Re: OT, and religeous

Quoting Joe <joe@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> >Quoting Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>:
> >
> >>Since the concensus seems to
> >>be that the universe is finite,
> >
> >Really? All popular cosmology works from recent years I've read have said
> it's
> >probably not.
> >
>
> Really?  I find that very surprising.  All the stuff I've read suggest
> that it's boundless, but finite.  Like the surface of a sphere.
Very briefly, an expanding general relativistic universe can have three overall
shapes; spherical, flat, hyperbolic. In the first case, it's boundless but
finite, in the two later, both boundless and infinite. The parameter
determining which is the mean matter density; if high, spherical, if low,
hyperbolic, with flat at the critical value. It's used to be thought that the
spherical version was the most likely, but observations in recent years seem to
have established that we're well with the hyperbolic regime.

                                                Andreas

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