andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> What I do know is that I studied special and general relativity 
> and some cosmology when I was at the university and that your claim that 
> the real size of the universe may be 'staggering larger' than the 
> observable universe does not seem to fit what I remember.

  You might find this article interesting:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=misconceptions-about-the-2005-03

  A quote:

"Notice that, according to Hubble's law, the universe does not expand
at a single speed. Some galaxies recede from us at 1,000 kilometers
per second, others (those twice as distant) at 2,000 km/s, and so
on. In fact, Hubble's law predicts that galaxies beyond a certain
distance, known as the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed
of light. For the measured value of the Hubble constant, this distance
is about 14 billion light-years."

  And btw, I didn't say the universe *is* staggeringly larger than the
observable part of it (observable by us, that is). What I said is that
it's perfectly *possible* for it to be enormously larger. We simply have
no physical means of knowing. However, AFAIK, current consensus is that
it's probable that the size of the universe is significantly larger than
the observable part, because that's one good explanation of some observed
phenomena related to the big bang theory.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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