How did round planets form from the explosion of the Big Bang?

Hi Aptera, welcome to EvCforum! As others have mentioned, you're actually talking about cosmology here. The Theory of Evolution is a model that explains the observed diversity of life as the result of cumulative random mutations guided by natural selection. It doesn't have anything to do with how planets form, or the Big Bang.You have the basics right, but you're just a little off in the details, and they're somewhat important.Big Bang cosmology observes that the Universe is currently expanding, and extrapolates that this means that as you go backwards in time, the Universe itself was smaller. Since mass/energy must be conserved, a smaller amount of space with the same amount of "stuff" in it means that the Universe must also have been hotter and more dense as you go back as well. Various observations, including the redshift of distant objects, the Cosmic Microwave Background, etc. all fit with this model.The Big Bang is not an explosion of any sort. The term "Big Bang" was actually coined by an opponent of the model (who was later convinced as additional evidence rolled in). The term was simply catchy enough that it stuck, despite the inaccurate connotations it conveys.The Big Bang is still happening today - it is, quite simply, the expansion of space itself. If you imagine three-dimensional space as the two-dimensional surface of a balloon, the balloon is expanding. Any two points on the surface of the ballon (any two points in our three-dimensional space) are gradually becoming more distant as the amount of space between them literally expands. The farther away the two points are, the more space is between them and thus the more pronounced the expansion. That's an incredibly difficult question to answer. You're talking about the actual origin of the Universe, which is a concept that includes time, and therefore our everyday understanding of causality isn't going to work correctly. The basic fact is that we don't know for sure. The Universe could have been created by a deity; it could simply exist, with no cause; it could have been created from some natural phenomenon that we aren't currently aware of.We do know a few things, however:1) Mass/energy is always conserved, though you can exchange one for the other (that's what Einstein's "E=MC^2" deal was about)
2) This means that, for as long as the Universe has existed, the same total of mass/energy has existed.
3) The three spacial dimensions of length, width, and height are expanding, and this seems to be a basic property of space.If Cavediver or Son Goku stop by, pay close attention to their responses. They are actual physicists in real life (Cavediver was once upon a time a physics professor), and both are very good at translating extremely complex, math-heavy physics theories into normal English. It didn't. The Big Bang was not an explosion. The Big Bang did not involve a magic "material." Space itself, over the entire existence of time, has expanded. Time simply has a certain value at which the entire Unvierse, by extrapolating the expansion abckwards, would have existed as a single dimensionless point that still contained the total mass/energy the Unvierse still contains today. The Unvierse did not exist as this single point for any amount of time - literally since the very first moment, it has been expanding. The concept of "before" the expansion has as much meaning as asking what is located farther North than the North Pole - it requires a coordinate that precedes the minimum value of the number set, like asking what comes before 0" on a ruler. Matter didn;t form immediately in the Big Bang, and planets came much later.During the first moments, the Universe was simply too small; the density of its mass/energy made it too hot for even matter to form. Gradually as space expanded, the Unvierse cooled down and the precursors of matter finally started to form. Initially, there wasn't much more than Hydrogen - but gravity caused the Hydrogen to attract itself until the first stars were formed. Stars, btw, are also spherical - this is because of gravity, which equally attracts all parts of the body towards its center of mass. I'm sure you've seen videos of astronauts on the space shuttle or in the ISS drinking water - note that the water drops form into what are basically spheres. At such a small scale it's not really being caused by gravity, but the effect is analogous.Stars work via nuclear fusion. They fuse 2 Hydrogen atoms into 1 Helium atom, and so on. All of the heavy elements in the Universe are the result of stellar fusion, including every atom in your body. As the stars consumed their fuel, they eventually died in novas and supernovae, which spread these heavy elements around.Gradually, clouds of Hydrogen and the remnants of these great stellar explosions congregated through gravitational self-attraction, and began to form new stellar nebulae - clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. Our Sun was one such star. The planets that orbit it are the remnants of that nebula - gas and dust that were located in stable orbits and accumulated significant amounts of mass. Our planets (and the Sun itself) are roughly spherical because of gravity - every part of the entire body is equally atracted towards the center of mass.Does that clear anything up for you?

