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“We can’t observe the whole universe, so cosmology is not really about the universe. It’s about the observable patch and the assumptions we make about the rest.
by jumploops 11mo ago
“We can’t observe the whole universe, so cosmology is not really about the universe. It’s about the observable patch and the assumptions we make about the rest.”
(paraphrasing George Ellis)
We’re in a bounding sphere, with a radius that’s roughly 46.5 billion lightyears, so any observation we make may be true for our local observable range, but there’s no (known) way to know what’s beyond that sphere.
- alfiedotwtf 11mo agoThis is the thing that blows my mind the most with physics and cosmology
- wtcactus 11mo agoRight, but everywhere we look the universe is roughly the same at same distances, so it’s acceptable to extrapolate.