Could the universe be older and bigger than we can see?
Jim Black wrote:
Okay great, then assuming by some discovery we find out how much of the
universe is outside of our viewing range, will that affect the
calculations for the age of the universe?
Not for our part of the universe. The portion of the universe outside
the region from which light has or could have travelled to us cannot
have had an effect on the part of the universe we can, in principle,
observe. To do so, some sort of information about the outside region
would have to have travelled faster than the speed of light to
influence us.
So if the age of the universe is always based on only what we can see,
wouldn't that mean that the age of the universe will always be fixed at
the current age (of whatever estimate you want to use)? If the estimate
says the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years old now, then the
universe will forever be 13.7 billion years old, even if we do the
calculation a 100 billion years or a trillion years from now.
Yousuf Khan
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