Just please don't make that presentation to our beloved school children without fully informed prior parental consent...
As far as I know, the leading theories indicate that the answer is no. There may be an infinite number of universes though...
So in theory, if you took off from earth and headed out into space, you could just keep going forever and ever? IOW, you don't ever hit a wall/edge of the universe?
edit: I don't like my first two paragraphs... and I'm not qualified to answer. My personal take is that when 95% of energy and matter in your model are "unknown," it's worth looking at your assumptions. And people are busily doing just that. There are all sorts of new hypotheses springing up, (including modified pictures of long-range gravity), but we'll have to see which ones stand up to scrutiny.
Well, going by the membrane theory, the 4 dimensions we can observe are actually the ones that are 'straightened out'. The 7 others are the ones that are wrapped. I don't know precisely how it works, it's pretty hard to get your mind around these theories. But, if our universe is located on a 4-dimensional membrane, then yes, one would think that it ends somewhere. However, most scientists believe that the universe is not flat (as it appears to be), but rather a sphere and it appears flat only because such a tiny part of it is visible to us. The way I picture it, the 4 are wrapped in a sphere and the rest are wrapped within those 4. As for Dark matter, in this theory it is regular matter in other universes/membranes and we feel it's effects on our universe as gravity. It is possible however, that it's just 'regular' objects in space so dim, that we can't see them. More unbelievable than dark matter/dark energy, to me is antimatter/energy. I mean, how can something weigh less than nothing?
So what happens when you hit the edge of "the box"? Is it like a wall? im not learned like you bbob so forgive me if i sound obtuse
Everything is nothing and nothing is everything. There is no such thing as 'junk' DNA. Percentage of minds blown = 100 %
We don't know why 95% of your DNA is there. The other 5% seems to do all the work in determining your traits. We don't know where 96% of the substance of the universe is. We have evidence it's there, but we don't know how to detect it or even what it's made of. But yes, we should all probably be high.
The problem with the earth's surface analogy is that we are on the earth, as opposed to in it, as we are with the universe. If we were in the earth, then yes, you could hit an edge. So with this wrapped universe theory, are we ON the universe?
