As per the big bang and the Bible's comparison I've been mentioning from Job 9:8 and other scriptures, many believe the big bang is still going on today and perhaps this is why:
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What is the universe expanding into?
I am very confused about things my science book says about the expanding universe. Every book I have seen has defined the universe as "everything". If the universe is expanding what is it expanding into? It would have to expand into even more universe. I understand that the red spectra indicates that things are moving away from us but that is drifting not expanding, right? If you could help me to understand this, it would be appreciated. Thank you for your time.
This is a very good question which is not at all easy to give a satisfactory answer to! The first time I tried to write an answer to this, we got so many follow-up questions from people who were still confused that I decided to try to answer it again, this time much more comprehensively. The long explanation is below. However, if you just want a short answer, I'll say this: if the universe is infinitely big, then the answer is simply that it isn't expanding into
anything; instead, what is happening is that every region of the universe, every distance between every pair of galaxies, is being "stretched", but the overall size of the universe was infinitely big to begin with and continues to remain infinitely big as time goes on, so the universe's size doesn't change, and therefore it doesn't expand into anything. If, on the other hand, the universe has a finite size, then it may be legitimate to claim that there is something "outside of the universe" that the universe is expanding into. However, because we are, by definition, stuck within the space that makes up our universe and have no way to observe anything outside of it, this ceases to be a question that can be answered scientifically. So the answer in that case is that we really don't know what, if anything, the universe is expanding into.
Now, for those of you who want a more comprehensive discussion:
Let me begin by saying that "expanding" isn't really the best word to describe what is happening to the universe, although that is the word that is often used - a word choice which I think leads to a lot of unnecessary confusion regarding what is already a difficult topic! A more accurate word for what the universe is doing might be "stretching".
The difference between "expanding" and "stretching", for me at least, is that an "expanding universe" conjures up an image where there is a bunch of galaxies floating through space, all of which started at some center point and are now moving away from that point at very fast speeds. Therefore, the collection of galaxies (which we call the "universe") is expanding, and it is certainly fair to ask what it is expanding into.
The current theories of the universe, however, tell us that this is not the picture we should have in mind at all. Instead, the galaxies are in some sense stationary - they do not move through space the way that a ball moves through the air. The galaxies simply sit there. However, as time goes on, the space between the galaxies "stretches", sort of like what happens when you take a sheet of rubber and pull at it on both ends. Although the galaxies haven't moved
through space at all, they get farther away from each other as time goes on because the space in between them has been stretched.
Of course, when we think of space in everyday life, we don't think of it as something which is capable of stretching. Space, to us, just seems like something which is
there, and which everything else in the universe exists within. But according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, space isn't really as simple as our common sense tells us. If we want to understand the actual way that the universe functions, we need to find some way to incorporate Einstein's ideas into our mental picture and imagine space as a more complicated entity which is capable of doing things like "bending" and "stretching".
To help us imagine this, a lot of people have come up with analogies for the universe in which space is represented by something more tangible. For example, there is the analogy with a sheet of rubber (or sometimes a balloon) that I mentioned above. My favorite analogy, though, involves imagining the universe as a gigantic blob of dough. Embedded in the dough are a bunch of raisins, spread throughout. The dough represents space, and the raisins represent the galaxies. (To the best of my knowledge, this analogy was originally proposed by Martin Gardner in his 1962 book
Relativity for the Million.) We have no idea how big the dough is at this point - all we know is that it is
very big, and we, sitting on some raisin somewhere inside it, are so far away from the "edge" that the edge can't possibly have any effect on us or on what we see.
Now, someone puts the dough in the oven and it begins to expand. The raisins move apart from each other, but
relative to the dough they don't move at all - the same particles of dough that start off near a particular raisin will always be next to that raisin. That is what I meant when I said that the galaxies aren't really moving through space as the universe expands - here, the raisins aren't moving through the dough, but the distance between the raisins is still getting larger.
And so the Bible got this "stretching" correct it seems: It is worth getting our heads around the problem, because the stretching of space is actually biblical. In Isaiah 42:5 and 45:12 both state that God stretches out the heavens like a curtain.
