troubling....

in either case don't it measure the same in any direction? unsatisfactory, lol.

@hankster If you are a tiny fish somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, do you want to measure the oceanin any direction? You probably want to escape predators, eat and mate.

If you become human, have survived predators, and have eaten, science requires you to observe something, write a hypothesis you can test, and design the test.

Choose a direction, do the measuring, write a hypothesis you can test for that direction, design and do the test, and report your results in a comment here.

@hankster, @yvilletom I purpose the conceptual understanding of infinity be applied to all directions from all infinate points.

I have to wonder, this red shift possibly very observable, but why must it be assumed "all" matter was involved in an explosion/expansion that gives for the apparence of this red shift observation?

@yvilletom i need a fancy telescope i reckon.

@David1955 @Wordywalt This may help...

@racocn8 That shows that it is very possible le that the universe has no beginning anor end.

i don't reckon the universe expands into anything, it just happens as opposed to not happening, if not happening is a possibility, ever was or could be. very tricky stuff, incomprehensible but fun anyway.

@hankster I read something recently about them finding or determining about something at the edge of the universe, but I didn't really understand. The word edge in this context baffles me, and I think it's because most of us are confined by the semantics of the language. Anyway, it still blows the mind man.

@David1955 edges wants to make sense, but limit works better i think.

@David1955 it get kinda silly but funnerer than new shoes.

That's right. The figure was extrapolated.

true, but 13.8 in every direction? no real sense.

@Wordywalt @Hankster I don't claim to understand it, but... When one looks at the farthest reaches, one is looking back, or seeing back, in time. Scientific findings indicate our Universe began 13.8 billion years ago by looking at the expansion based on red shifting of light, Cepheid Variables and other features that demonstrate universal expansion. The 13.8 comes from winding the clock back to the point when all the matter began expanding. One might expect that the universe should be no more than twice the 13.8 billion years, or 27.6 billion light years in 'diameter.' Sources can be sought out on this, but the figure is much greater (something like 70 billion light years).

@racocn8 but the same in every direction?

@hankster It would be nice not to have to resort to the incomprehensible, but the reality is that just as our senses are limited, so is our ability to visualize. Beyond that caveat... The expansion is what we see. We also see the far infrared radiation believed to be the remnant energy glow from the Big Bang. These were mapped by COBE, the Cosmic Background Explorer, and it showed surprising uniformity of the Big Bang, which cosmologists have used to calibrate their models.

I've heard the analogy of points on a balloon expanding away from each other as the balloon is inflated. The point being that even within our seeming 3 dimensional perception, at least one more dimension is in play. Rather than being a sphere, it's something we can't imagine, so that everyone has a similar perspective, a Universe expanding or inflating from an initial point, but without a center. Some physicists suggest space-time may be saddle-shaped. Ultimately, visualization fails, but the equations are often very successful and provide startlingly good predictions. That's when they think they're on the right track. Except that answering one question just creates several more.

@hankster That would place us at the center of the universe -- which I doubt.

@wordywalt right.