Starboard (Errol) e-mailed me the following replies. Said that the
board would not accept his post for some reason.. I'm posting for
him...

cantseeboo........................................ .................................................. .

I guess that's the same as asking where's the universe's center of gravity....

The Universe has no true center. The frames of reference we are used to
on the earth are only illusions. In the universe at large no two
observers (people) can be expected to keep the same time much less agree
where to measure everything from.

When the universe came into being, it began expanding into, what I
first heard
referred to by Prof. Hawking, nothingness. But suppose someone viewed
said expanse from that area of nothingness. Could he say "I saw the
universe
expand away from some point in the universe's interior."?

Would it be the same as asking "if there were a big crunch, to what
point in the
universe would all matter crunch to?"

Imagine that you live on the earth but think it is flat. The flatness
of the earth is an illusion. For a person who sees the earth in terms
of this illusion, where then is the center of the earth? Where is the center?

Seems obvious, but don't you think difficulties arise when one states
that the
flatness expanded from a single point in the past?

In a very real sense the position of each observer is the center of the
universe. Relativity teaches us that everything is relative--which
means there are no absolutes.

Agreed that relativity does teach us that there is no preferred place
from which to take a measurement, however, isn't it also reasonable to
assume that the universe did expand away from some point in the
universe's interior in the distant past?

Errol
pasnola