Trust Me... The Universe Is FLAT!

essay

Interesting hypothesis, when you think about it. Flat? How the hell can it be flat? Don't leave, hear it out. We know certain astronomical facts to be true. We are certain the Earth is a fairly round globe, as is the sun, and all the planets. We know that the motion of all the planets revolving around the sun make the solar system into the shape of a DVD: Still round, and yet flat. And we also know that the Universe is big. Ridiculously big. And of course it's getting bigger daily.

What we may not be able to conceptualize, however, is exactly how big it is. But here's an idea. A piece of paper is flat, too, and very thin. Yet if you become tiny, shrink down to the molecular level, to your eyes the paper is suddenly miles in thickness, and billions of miles each in of the other two directions.

If you wanted to explore the paper, you might start by going up and down through the thickness, but at only a few 'miles' you'd explore it all pretty quickly. There would be nothing to explore beyond the page's two surfaces, so logically you would head out in any of the other directions.

Well, that's kind of like what traveling through the Universe is like, except on a vastly larger scale. From the big bang, the Universe travelled outward in all directions for 14 billion years and now resembles a huge planet, if you imagine the surface being where all the stars and planets and matter and energy are. Inside the planet, it's largely empty. Outside the planet it's definitely empty. And this planet keeps getting bigger with every passing minute.

We can't notice this shape, of course. We are so insignificantly small by comparison, it would be like asking a gnat on a subatomic particle's ass to point out where China is. We can only postulate a hypothesis and then measure by using a plethora of techniques to tell us what shape it is.

If you have ever been out on the ocean far enough so that all you can see, in all directions, is water, you will realize that you cannot see the curvature of the earth from so close to the surface. The horizon appears flat, no matter which direction you look. This is the reason why early explorers proclaimed that the 'world was flat'.

Imagine you have a balloon which can be inflated to the size of a city. An ant is placed on this perfectly round sphere. From its perspective, it is standing upon a perfectly flat surface. It is too close to the surface to see the roundness of the balloon.

Now imagine that you are watching a fourth of july fireworks celebration, using magic. You gently float up into the air where the fireworks are exploding, and freeze time. You can do that with magic... or with a DVR. Now go into the middle of one of those colorful types that explode and are now in the shape of a dandelion. You notice that all of the colored bits have pushed outwards from the explosion, in every possible direction, each exactly the same distance. It now resembles that dandelion which has had its middle scooped out, leaving only the little feathery colorful ends frozen in position.

The colorful firework bits are now in the shape of a ball, or a soap bubble.

Now with your magic, you zoom close to one of the colorful bits... and now you make yourself tiny. So small in fact that the colorful bit has become huge, like the size of our sun. When you look for the next nearest colorful bit it's suddenly very far away, now that you are a speck. And those shiny bits that are on the opposite side of the ball shape, the bubble shape... well, those are too far to see at all, when you are that small.

Okay, you are again normal sized and back reading this post. Now think of the Big Bang, that ginormous explosion which is supposed to have created this Universe, fourteen some odd billion years ago. Imagine it as being the same shape as the firework in the previous description, ball shaped, or soap bubbley. It's been expanding at the speed of light for fourteen billion years, and we are in a galaxy next to other galaxies, like the shiny bits next to each other in the firework.

Now think of that little ant on the surface of that balloon, and how it doesn't know any better than thinking it's on a flat surface. Think about being in that boat on the middle of the ocean, unable to see the curvature of the earth because you are much too close to the surface.

Finally let's give you back your magic, and now approach a soap bubble that is floating in the air, making a beautiful perfect circle. Become tiny again, but so small this time that you can float between the chemical bonds that hold the soap bubble in shape. You suddenly realize that the bubble is not thin as it appears, but has many, many layers of bonds between the very inside of the bubble surface, and the very outside.

That's all the information you need, to realize that the Universe is Flat.

We are on planet Earth looking outwards, in all directions, and we of course see stars in all directions. It seems logical to assume that the Universe is like a room filled with air molecules, with them being everywhere in the room.

What we are actually looking at, is a tiny, tiny cross section of the surface of that soap bubble, from right in the middle of that section. We look in every direction and we think we see stars everywhere... and we do. But they are only part of that cross section, because we are just that tiny.

If we were on the outer edge of our cross section, we would see something that we don't now see. We would see an entire half a sky of inky blackness, not a star or shiny bit to be found, because we would be looking at the approaching nothingness our Universe is expanding into.

Now if we were lucky enough to be on the very inner wall of our Universe/bubble's cross section, we would be treated to the evidence of its shape. We would see inky blackness overhead, because as with the firework, the stars on the other side of the soap bubble/Universe are too far to see. But instead of the blackness occupying half of the sky, as we would see being on a ship on the ocean, we would see stars radiating upwards from the horizon as being in pieces of Universe cross section adjoining ours, eventually moving further and further away from us, and the ones higher in the sky are further away and therefore would be fainter than the ones lower in the sky... and eventually there would be only blackness directly overhead.

Evidence of the soap-bubble shape of the Universe.

Getting back to exploration. If you wanted to explore the Universe, once you were finished exploring the thickness of the soap bubble you'd move on to all the areas left and right, and front and back. It would be like exploring the surface of the Earth, but again, on a vastly larger scale. But no matter which direction you chose, the course you plot would be a straight line, because this soap bubble has been expanding for 14 billion years and could have a diameter as large as 28 billion light years across, and at that size there is essentially, no curve.

But we are not on either edge of our cross section of Universe. It is millions of light years thick, and we are somewhere inside. When we look out at night, we are seeing stars all over the sky, and most of them are within our own galaxy, our enormous galaxy being only one tiny feature of the thousands in our tiny cross section of the whole. When we look beyond those stars and the other galaxies... we see darkness, and again when we rotate our telescopes 180 degrees to look the other way.

So for all intents and purposes, we end up seeing a blanket of stars that, like a piece of flat paper, have nothing above it, and nothing below it.

So like the ant, all we can see is a flat surface.

So from our perspective, the Universe is FLAT.

But we know better, don't we?

Copyright 2011 Bruce Friedman