers to in the writeup above is the PROBABLE extremities of the universe, given the maximum distance light could have travelled in all directions since the big bang.
Thanks to Olathe for helping me work through the matter.