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Originally Posted by mikesbytes
Thanks for the info guys, much appreciated.
There yah go, proof I'm a newbie, I've mixed up Inflation and Expansion.
Hey, even if you could map the rate of expansion, it doesn't necessarily point to a central point (assuming that such a think exists), there's other reasons non uniform expansion could occur
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Mike
Going back to the balloon analogy, a being on any point on the surface of the balloon will see all the other points moving away, and the further away they are, the faster they appear to be receding, which will give the impression that they are at the centre. Of course that applies to all the points. Again this is analogous to us within 4 dimensional spacetime.
This analogy was used by Hawking in "A Brief History of Time" which although it is a bit dated nowadays (for example it doesn't cover the accelerating expansion of the universe) is still a good intro to many concepts central to cosmology for the layman.
Cheers
Malcolm