Re:Please explain (Score 2, Informative)

Well, I just walked out of my statistical thermodynamics final and unfortunately, I'm not sure that I can help you out any. I won't claim to be an expert in the field, but the general consensus seems to be that the universe as a system should follow the laws of thermodynamics. That being said, I'm not sure how you handle an real infinite system in regards to any of the thermodynamics laws. I mean, sure I pull spheres from infinity all the time, but really it's just a convenient cheat for us lazy physicists.

Alternatively, I think that it doesn't make much sense to think about space in terms of space. That's kind of like thinking of lollipops in terms of lollipops. I mean, sure, they're delicious. If I tell you about lollipops, you may think, "Mmm, those are delicious." But I don't know that I could say anything useful to you about lollipops strictly in the language of lollipops, whatever that means. Frankly, there's a lot of ways to mess with space (dilation, anyone?), and it doesn't seem as static a thing as I once thought it was. What happens when you stretch out space? Hmmm, more space.

My gut intuition (not that it means much) makes me think that the universe is closed and probably looped back into itself. The main reason is that it seems like a weird concept to have space just "end". If it were shaped like a balloon, for instance, maybe there's a way to avoid some disturbing delta functions of vacuum to nothingness.

Oh yeah, sorry I couldn't help. I'm done rambling now.