If the universe is accelerating outwards, and in accordance to the big bang theory, can we come to a conclusion that there is a center in our universe?

The universe is expanding, but not “outwards.” It is expanding in the sense that every point is getting farther away from every other point.

Draw on a balloon and blow it it up. That’s a good model of what is happening.

So there doesn’t have to be a center. There’s no one point that everything is moving away from, which is what I expect you’re picturing.

@Mariah Thanks Mariah, yes I understand how all galaxies and everything else is expanding away from another point all the same, but isn’t it going outwards at the same time?, just like a balloon expands outward?

Whatever you imagine the “center” is did not exist after the big bang. At that particular point of focus there was nothing but pure energy, Energy did not “condense” into matter until some time after it had been ejected from the singular event of the Big Bang. There is not a material point at the center of the universe because there is no matter there. The universe is like a shell outside of that point. All matter is expanding in an area remote from that place. Like @Mariah said. It is more like a balloon than increasing concentric circles.

Ahh, both of your points combined make good sense.

There are some very strange implications to string theory and some of its weirder variations. For example, it’s possible to conceive of every particle in the Universe as a single particle which oscillates back and forth across the instant of “now” through past and future. In that sense, everywhere is the centre of the Universe.

@Mariah so is it “possible” to fly through the center of the balloon to the other side, or is that space literally outside of our reality? In other words if we’re on the USA of the balloon, can we travel through the emptiness of the core to reach China, or do we have to circumnavigate the “surface” of the shell?

@gorillapaws At the risk of speaking for Mariah, the answer is no. There is “nothing” there to fly through

@gorillapaws One of the theories for faster-than-light travel which does not violate any known physical laws involves “crumpling up” the skin of the balloon. You can’t accelerate to the speed of light, but there’s nothing which says you can’t reshape space-time to make the distance you need to travel shorter. We know that space-time can be bent by a number of phenomena, such as gravitation. We don’t have any idea how we would go about bending space-time so that you could reach Mars in a single step, but it’s physically possible.

@saint So if I were in an imaginary spaceship and pointed at where the core would have been, and went forward as a very fast speed, what happens? Is it like running against a treadmill with the gravity of “the skin” of your particular part of the universe preventing you from making headway? Perhaps a better analogy might be like running with a parachute with an ever increasingly strong headwind preventing progress beyond a certain point?

@gorillapaws Clearly nobody knows for sure. But all of what is real in the universe is cast in a matrix, a sort of soup of matter, electromagnetic phenomena and raw energy. Everything within that framework has some interaction with it based on the laws of physics, whether we know all of them or not. Where you are describing is not compatible to what we know or experience. You would not exist there. You could not even get there

The problem with the balloon analogy is that you have to confine your observations to the 2-dimensional spherical surface of the universe of Flatland, where galaxies are like painted dots moving apart from one another. Flatlanders can’t visualize this.

Likewise our universe is a 3-dimensional hypersphere (or similar geometry) expanding 4-dimensionally in a way we can’t visualize, The point is that space itself is expanding & nothing lies beyond.

@gorillapaws You would be able to travel from point a to point b, if you were traveling at the speed of light, however should you come across a blackhole, you would not be able to out run that.

Honey. All you can conclude is that the world is very big and mysterious .

@saint I guess what I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around is if the nothingness in the center of the balloon is in anyway different than the nothingness on the exterior. The nothingness on the interior once had the property of “something” being there, which seems strange, whereas the void of pure nothingness which has yet to be invaded by the expanding universe seems easier to grasp for some reason. From the descriptions I’m hearing it seems like both types are identical.

I remember seeing a visualization of the Universe on a documentary (maybe on Discovery about the nature of our Universe? but it could have been elsewhere) as looking like a spiral galaxies, made up of various types of galaxies (of which our milky way was way out on an arm). I’m guessing this was an inaccurate portrayal from the descriptions I’ve been reading.

@oldgranmum Actually, I can pay my taxes and help fund the National Science Foundation and they can keep exploring. :D

@gorillapaws “So if I were in an imaginary spaceship and pointed at where the core would have been, and went forward as a very fast speed, what happens?”

What’s going to happen is you’re not going to be able to point yourself in that direction in the first place. Like @gasman said, the balloon analogy might have been more confusing than helpful. Many times in discussing the universe, we have to think about the concept of fourth (or higher) dimensions, which as far as I know are impossible to imagine visually. The best way to discuss these concepts is to extrapolate from lower dimensions. So to conceptualize a four dimensional hypercube, you first think about a three dimensional cube (has 2 dimensional square faces) and extrapolate – and you can conclude that a hypercube would have cubes as its faces. Don’t try to picture it, it’ll make it worse.

My point being that the balloon analogy is just another such tool and it doesn’t apply directly. The universe isn’t truly a shell expanding in a spherical shape. In the case of the balloon, that would be a universe in which the creatures living in it were two dimensional. They could travel around on the surface of the balloon but not in. To them, the only existing directions are forward, backward, left, and right, there is no up or down and so they couldn’t point themselves “downward” towards the center of the balloon in order to try and reach it.

So you have to do some extrapolation in order to apply the balloon model to the real universe. Instead of a two dimensional shell expanding spherically, we are a three dimensional shell expanding hyperspherically. Again…...don’t try to picture it. And we can point ourselves forward, backward, left, right, up, or down, but the “center” of the “balloon” would be in a direction other than all of those.

Disclaimer: This is all my (very amateurish) understanding of how things work and I definitely might have some misconceptions; do point them out if you spot them.

@Mariah You can actually point yourself in a direction. It’s how accurate distances are determined through parallax, amongst other things.