On Wednesday, 2 January 2019 10:33:51 UTC-5, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Wed, 2 Jan 2019 05:48:37 -0800 (PST), RichA
wrote:

On Tuesday, 1 January 2019 09:54:16 UTC-5, Chris L Peterson wrote:
On Tue, 1 Jan 2019 00:19:24 -0800 (PST), RichA
wrote:

No, we are on the surface. The surface is "now". The center is t=0
(actually, it is (0,0,0,0), the location of the Big Bang). The past is
inside the sphere, where it is not accessible to us.

If we are to take this literally, then the universe isn't flat, it has no end-point (for us) and building bigger telescopes means little.

I don't follow. Why is there no value in building instruments that
extend how far we can see, in both space and time?

Stupidly, I was actually hoping that they could build scopes large enough to see the brightest objects at the edge of the known universe. Unfortunately, if we are on a sphere, there is no edge, we'll see to a certain distance and that'll be it. Building larger scopes now will enhance what we can see however. However, I'm not even sure I buy the sphere idea anyway.

We are on the 3D surface of a sphere (really, a hypersphere, although
it may not by hyperspherical, but have some other 4D shape). The
entire 3D volume of space that is causally connected to us is
accessible to our observation. That volume is called the observable
universe, and we are constantly improving instruments which let us see
closer to its edge.

Are they still sticking the idea that the sphere is 90 billion or so light-years in diameter? That's the last measurement I read about for the universe's size.