Praise Jesus! Praise the Lord! Praise the Eternal Lord God The Father! Praise the Lord God Jesus Christ The Son! Praise the Lord God The Holy Spirit! Alleluia! Praise The Lord!I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. A while back, I attended an evangelical sermon. It didn't take long before I realize it was actually a creationist babble fest. Others have already politely told you how wrong you are about what scientists actually believed. To someone like me, however, everything you said sounded almost exactly like what evangelical preachers preach to their flocks. Since I believe in freedom of speech, they can say whatever the hell they want even if their downright lies.That said, heed my word. Now that you've been told everything you said is wrong, if you continue to believe the things you say or tell others all this nonsense, it will be nothing more than lies. Telling a lie violates one of the 10 commandments. You will burn in hell for an eternity if you continue to spread these lies.Thank you.

Hi Aptera! Welcome to the cosmic monkeyshines I notice that your original thread proposal is entitled Why I see creation to be more scientifically correct than evolution.. When I examine your posts though, I don't see any actual argument for creation at all. All your content appears to be about areas of scientific theory which you find confused or difficult to believe or understand. How do these perceived flaws advance the theory of creation in any way?You appear to be taking creation as some sort of "default" position, based on the worldview in which you were raised or perhaps a sense of historical priority. This is a very dangerous way to think. Other default positions include the flat earth, geocentric astronomy, and objects falling at different speeds based on their weight. All these ideas have been shown to be categorically false. Why should creationism be any different?Let's examine your objections to the current view of cosmology. We will start with the most philosophical one, and see how it compares to the creation theory. Where did God come from? Who created God? If the universe requires a creator, why wouldn't God require one? Are there an infinite number of Gods, each creating the next? Where did the idea of God really originate?We don't follow the misleadingly-named "Big Bang" theory because we find it philosophically appealing. Far from it! It begins with the relativity math, but Einstein himself hated it. He preferred to believe in a steady-state "eternal" universe. But the math implies that the universe may be expanding or contracting, and thus, in its current state at least, may have a beginning and an end. Hubble did the necessary research, examining nearer and farther portions of the universe and comparing their doppler shift. After a lot of work, and repeated replication of his results, the most distant parts of what we see are found to be consistently red-shifted quite off the scale in ways that normal motion cannot account for. That means that the universe, not just the objects in it but spacetime itself, is expanding at a steady rate.When we work this expansion rate backwards, we find that 10 to 20 billion years ago, there is a point known as the Singularity where normal math breaks down, because the density of existing matter-energy is such that we begin dividing by zero. So anything we talk about using this math has to begin immediately after that point. This implies an extemely tiny high density area expanding outwards at at least the speed of light. And that is all that relativity can tell us about it. Fortunately, we have more math than just relativity to work with. For extremely small phenomena like the one we appear to be describing, the prevailing theory is quantum mechanics. Again, Einstein hated this stuff, because it implies that the real underlying framework of the universe is statistical in nature rather than deterministic. "God does not play dice with the universe!" wailed the old man with no hairbrush. But science proceeded to do its work, regardless of people's "choice" of philosophy to like.Quantum mechanics gives us a sort of periodic table of the observed and implied "particles" of the subatomic level, known as the Standard Model. Some of the items on the Standard Model are bosons, waveforms which mediate the macro properties of the fields composed of other waveforms; and one group of these is scalar in nature, like the infamous Higgs boson, which is responsible for the rest mass of existing matter. Just as all of the other quantum forms are implied by the math and/or shown in the colliders to have higher energy levels, so would these scalar bosons.Alan Guth and Alexis Starobinksi, working independently, decided to apply this high-energy scalar model to the early universe implied by relativity and see what came of it. In such a tiny high-density situation, every single quantum effect would be taking place in essentially the same place at the same time. In such circumstances, the scalar fields would supersede the other more limited ones, and the highest energy scalar field would decide the outcome of the interactions. This results in a massive expansion of spacetime, at much faster than the speed of light to which mere matter/energy is limited, in the first zillionth of a second of the universe as we know it. This theory is called Inflation, and the theoretical entity responsible is known as the inflaton.Amazingly, this resolved a tremendous number of the known problems and questions about the relativity version of the Big Bang. For example, why are all sides of the universe which we can see basically consistent with one another? They haven't been in contact for billions of years, why haven't they changed in totally different ways? Why aren't any of the rare phenomena like monopoles that would have been generated in such a quantum stew present in our local universe? Why is the universe so flat overall, instead of wildly curved one way or another? The new theory solved all these problems, without ever intending to.This is how the theory in science really works. One starts by investigating one tiny aspect of one problem, and before one knows it the correct solution expands outwards, resolving any number of unrelated problems in other fields. Perhaps one is working on why there are so many different kinds of finches in the Galapagos. Other people have worked on things like this already, but their theories were crap. Then the correct theory is found, and wham! Like dominoes, all the unresolved flaws in geology, paleontology, archaeology, radiometrics and sociology fall. I will touch on this again when we get to whatever thread your bio questions end up in ...Note that these aren't the same kind of "flaws" you think you are seeing in the current cosmological model. For example Gravity is a curvature of spacetime. Curvature tends to make things round. In three dimensional space it produces oblate spheroids, like our planets. In two-dimensional planes, like an orbit, it produces ellipses. This is how things work, no surprises at all. Please stop believing things, it can only make you stupid. Doubt everything. Begin by refraining from choosing to believe things, and work your way up from there.

