Sunday, May 13, 2007

Space... the final "thing" to keep us confused?

Just came by this article on /. about the discovery of a fossil star which is found to be 13.2 billion years old (recent studies show that the galaxy is about 13.7 bn years old). In one of the reactions someone answers the question of someone who wants to know if there is a 'place' in our universe where the Big Bang occurred. He/She states it nicely:
If by "origin" you mean "point of origin", then we already have that answer. The big bang was not an explosion which occurred at one point in space, spewing matter and energy out everywhere. The big bang was a big explosion OF space, and spewed out a glob of space which began to expand, making points more distant from each other.

So you cannot ask "where" the big bang occurred, because if you take all the points in space as far as can be seen, all of those points in space were at one single point at the moment of the big bang. So the best answer to "where" is "everywhere".

It may be nonsense (I don't think so, but I am not very well educated on the Big Bang topic), but if it is in a simplistic way correct, I like it :)

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