According to Dr. Einstein's beautiful unchangeable universe, the presumably spherical universe would be and neither expanding or contracting. http://cosmictimes.gsfc.nasa.gov/online_edition/1919Cosmic/universe.html With the role of gravity and with the notion that it's not expanding or contracting, I think space is filled up, and do have boundaries. Just my 2 cents and sorry for the NASA link.
I thought it had been proven that the universe is expanding with an accompanying theory that it could some day collapse. It's very hard not to think there is something on the other side of the boundaries. Perhaps it's where this dimension ends and another begins. There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears, and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call ... The Twilight Zone.
Quite eerie, but somehow the law of conservation of energy cannot be created nor destroyed it will only changed from one form to another. Maybe this is the cause of the expanding and contracting, somehow. We still don't know yet.
And a damned good sci fi writer. My favorite. And probably smarter than most of the posters here. Afterall good sci fi writers have to have a basic grasp of current physics and other sciences. More so than the average college grad, who tend to specialize....which Heinlein compared to the insect species.
Wasn't it Thomas aquinas, that said, he knows what time is until you ask him? Which I guess he means that the mind intuits it, but can never using abstractions, define it very well.
That's what I'm saying, so if it can't be destroyed it will exist for eternity in some shape or other.
Here's more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/startsw...tars-scientists-still-dont-know/#34fa6ee220ae OCT 13, 2016 @ 12:15 PM 612 VIEWS The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets How Far Away Are The Stars? Scientists Still Don't Know Starts With A Bang The Universe is out there, waiting for you to discover it Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Ethan SiegelEthan Siegel, Contributor This is the Milky Way from Concordia Camp, in Pakistan’s Karakoram Range. To the right is Mitre Peak, and to the far left is the beginning of Broad Peak. Photograph by Anne Dirkse, of http://www.annedirkse.com, under a c.c.-by-s.a.-4.0 license. When you look up at the night sky and see the glittering stars overhead, your first thought might be to wonder what, exactly, they are. Once you know they’re very distant suns, however, with different masses, brightnesses, temperatures and colors, your next thought might be to wonder just how far away they are. It might surprise you to learn that despite centuries of advancement in astronomy and astrophysics, from telescopes to cameras to CCDs to observatories in space, we still don’t have a satisfying answer. When you consider that much of our understanding of the Universe today — how it was born, how it came to be the way it is and what it’s made of — is based on the distances to the stars, it highlights just how important this problem is. Stars that appear to be at the same distance, like the ones in the constellation of Orion, may in fact be many hundreds or even thousands of light years more-or-less distant than one another. Image credit: La bitacora de Galileo, via http://www.bitacoradegalileo.com/2010/02/07/orion-la-catedral-del-cielo/. If you want to know how fast the Universe is expanding at any point in time, you need to know how fast the distant galaxies are moving away from us and how far away they are. Measuring a galaxy’s recession speed is straightforward — just measure its redshift and you’re done — but distances are a tricky thing. There needs to be some type of relationship between a quantity you can measure, like observed brightness, angular size, periodicity of a particular signal, etc., and something that will tell you an object’s intrinsic brightness or size. You can then calculate its distance. That’s how we figure out a whole slew of properties about the Universe, including: how fast it’s expanding today, how the expansion rate has changed over time, and what makes up the Universe, including matter, radiation and dark energy. . The construction of the cosmic distance ladder involves going from our Solar System to the stars to nearby galaxies to distant ones. Each “step” carries along its own uncertainties. Image credit: NASA,ESA, A. Feild (STScI), and A. Riess (STScI/JHU). But all of that knowledge requires a starting point for measuring cosmic distances. All of our measurement methods are dependent on knowing how these objects we’re measuring operate nearby: they all require an understanding of the closer star or galaxy types that we also find at great distances. No matter how you go about it, there’s one key step we need to begin with, and that’s an assumption-free method to measure the distances to the nearest stars. We only know of one, and we’ve known of it since before the time of Galileo. The parallax method, employed since the 1800s, involves noting the apparent change in position of a nearby star relative to the more distant, background ones. Image credit: ESA/ATG medialab. It’s the idea of parallax, which is a purely geometrical way to measure the distances to the stars. Regardless of what type of star you have, what its brightness is or how it’s moving through space, measuring parallax is exactly the same. Measure the star you’re trying to observe today from your location, at its current position relative to the other objects in the sky. Measure the star from a different position in space, and note how the star’s apparent position appears to change relative to the other points of light you can identify. Use simple geometry — knowing the difference in your position from those first two measurements and the apparent change in angle — to determine the distance to the star. We’ve been using this method since the mid-1800s to measure the distances to the nearest stars, including Alpha Centauri, Vega and 61 Cygni, which has the distinction of being the first star to ever have its parallax measured back in 1838. 61 Cygni was the first star to have its parallax measured, but also is a difficult case due to its large proper motion. These two images, stacked in red and blue and taken almost exactly one year apart, show this binary star system’s fantastic speed. Image credit: Lorenzo2 of the forums at http://forum.astrofili.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27548. But as straightforward as this method is, it comes along with its own inherent flaws. For starters, these angles are always very small: about 1 arcsecond (or 1/3600th of a degree) for a star that’s 3.26 light years away. For comparison, our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years away and has a parallax of just 0.77 arcsec. Stars more distant than perhaps one or two hundred light years can’t have their parallaxes measured from the ground at all, since the atmospheric turbulence contributes too greatly to uncertainties. In 1989, the European Space Agency attempted to overcome all of these difficulties by launching the Hipparcos satellite, which — from space — could measure precisions down to an accuracy of just 0.001 arcsec. Testing the Hipparcos satellite in the Large Solar Simulator, ESTEC, February 1988. Image credit: Michael Perryman. Ideally, this would have meant that we could get accurate parallaxes for stars up to 1,600 light years away: about 100,000 stars total. The brightest and closest stars would be able to have their distances measured to better than 1% precision, which would then mean we’d be able to measure things like the expansion of the Universe throughout its history to that precision level as well. But a number of difficulties prevented that.
Here's an interesting little tidbit for all you space geeks: "Comet impact 'linked' to rise of mammals" And for the past 55 million years we've been told it was a meteor that 'wiped out the dinosaurs'. Discuss (but leave me out of it because I have more self-respect than to waste a second of my life on such utter drivel) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-37647049