I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING

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This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.

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My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

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My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

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Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.-- Robert Anton WilsonEdited by Iblis, : provisional corrections

Nice essay, with just a couple of red-ink requirements I think you mean charge, rather than spin. Quarks are spin 1/2, as are protons and neutrons. But their charges are -2/3, -1/3, 1/3, 2/3, where-as protons are +1 (and -1 for the anti-proton) and 0 for the neutrons. Hmmm, I smell layman-ese bullshit Where does this idea come from? The Higgs simply gives particles effective non-zero rest-mass. It doesn't generate gravity, or any of that other crap that gets thrown around. The gravitational mass of an astronomical body is 99.9% binding energy, and only 0.1% rest mass!

Yep. Thanks! Super! Explain to me what gibberish like this example is talking about and how it works please. Neutron - WikipediaI could have sworn that the reason I can't think of a neutron as an electron that fell into its proton and started doing it with a passing neutrino was something to do with the spins not adding up. Am I understanding this incorrectly? Or am I just saying it wrong?Either is fine, but I needs to know! I've been trying to grok fractional spin for whatever, weeks and weeks now, and I'm still apparently clueless. LOL, I thought the one I was going to get jumped for was claiming Darwin solved sociology problems. Che sera, sera.I guess what I'm really looking for is an appropriate thesaurus entry for "universe" in this context. The Higgs to whatever extent is applicable, and the inflation certainly, are responsible for this big mess of expanding whatall that under other circumstances I tend to refer to as "the shebang". Maybe I should have gone with "spacetime as we know it"?Here, explain this bit of layman-itis to me, that will likely help more than Roget's could http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/9901/9901124v1.pdf Oh I would never use the Higgs to explain gravity, I would speak, as I did above, of curved space. I might mention the elusive graviton, but I don't have the slightest how it allegedly does the job, so you kind of have your work cut out for you Seriously though, weren't people arguing for years as to whether the inflaton and the Higgs were really the same guy? I still don't understand the difference between them, other than that higher energy level crap I posted.

I was reading just the other day (I forget the reference, I'd have made a note of it if I'd known I would be participating in this thread) how the Earth can't possibly have mountains greater than a certain height (I think it was twelve miles).The point is that under sufficient stress rock will squash like plasticine. You can see this in the photograph below, which shows the effect of stress on cylinders of marble under various confining pressures. Rock that's buried under twelve miles of rock is under a lot of stress. Apparently, a mountain taller than twelve miles, under Earth gravity, would squish itself flatter than twelve miles high.I might have misremembered, it might be twelve kilometers, but you get the point.

