On 28-Jul-08 20:16, Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> Well, the number of grains of sand on the entire English coastline is 
>> "obviously" a pretty damned big number. And the number of subatomic 
>> particles in the universe is equally obviously *very* much larger.
> 
>   The funny thing about the amount of particles in the universe is that,
> if current theories are right, there's no way of knowing how big the
> universe is and how much material there is. There's a thing called
> cosmological horizon which makes it completely impossible for us to
> observe the entire universe, no matter what the means.
> 
>   That's where the term "observable universe" comes from: It's everything
> inside the cosmological horizon, which is at least in theory possible to
> be observed.
> 
>   The real size of the universe is completely impossible to know. It
> could be just slightly larger than the observable universe, or it could
> be staggeringly larger. There's just no way of knowing.
> 
I have apparently missed a lot since my physics study. I was under the 
impression that the size of the universe is of the order of a sphere 
with a radius of the age of the universe times the speed of light. Could 
you give a pointer to those current theories that you mentioned?

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