Infinite Universe
ambience: time lapse sound analog of the Big Bang
We’re listening to a time lapse picture in sound of the Big Bang what’s thought to be the creation of the universe. But was it? I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet
Berman: “The most amazing thing in astronomy, for me, lately is the realization that the universe is infinite. The clincher came in 2012, when a Berkeley team analyzed nearly a million galaxies that showed us that space is flat.”
Astronomer Bob Berman
“If our universe had an end to it, space itself would curve, and if you shone a light somewhere, the light itself would travel on a slightly curving path.
They’ve analyzed the galaxies, and it shows that space-time is perfectly flat and this suggests an infinite universe. This has tremendous ramifications in cosmology. For example, the Big Bang is now probably just a local event. It’s just something that happened in the hood. It’s part of the what we call the observable universe the visible universe, which is an infinitesimally small part of the actual universe. (02:52) If the universe is infinite, then everything we can see or ever hope to see the information we have is zero percent of the actual universe, and I don’t have to tell you that when you have a sample size of zero percent, no conclusions are valid and that if we were to tell everyone the truth, we’d have to say, ‘We don’t know.’ In fact, worse than that, the universe, as a whole, may well be unknowable.”
Astronomer Bob Berman is the author of the book The Sun’s Heartbeat. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.