Does our universe have a beginning and an end?

Question

Think about this - everything we know on this earth has a beginning, an end and is contained in something (air is contained within the atmosphere, the water of a river is contained within it's banks (except when it floods), etc.). So, what is the universe contained within?, if at all? Does it have an end or a beginning? When I was 15 and learning about the structure of atoms the idea occured to me that perhaps each galaxy was like an atom, for example, the Sun in our galaxy would be the the nucleus and the planets would be the electrons. A basic notion but could this contain some truth? If so, what is the universe contained within? And what would that be contained within? etc, etc, etc!

Answer 1

The universe is generally considered to be finite. That is to say, that it contains a limited amount of matter and energy. This is a meaning of Einstein's equation: e=mc², e is the amount of energy, and m is the mass , and c is a constant amount.
However, the universe is expanding. So it is not limited in space. There is no spacial beginning or end. You cannot meaningfully talk of "outside" the universe, as space as we know it is part of the universe.
The Universe is considered to have a beginning in time. That was the Big Bang. Time started then, so did space, so we can't talk about time before, or space outside, as time and space ARE THE UNIVERSE WE KNOW.
Scientists are not sure if or how it will end. This depends, they think, on how much matter it contains. It could start getting smaller again, and shrink back into a singularity, which is how it began, or it might just go on getting bigger and bigger, and all the material within it would get sparser.
The only thing that I know of that can "contain" the universe is your head.

Answer 2

People like Stephen Hawkins (mentioned above) do not believe that the universe has an edge or a centre. Part of the Big Bang hypothesis is the Copernican or cosmological principle, which assumes that universe is both homogeneous (no matter where we view it from it always looks the same) and isotropic (it looks identical in whichever direction we look) and that the laws of physics are the same everywhere.
Hence no edge or centre. But this is an unprovable, philosophical (and unwarranted) assumption.

The laws of thermodynamics tell a different story. The 1st law says matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. The 2nd law says, in essence, that entropy is increasing and the universe is heading toward disorder. Since the universe is not currently disordered it must be of finite age.

The Bible describes clearly the beginning of the world, and subsequently the rest of the universe. It also has something to say about the end of the world.

See the link below for loads of articles about astronomy, and lots of scientific (and other) evidence that the universe had a beginning.

Answer 3

Basically we are all made up of the same material.We are all the product of the universes waste material. So we obviously have a connection.Likewise everything has an opposite,think about it and you Will realise this is true. So yes there was a beginning and there Will be an end and then it will start all over again. In fact there are co many mysteries on earth that we can not explain i.e. How did the Egyptians cut granite blocks for the pyramids more accurately than we can do today with diamond cutting equipment and all they had was soft copper tools.and in deed how did they even build the pyramids when you consider ther is more stone in the great pyramid than in all of the worlds churches put together. We have lost so much knowledge of the ancients.But it only goes to show that they were highly advanced so it does go in cycles.Sorry if I went on to much!

Answer 4

Hmmm, the beginning and end of the universe. Well, what I'm about to present is a summary of the current holdings of astrophysics and cosmology.

Modern thought is that yes, the universe had a beginning. Our universe is currently expanding - so, the short answer: "Since it's expanding, it must be expanding from somewhere, when it was crunched down smaller. So, it had to have a beginning!"

Long answer: Back in the early 20th century, Edwin Hubble was looking at galaxies across our sky, painstakingly exposing them night in and night out to photographic plates. After analyzing these plates, he realized that the light being emitted from these galaxies was being red-shifted (due to the Doppler effect). This meant that the galaxies were moving away from us, and that the universe is expanding.

Recently (starting with Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in 1965, and then extending to the COBE satellite in the late 90's and WMAP in 2004 [I think that's when WMAP was launched]), we've been mapping and examining the cosmic background radiation left over from the Big Bang. This radiation is in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum, and was created in the Big Bang. This radiation is still bouncing around today, and is the earliest picture we have of what the early universe was like. Currently it's cooled down to 2.728 Kelvin (notice you never say "degrees kelvin" - it's always just referred to as "kelvin"). Now, according to the Friedmann models of universal expansion, as the universe's temperature is inversely proportional to its temperature - that is, as the universe doubles in size, the temperature halves. If you do a little math, you can track back to see what it was like at the beginning of the universe.

Using the laws of physics we have today, we can track backwards until just after the explosion. This is because the early universe was a singularity, a point of infinite density, temperature, and one which is mathematically impossible to define. Physics breaks down in singularities. We're working on ways to know what happened before then, but with our current understanding of physics, it's impossible.

Now, for the end of the universe - well, remember how I said that the universe was expanding? Well, way back when Einstein began to concoct his theories of relativity, he flubbed his original calculations (on purpose) to include the cosmological constant - a mathematical value inserted to MAKE the equations show that the universe will continue to expand, because his original equations showed that the universe will contract, and that there will be an end of time - something Einstein didn't like one bit. Now, however, scientists have confirmed the cosmological constant - the mysterious value driving an acceleration in expansion of the universe. This constant can be identified with a mysterious energy called "Dark Energy." This mysterious force is driving the expansion of the universe at an increasing pace. Current cosmological theory states that the universe will continue to expand until the universe is so large that matter will be dispersed to a great degree. For example, if we were still around to see it, the star nearest us would be beyond our cosmological horizon, which is greater than 14.6 billion light-years. There's nothing to slow this expansion, and it seems that we're doomed to die in an empty sea of nothingness.

This, in a VERY SMALL nutshell, is the current standing on where things came from and where they're heading. I could literally take hours and explain all of this, but that would get rather tedious. However, if you'd wish to learn more, be sure to either A) email me, or B) read the following books which I will list in the sources.

Hope this helps!

Answer 5

The universe obviously had a beginning somewhere, somewhen, somehow, because it is here. If it will some day end is unknown. You would think that everything ends, nothing lasts forever. Still, current theories suggest that the universe is open-ended. It is expanding and will continue to do so.

Certainly any end is so far in the future as to be meaningless to the human race.

Answer 6

I do not think it has a beginning or an end. It has to be cyclical. Given that the big bang happened several billion years ago, before the big bang there was nothing, if there was nothing, even time did not exist as there was nothing to change, which means there is no reason for the big bang to happen at any one given instant of time (based on some other frame of reference) than any other. Hence it appears that the universe is bound to be on a course of expansion, possibly contraction back to a signle point later on, and then yet another big bang and so on...

Answer 7

No, the universe does not have an end. It just approaches it, but never reaches it, just like in calculus limits. The Universe is contained in nothing. Otherwise it would be a multiverse... If there were a wormhole leading to the putside of the Universe, I'd gladly go into it.

Answer 8

think of the universe as the outside of a ball only so big and no ends. If you start to draw a straight line on it with a marker you can keep drawing forever because there are no edges to stop you
Space/time is sort of like that but in more than three dimensions.

Answer 9

our universe is not CONTAINED within anything, our universe has an outer edge which is currently expanding.

Gravity has an effect on how we perceive this expanding outer edge.

The fact that the universe is expanding from a central point shows that it had a beginning.

There are many scholars on this subject.

I sugest you read something by Stephen Hawkins.

A brief history of time is a good start

Answer 10

The universe has no beginning or end the only reason this question even arises is because are human minds can't consive any thing with out a beginning or end like life after death we havent exspirenced anything but life so we assume theres life after this one. u cant imagine nothingness because by imaging it u imagineg something.