That's actually all fine. Spin 1/2's can be combined into Spin 1, as happens in this case. But the Spin 1 is an entire nucleus, and is made up of the Spin 1/2 nucleons. You were refering to quarks making up nucleons, in which case all are spin 1/2. We also don't use the word fractional to refer to spin 1/2 - it is usually reserved for talking about the fractional electric charges of the quarks. No, the spins are fine - the proton is 1/2 1/2 1/2, the neutron is 1/2 1/2 1/2, and the electron and neutrino are both 1/2. So it all works, and you can think of it that way. No. The Universe expands fine on its own without any need of an inflaton field. Inflation merely gives us the initial super expansion that explains away all the usual problems. Not quite to that extreme - but it was certainly considered. They are both scalar fields, but they don't behave in same way if they are to represent reality, which is always useful if not totally necessary in our game I'll try to get back to flesh out the other stuff later.

I don't quite understand what you're trying to tell me. I said that matter is a form of energy --- on that I think we are in agreement.Perhaps you object to my use of the word "frozen". But all I meant by it was that, intuitively, matter coagulated out of the energy of the Big Bang when the energy density was low enough. I didn't mean to mislead anyone --- but is this not a good metaphor? If not, why not?

True. I wouldn't call that a belief though. And usually, I'll say something like: "Current evidence points to this and that, there are doubts however as to the accuracy of this". Or something along those lines. Yes. But when there is overwhelming evidence for a claim, and none to almost none against it, should we really then doubt if it is true? My "beliefs" are always tentative anyway, and when better or contradicting evidence comes to light, I'm not afraid or unwilling to change my "beliefs" and admit I was wrong in that particualr case. I've done so several times on this forum, and it's not something one should be ashamed of, methinks.

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I hunt for the truthI am the one Orgasmatron, the outstretched grasping hand
My image is of agony, my servants rape the land
Obsequious and arrogant, clandestine and vain
Two thousand years of misery, of torture in my name
Hypocrisy made paramount, paranoia the law
My name is called religion, sadistic, sacred whore.
-Lyrics by Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead

No, definitely not. That's like saying a compressed spring is a form of energy. Matter is a field, and a field is not energy. You can use energy to compress a spring, but it remains a spring. And you can use energy to excite a matter field so that you see a matter particle, but it remains a matter field. Of course not, but you wouldn't want me to sit idly by and watch layman language dominate when EvC can do so much beter, now would you? I think this is worth a thread of its own as I've probably been far too vague in the past on this subject. It will also help with "something from nothing" bullshit...

I see a large part of where I'm going wrong now, I jumped straight from the beginnings of the bestiary to the standard model as if they were remotely the same thing. I think I'm going to cut out most of both paragraphs and replace them with one paragraph that tracks the way I usually do when I give this argument, qm gives us the standard model, the model gives us scalar bosons, high-energy scalar bosons give us inflation. It ought to flow more smoothly that way and act as a cleaner introduction to the array of problems inflation seredipitously solves.I just thought I had finally understood something about "angular momentum" from studying neutron decay, oh well, you win some, you learn some. I believe I will take whatever the cut material grows into as I proceed up again in a rant about the particle zoo, you will likely get another chance to sharpen me up then Edited by Iblis, : PS: matter isn't frozen energy, it's boiled space!
*flinches*

