Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian W
Now this begins to become understandable. with 'space expanding' and galaxies more or less going along for the ride then I can begin to see where no 'absolute centre' makes sense.
Now a little more help if you please... is it permissible or sensible might be a better word, to talk of an' absolute beginning position'? Granted that it is not the absolute centre.
Brian
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I suppose the quite intuitive reasoning behind the original question is that the Big Bang was an explosion (as it is all too often depicted as) and therefore it must have had a centre, or merely that the Big Bang must have happened at a particular point in the Universe. The key point however is that
everything, both space and time - essentially what we call the Universe - was created in the Big Bang, and thus it is impossible to define a position
inside the resulting Universe for this event.
For example, imagine a new coordinate system that suddenly emerges and expands from a single point. That single point can only be defined relative to some other coordinate system, which must be
outside the expanding one.
Likewise, any 'centre', 'beginning position', 'point of origin' (or what one might call it) for the Universe would have to be
relative to something else that is
outside the Universe itself. But what, if anything, which may or may not exist outside the Universe is of course pure speculation...