On Mon, 8 Sep 2003 12:38:29 -0400, "Asger" wrote:

Thank you for the wonderful explanation Painius.

From what i understood, does it mean that the universe is everything that
the space is (including all other galaxies etc), or is there something
larger than that? What does cosmos mean then? Can there be more than one
universe?

Asger

The word "Cosmos" comes from the ancient Greek and mean: Order; it is opposed to
the word Chaos (disorder). I agree with that: the Universe is a well ordered
place!

But during the last twenty years, some scientists began to believe that the
Universe might be MUCH bigger that the one we see using our biggest telescope.
Here is the idea: The Universe is (about) 15 billions years old. Because of the
speed of light, all the instruments we can create cannot "see" further away than
15 bilions light-years away. We have instruments much more sensitive than that
but all we can see is a big wall: the initial "flash" of the Big Bang. We will
never know what is beyond his wall until we discover something that can goes
faster than light.

When we look at those distance with the Hubble Space Telescope, all what we see
are a few sparse Quasars and very young galaxies. But there are people out
there, they too have evolved for 15 billions years just like us. And when they
look at us with their "Zxdbdltg Space Astroscope", they see a very young galaxy
only a few millions years old unable to harbor any life at all. That is the
problem with light, it is too slow to show us what is "actualy" happenig at the
other end of the Universe.

Shortly after the Big Bang, our Universe entered a phase of "inflation". The
first computations described that phase as "The Universe is the size of an atom
and it grows suddenly to the size of a football in less than a billionth af a
second". Now, many people think the the inflation might have been much more
stupendous than that, placing much of the Universe outside of the boundary of
the "Big Flash", unreachable for us forever...

Now what is the Universe: is it "everything that exist" or "everything that can
be observed"?

I go for the latter.

P.S. According to some theories on quantum fluctuations and the Higgs's boson,
there are litteraly billions of Big Bangs happening under our noses every
seconds all of them leading to another "Universe". We cannot detect them
because they are not part of "our" Universe. Choose your religion...

Benoît Morrissette