I would like to develop a new model which predicts that observational
astronomers will never find an image made by light that has crossed the
entire universe and passed it's original starting point. Those guys are
barking up the wrong tree, because general relativity predicts that
energy deforms space in a manner similar to matter. Observationalists
have apparently forgotten that, under general relativity, energy does
not exist independent of space, but that their presence distorts the
shape of space. Neither is a more fundamental quantity than the other,
but rather they are two quantities at an equal level in the hierarchy of
nature. They are different manifestations of the same thing.

Thus the "edge" of the universe retreats at the speed of light, because
the light racing toward it is creating new space along the way. Light
can never reach this horizon, because, as light pushes forward into
space that hadn't previously existed, it carries space along with it.
This causes the horizon to retreat further, and keeping it forever out
of reach of the photons heading toward it.

I use the word "edge" metaphorically, to appeal to the viewpoint of old-
style geometry. Because no point in the universe is the center, the
edge of the universe is the point from which a photon originated. Every
observer sees a different edge to the universe, the projection of the
observer’s location onto the sphere that is their horizon.

The people trying to find evidence for light crossing the horizon have
not properly interpreted how general relativity affects cosmology. They
are still trying to visualize it in terms of simple three-dimensional,
high school geometry, when that viewpoint is insufficient to visualize
this system.

The idea that light can circle the universe contains a built-in
assumption that the edge of the universe retreats at a speed less than
c. There is no reason to make this assumption, but a good reason to
make the contrary assumption. I'd love to find a partner to put
together a paper on this topic, even if it's just for Analog Magazine,
because I’m not a specialist in general relativity.

Starting with the central equation of general relativity and the
assumption that light carries space along with it, we would need an idea
how to begin the deriving an equation for the rate of expansion of the
universe.

This theory would be supported by a proof that the background radiation
can come to thermal equilibrium without ever looping past its original
point. Conceptually, that is straightforward, and I’ll explain how if
you'd like to get on-board. Eventually, this model should make a
prediction about the dark energy expanding of the universe. This could
then be compared to observations about measured rate of increase of
expansion, to see how well the central assumption holds up.

This argument does *not* say that the universe isn't connected in one of
the ways theorists predict, only that we can't observe that connection,
since that would involve seeing photons that have crossed the horizon,
which isn't allowed.

Also note that part of this model made the approximation that the
universe was perfectly spherical, with the corresponding effect that the
horizon will be a perfectly spherical surface. This is clearly not
true, but merely a good approximation for working the bugs out of the
idea.

The universe will have slight departures from the perfect symmetry
required to project the observer onto the sphere of the horizon. These
asymmetries should cause points near the observer to be projected onto
the horizon, rather than the observer themself. That’s the mark two
version of this model, and beyond the scope of the current work.