I'm simply going to build on Rahvin's reply since he has been kind enough to flesh out the ground work.I will use decimal point notation to give an indication of the scales, even though it might look messy.Between 0 and 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds:
We don't have a clue, although String theory hopes to describe this era. General Relativity stops working and we need to take into account quantum effects on gravity (we presume). Probably our notions of time and space, in fact possibly any single notion we have at all does not make sense. Terra Incognita.Between 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 and 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds:
There are a few things we do know with some certainty:
There were probably only two forces, gravity and the electronuclear force. The temperature of the universe was about 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Kelvin or in shorter words about 100 septillion degrees. The particles that we know today did not really exist, there was no real difference between quarks, neutrinos and electrons yet. What was a single particle back then would manifest itself as two particles now for example. Electric charge didn't exist and neither did the color nuclear charge of quarks.
The observable universe grew from fist sized to melon sized.Between 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 and 0.0000000000000000000000000000001 seconds:
Here we begin to be more certain. The electronuclear force splits into the strong nuclear force and the electroweak force. Quarks and electrons are now different, although neutrinos and electrons are still the same. We are very sure of this.We suspect that one of the after effects of the forces separating was the result that matter became slightly more common than antimatter.We suspect that at this time the observable universe went from being the size of a melon to billions of light years. We are not exactly certain when in this period the huge jump in size happened or what caused it. We suspect it pumped the universe full of more matter with the energy released by it. Eventually this super expansion (inflation) stops and the universe returns to expanding at normal rates.Between 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 and 0.000000000001 seconds:
Physics that we properly understand is now in effect. The universe is very large and filled with quarks and electron/neutrinos. The strong force controls the quarks and the electroweak force controls both quarks and electron/neutrinos. The universe continues to expand at normal rates. This is certain.If supersymmetry is true, then at some point in this period it stopped having an obvious effect on the universe. Supersymmetry says that every particle species has a "twin" species with different spin, at some point in this period the universe became too cold for the twins to exist.Between 0.000000000001 and 0.000001 seconds:
From now on things are certain unless otherwise indicated. The physics that we see today starts. The electroweak force separates into the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Electrons and neutrinos start to exist as separate entities. Electric charge and electric current as we know it begin to exist and also light comes into existence. The universe is basically a very hot soup of these particles.Between 0.000001 seconds and 1 second:
Finally the universe is cold enough to allow quarks to combine into protons and neutrons and other hadrons (name for particles made of quarks), taking us one step closer to having atoms. The universe is now made of hadrons, electrons, neutrinos, anti-hadrons, anti-electrons and anti-neutrinos.
Eventually it is too cold for new hadrons and anti-hadrons to be created, at this point production of these particles effectively ceases. Hadrons and anti-hadrons now begin annihilating each other until there are basically no anti-hadrons left and only a few hadrons. The surviving hadrons are a miniscule fraction of the original amount, but they will form the whole universe we see today.
Electrons, neutrinos, anti-electrons and anti-neutrinos now vastly out number hadrons.1 second to 376,000 years:
In the next few seconds the universe becomes too cold for new electrons, neutrinos, anti-electrons and anti-neutrinos to be created. Just like the hadrons, they begin to annihilate. Leaving only a tiny bit of the original amount. Essentially no new matter will be created again.
The temperature continues to drop, until it is cold enough for protons and neutrons to stick together forming atomic nuclei. This continues until the universe is 16-17 minutes old, when the temperature drops beneath millions of degrees. This creates mostly hydrogen and helium nuclei.
The universe is now made mostly of light trapped between the hydrogen and helium nuclei and the electrons and stays that way for thousands of years.
At around 70,000 years the universe stops being just a big soup and starts to become clumpy. Irregularities start to develop. Dark Matter probably causes the irregularities to develop, until the universe goes from being a soup to being a bunch of lumps separated by emptiness. This is the first point at which Dark Matter is noticeable.376,000 years to 150 million years:
The universe becomes cold enough for the hydrogen and helium nuclei to capture the electrons, creating hydrogen and helium atoms. Matter is now electrically neutral and light escapes and begins to move freely. However nothing makes light, so after this initial burst at 376,000 years the universe becomes dark.150 million to 1 billion years:
Isolated energetic objects begin to exist. That is objects which are hot, independent of the background temperature of the universe. The first big black holes form, sucking in the surrounding matter and blasting out jets of radiation. These huge black holes together with their accretion disks (the spiral of matter surrounding them) are called quasars. The first stars begin to form, outside of galaxies. Eventually the quasars will settle down to become galaxies. The earliest stars produce the heavier elements in their interiors, adding something other than hydrogen and helium to the universe.The galaxies begin arranging themselves into groups through complex gravitational interactions. On larger scales the groups assemble into clusters. The clusters into superclusters. Finally superclusters string together to form filaments.1 billion years to 8.5 billion years:
New generations of stars are produced in galaxies.I could go on from here to our galaxies formation and then our solar system, but I don't want to be "Earth-centric". At this point the present day structure of the universe has developed, except one more event occurs.8.5 billion to 9 billion years:
The universe starts to expand faster again, although not at the speeds as the early super expansion (inflation). It begins to expand faster and faster as time passes and continues to today. It is suspected that a new form of energy, dark energy, is responsible.Edited by Son Goku, : Change for clarity.

