Are you wanting to discuss the Big Crunch Theory, specifically?
Err... what? you mean the reverse big bang like thing? that text books say happen ever so many billion years?
And, I'm not an astrophysicist...but I do know that we are fairly positive the universe is expanding outwards.
You might be right, In which case it could be finite and we could slowly stop going outward at any time and all of the sudden start going into a giant black hole at THE CENTER OF DOOM!.
It's finite, though it is constantly creating new space to expand into. There is also no center of the universe, that's kind of difficult to explain and I don't feel like cracking open the book and typeing all that here, not that you feel like reading it.
I don't prescribe to the big crunch theory either Asherlee, nor do that many astrophysicits from what I've heard. Again, the Universe is constantly expanding, creating new space from where there was none and then expanding into it. There is no center and there also may not be an edge so to speak. I think everything in the universe is in orbit of something, galaxies are held together by the gravity of supermassive black holes in their center and the galaxies orbit around each other, sometimes even colliding.
There are indeed pictures taken by the hubble telescope, showing pictures of galaxies colliding centuries ago, however we don't even know what is at the center of our own galaxy. Heck...scientists haven't even figured out how exactly gravity works, we have the basic principle but not the entire mechanics. But I digress, the universe could be considered finite in my opinion, however because it is constantly expanding it could be mistaken for being infinite.
Second law of Thermal Dynamics states that matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Based on this, we can assume that it has always been here, and what we have we have forever more.
Every atom in every piece of matter in the universe is what we are always going to have. It just expands. The universe is one big Santa Claus bag. What we have is the areas of space that are currently undergoing expansion, which slowly moves outward each passing year. The rest is just a vast abyss of infinite void.
The universe is finite though the amount of stuff we will always have, and it is infinite though the infinite amount of space that is enclosing it.
Isn't it stated that the universe continually expands because light can only travel so fast, so that what we're seeing now is actually what happened in (many) years past? I believe so. I think the universe's state cannot be defined, because we cannot see where it is right now. We don't have the technology to even provide a hunch of the universe's state, whether infinite or finite.
The universe has a area of 1 x 1 x 1. The reason we think it's infinite is cause we're just trying to split it up into smaller measurements. It's just one thing. That's why it's called Uni, like Uni-corn, or Uni-cycle. One size. One limit. One. That's finite.
