Is this universe infinite?

[Humus]

Am i the only one that feels that maybe there are some things that we will just never understand?

Since there's more stuff going on out there than could be stored in a human brain I would say that we will never understand everything.

 

[OpenGL guy]

Is there evidence of the opposite?

Yes! There have been observations of redshifts that would imply that the age of the universe is 48 billion years old, but the objects are only ~12 billion light years away (when the light was emitted). That implies that the objects are moving more slowly than the expansion of the universe, which makes sense since matter moves slower than the speed of light.

There was an exception to the last comment and that was the inflationary period shortly after the Big Bang. I have no idea what that's about.

 

[OpenGL guy]

Since there's more stuff going on out there than could be stored in a human brain I would say that we will never understand everything.

While I think you're right, I wouldn't use that analogy. For example, do you need to know every digit of pi to understand that it's the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter? Another thing to remember is that one person doesn't need to know everything, although some people think they already do

 

[Bumpyride]

Consider also Goedel's famous incompleteness theorem. It implies that even if we had a final theory of everything that was qualitatively correct, we would never be certain that it was mathematically consistent. Though that line from Douglas Adams probably covers it just as well - that's one of my favorites.

 

[Deepak]

I feel depressed that how less we know about lot of things, but then looking at the astonishing pace we have gathered knowledge in past century or two I feel hopeful that we shall solve world's greatest questions one day.

 

[Humus]

Yes! There have been observations of redshifts that would imply that the age of the universe is 48 billion years old, but the objects are only ~12 billion light years away (when the light was emitted). That implies that the objects are moving more slowly than the expansion of the universe, which makes sense since matter moves slower than the speed of light.

I don't quite follow. At what rate does the universe expand? The age alone doesn't tell me much.

 

[OpenGL guy]

I don't quite follow. At what rate does the universe expand? The age alone doesn't tell me much.

If only the objects in the universe were moving, then the farthest objects would be at about the same distance (in light years) as the age of the universe as the farthest objects are moving the fastest. However, the red shifts on some objects imply that they are ~40 billion light years away, which is impossible since the age of the universe is only computed to be ~10-15 billion years old. Thus, the expansion of the universe itself is causing the more severe redshifts. Since the universe's expansion caused a ~30 billion year discrepancy, I think that means that the universe is expanding faster than the objects in it, which makes good sense to me as matter is always limited by the speed of light.

Something like that anyway, I am no cosmologist