Isn't the universe considered infinite and Euclidian in the BBT ? I'd hope you could clarify this little bit because it seems very counter-intuitive to my understanding of it.

Finite but unbounded. It's not possible to have an expanding Universe if the Universe is infinite - the concept of relative size requires discrete quantities.Just think like the surface of a sphere. The topology isn't quite right, but you can see how there are only so many square meters of space, but there is no boundary.

Hi slevesque If I understand Son Goku correctly, he's talking about the observable universe. This is a tricky bit of semantics, there is still a debate as to whether the universe is finite, infinite or flat, and those words in that context don't mean quite what we might want them to mean.But the observable universe is only from here to the edges that were expanding slower than the speed of light once inflation collapsed into normal expansion. These were only about a billion and half light years away then but because of the continued expansion the signal from the first scattering (several million years later) and the first suns (about 400 million years later) has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. Those are the last signals we will receive from that distance, because it and theoretical areas beyond it have moved away at speeds that simply leave this final red-shifting 4k hum and later starlight signal perpetually traveling to us without showing any further duration.In the meantime, based on the observed expansion, the implied universe or "co-moving now" is actually about 78 billion light years in radius, that is, that is how far those edges are predicted to be now 13.7 billion years later. This figure is being adjusted outward to account for dark energy, but I have not seen a consistent new figure yet.This section is what grew from smaller than an atom to the size of a fist to the size of a melon to 3 billion light years wide to more than 156 billion light years wide. You understand? This has no bearing on how much stuff was actually involved in the process, that could have been twice as much or ten times as much or an infinite amount.This is where the curvature measurements begin to possibly tell us more. Inflation left the universe almost perfectly flat. We are investigating it very carefully to determine whether any slight overall curvature can be detected. If this curvature is inward, or convex, then there is a point some great distance away where it curves around again. We think we know that this point would be further away than the 78 billion light years mentioned above, as if it were less than the light from the cosmic microwave background (that 4k hum I mentioned) would be arriving in a repetitive pattern by now that showed that it had circumnavigated the universe.That would be something that we could think of as a finite universe, and would tend to indicate that the area affected by inflation was not infinite. It would also indicate a universe that could end up collapsing in on itself into a Big Crunch. But the Dark Energy seems to indicate that this will not be happening, and so evidence is being eagerly sought to show that the universe is actually curved outward, or concave. This would be an infinite universe, but whether that means that the area affected by inflation was itself infinite in the normal sense is still a matter of great uncertainty.On the other hand, if it is perfectly flat, as it certainly appears to be (within a 2% margin of error that keeps getting smaller as more effort gets thrown at the question) well then, it may indeed be Euclidean. But there would not be any way to tell whether it was infinite or finite, so far as we are aware of now, and so in that case this question might have no relevant meaning for science.The finite but unbounded universe that Rahvin is describing would be the closed curvature version, note that this finiteness does not keep the example sphere from growing larger, it just remains finite through the process like a balloon being blown up. There is some question as to whether the open version could be imagined with the same analogy, only from inside the sphere; in which case I do not expect you would consider it to be infinite either, regardless of whether it continued growing larger forever or not.A universe that does not come round on itself and collapse will still eventually meet a fate of sorts, in that the particles will all become so far apart that no further interaction between them is possible, each particle will be separated from the others by a distance growing faster than the speed of light. At this point the space between them may well collapse into another "false vacuum" and new epochs of inflation could occur.To understand this issue of curvature better, imagine gravity as curvature inward, toward the planet, and expansion as curvature outward, away from the beginning of time. In this sense Dark Matter is closedness, Dark Energy is increasing openness. And all the discussion has assumed that the whole universe (not just the observable part) is spherical, this assumption is somewhat groundless. It may well be shaped like a peanut, or a pringle, or a doughnut, for example. Nor does any of it refer to dimensions beyond the standard 4, though we are reasonably sure there are more.