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I know I should not do this but here goes.
Before the Big Bang there was nowhere and nowhen. That is Space and Time did not exist.A fraction of a second after a very large amount of energy was expanding so causing the existence of space and time. We cannot know what happened before as there was no before. As this energy cooled due to expansion then elementary particles could form protons electrons etc. the only atomic nuclei that were produced was Hydrogen Helium and a litte bit of Lithium. To produce all the elements we see today stars had to form by the gravitational accretion of these elements. These stars could only produce the heavier elements up to Iron by nuclear synthesis. Elements with a greater atomic number can only be produced in a Supernova.<o:p></o:p>
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The universe is not expanding into anything. It is just expanding and it need not have a boundary. If you don’t believe something can come from nothing it is happening right now everywhere particles appear and disappear due to quantum effects. This can be measured.<o:p></o:p>
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The really scary thing is because of entanglement every particle in the universe is entangled with every other particle as they were all once in the same place. This quantum entanglement is not understood and works over vast distances apparently faster than the speed of light. This really bothered Einstein. Dark Mass and Energy must somehow be related to this Quantum Entanglement. These connections must be through other dimensions we cannot perceive directly.
Life is just an inevitable result of the Universe heading towards more complexity rather than the reverse. Consciousness is an even more remarkable inevitable outcome. My firm opinion or belief is that all things are connected at a quantum level as it explains a lot of the unexplanable. Your body's physical boundary has no more reality than the physical boundary of the Universe. You are inexorably linked to everything else both through Space and Time.
I really enjoyed reading the longer version of your post Bert! The one I got by email about quantum entanglement and such. Undelete, please! It would be a great read for everyone; give that old grey matter something to do besides going over the same old same old.
I really enjoyed reading your post and I am very much in agreement with it. It is a difficult subject to get one's head around because it is a long way from classical/ Newtonian science and is somewhat Metaphysical.
Great post Bert
Very well put, you are correct that many of these phenomena are measureable.
This was really bought home to me by a lecture given up here in Gove by Prof Ray Norris from CSIRO.
Bert, sorry, I didn't realise your post was still here in its entirety! In the browser I was using only the first 3 and the last sentences show up followed by "Bert" and then the signature. In Firefox I can see the whole post. I thought you deleted most of it after posting it.
I source view mode I see in there is some xml stuff / formatting in there that this browser does not seem to understand...
I am in the habit of typing posts in MS word since after a long type lost the whole lot due to a crook connection to IIS.
I realized some years ago that Chaos Theory virtually discounted the idea of Destiny and Fate (clockwork universe). The Universe is far more forgiving as it allows you to take limited control of your own future by your own actions. My interest is because of forty years of reading the latest and best of science. I do not have all the answers but a lot of questions. I have long tried to put together everything I have learned and seen from all fields. It is difficult as I am only a limited life form that is not too smart. To put these ideas into plain English is difficult to say the least. I am surprised I have got so far.
Wow, so many answers and theorys.
Well, the universe is expanding, but has any one thought that it could somehow shrink as well? And simce the universe is expanding could it also stop becasue of some sort of barrier?
Yes, it could shrink, and it could stop expanding too. Not because of "some sort of barrier" like a balloon expanding inside a room and hitting the walls, but because of some inherent "potential barrier", a critical point where the process might reverse, like a pendulum's swing reaching its highest point, stopping, and reversing direction.
There is no external space in which the universe is doing its expanding. It is space itself that is expanding. The distance between any two points is increasing over time, that is all. Whether space is finite or infinite has nothing to do with this. And if it is finite, it is more in the sense of a circle having a finite circumference even though you could traverse it round-and-round for ever (i.e., finite but no boundary), and not in the sense of a straight ruler which has a finite length because it has two end points a finite distance away, which you can go beyond and step off the edge.
Good answer.
But, does anyone know at what rate the univers ie is expanding?
Could the rate be fast enough, so thats space expanded so much that the Andromeda galaxy woul never reach us, since Andromeda is heading towards us at 148,000kmh. Or is the expansion of the unviverse much slower.
I have Peebles' "Principles of Physical Cosmology" here, which I'm slowly working my way through. (Picked it up by chance at a book sale for $10 last year. It's a great book on cosmology with lots of detailed observational evidence and not much beyond high school maths. Anyway...)
For the expansion of the universe, we have Hubble's law which says that the distance between two points is increasing at a rate of Hubble's constant times the distance. So the further apart things are the faster they are moving away from each other. Kind of like when you stretch something (rubber band, a piece of fabric, balloon): two points close together move apart slower than two points farther apart.
Now let's see what this says about Andromeda, after a bit of googling.
- The distance between us and Andromeda is 2.9 million light years
- Hubble's constant is about 2.5 x 10^(-18) Hertz (2.5 billionth of a billionth of an inverse second)
- That gives a rate of expansion (the product of the above two quantities) of about 250,000 km/h between us and Andromeda.
If Andromeda is heading for us at around 150,000 km/h like you say, then what Hubble's law says is that if it was not for the expansion of spacetime, Andromeda would be approaching us at about 400,000 km/h.
My understanding is that the expansion of space time does NOT affect the local group, or any other galaxy cluster. Andromeda is unaffected by the expansion of space time as demonstrated by Hubble. This is because this expansion is overcome by the effects of the local gravity field. If you took the expansion of space time away tomorrow Andromeda would still be speeding towards the Milky Way at the same speed as now, as this is driven purely by gravity and not by the "Hubble flow". Conversely, if it wasn't for the gravitational attraction within the local group, then Andromeda would be accelerating away at the rate of the Hubble flow, just like the rest of the Universe.
The gravitational effect within clusters is called the "peculiar velocity" and it is only when you get beyond the local group of galaxies do you observe the effect of the Hubble flow expansion of space time. All galaxy clusters will maintain some sort of integrity in spite of the expansion of space time, due to the effects of local gravity, principally from their dark matter halos.
Eventually, all the visible galaxies and galaxy groups will expand over the edge of the visible universe and we will be just left with the local group of galaxies to observe in our telescopes, or rather what is left of them after various merger events and exhaustion of their gas and dust through star formation.
Although with the universe expanding and accelerating it would brobably dissmiss that theory. but then again you would think that all the material in the universe had to come from somewhere even at its compressed state before the big bang, and what triggered it to bang?
As a youngster when i first read about the big bang i thought that maybe all the black holes would eventually suck in and cosume thier host galaxy's and then maybe eventually collide with other black holes (and dead star black holes) and merge and keep consuming everything and so on until the pressure so compressed cause another bang!!!
just my 2 bobs worth!!!
At the moment im reading Stephen Hawking's UNIVERSE IN A NUT SHELL very interesting read!!!!!
What I said I assumed to be the accepted model of the big bang.
Undelete, please! 
It would be a great read for everyone; give that old grey matter something to do besides going over the same old same old. 
In Firefox I can see the whole post. 
I thought you deleted most of it after posting it. 
