I remember reading a few months back on Learn More at Space.com. From Satellites to Stars, NASA information, Astronomy, the Sun and the Planets, we have your information here. ,or another similar site, about scientists looking into a way to view beyond the beginning of our universe. There was a way they can fold the outward acceleration back in on itself to view what came before the big bang. Pretty interesting. I culdn't find the story though. That'd be intense to see though. :stoned:

I myself think a cyclic, or renewable universe with perhaps many thousands of smaller universes budding off is most plausible. This is similar to a string theory universe where there is one large universe that compresses into another smaller but progressivly bigger universe(such as our is accelerating outwards today) until it reaches a max point and starts shrinking down into another new universe. :thumbsup:

Here are some more interesting links regarding the beginning of the universe:
1. SPACE.com -- New Theory: Universe Was Born in a Black Hole
2.SPACE.com -- In New Theory of Universe, Time Never Ends
3.Sentient Developments: The Universe is Freakin' Massive, Dude


THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING!! IT ISN"T BEING BUNCHED BACK TOGETHER BY GRAVITY YET. Dark matter and Dark energy act as a negative gravity and pushes everything away. Galaxies and local galaxiy systems aren't affected as much b/c the gravitational pull is soo intense, but in the spaces between the clusters of galaxies... space is expanding. :wtf:... yea
SPACE.com -- Universe Expansion is Accelerating, UK and Australian Researchers Say

The universe is just huge! Lets look at it this way....seriously check this out!!
According to the standard inflationary model of cosmology, the visible portion of our universe, the one mapped by our telescopes is an infinitesimally small speck in a much larger universe of at least 10 to the power 35 light-years across!

Admittedly this number is really, really big, and almost impossible to imagine. So lets shrink everything down, WAY down, just so we can get a better grasp of it. Let's imagine that the entire universe that we have seen in all the worlds telescopes, all the galaxies, all trillion of them, extending out 13 billion light years in every direction is shrunk down to the size of a golf ball.

If we do a volume calculation, the actual universe contains 10 to the power 60 of those golf balls! Wow, I guess we didn't shrink things down far enough, but this will have to do. So how big a volume would 10 to the power 60 golf balls fill up? Try a sphere 850 light years across! So imagine a mass of golf balls that big, and each one of those golf balls contains all the stars and galaxies that we can see through our telescopes!! :stoned:

It's pretty intense when you sit down and think about it, especialy when your ripped on some good "thinking" herb.:jointsmile::stoned: