You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. -Eckhart Tolle

Were really hitting our stride for 2015 here atStarts With A Bang,and Im so pleased you shared this past week with me. If you missed anything, heres what weve been through:

These articles have all been a pleasure to be a part of,and as always, youve hadyour say as well. Lets take a look at what weve chosen asyourComments of the Week!

Image credit: E. Siegel.

From John Duffield on expanding spacetime: There is no evidence whatsoever that the 3D space of the universe is anything like the surface of a balloon. There is no evidence of any higher dimensions wherein the space of the universe somehow curves back on itself.

As another has said, the evidence that the Universe is like a balloons surface is tremendous, so long as youre willing to accept an analogy. Youre going to have to, frankly, unless you want to go and work through all the math associated with General Relativity, and be aware that all analogies have limitations. The reason the balloon is so attractive is because its familiar, its in areduced number of dimensions which makes it easy to visualize, and it gives you a reasonable analogy for why galaxies appear to recede from one another at faster speeds the farther away they are: because the fabric of space itself is expanding over time.

Image credit: NASA / WMAP / Universe 101, via http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_exp.html.

So you will have to accept an analogy, as well as the limits of that analogy. The point to this article was that there is no center tothe surface of a balloon, just like there is no center to the circumference of a circle, the surface of Earth, or now were coming up to three dimensions the physical Universe.

The part observable to us is centered on (well,near) us, but thats certainly not the entirety of the Universe. The key to understanding the expansion of space is to understand that any observer would see galaxies distributed and receding the same way we do, and the particulars of what we see alone are specific to our location; the generalities hold everywhere.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler.

See the rest here:
Comments of the Week #44: From the Universes center to where you are [Starts With A Bang]