Lorne Booth
Sep 6, 2018 · 2 min read

I’m a layperson too. I’m just ahead of you in terms of personal research into this topic.

I think there is no reason to get one’s head around space or time being curved because it is just an analogy and neither one is physically curved in the sense of a planet’s surface. They just present that way mathematically. And the expected observed effects if the math is correct have been confirmed. So we say they are curved. What the mathematics really physically means is probably a mystery to all. It may mean something we don’t have a precise word for but something that loosely resembles being curved. I often hear/read cosmologists saying it is the “metric” of space that’s changing and this is a clue that curved doesn’t mean curved in the ordinary physical sense of the word. Yes, I know what they mean by “metric” but it doesn’t lead me to a physical interpretation. Another similar thing they mention is “spacetime interval”. Physicists just go with what they calculate and don’t get hung up on physical interpretations, it seems.

As to the multi-verse, it is just a conjecture, and one that I think won’t pan out. I can’t rule it out either. It does sort of fall out of some reasonable theories of inflation as a possible or even likely side-effect. But, as I see it, even if is a fact, it does not enlighten us in any way about our own universe since other universes cannot be observed and compared to ours, at least not in a way that anyone can suggest even if we had the ultimate in technology available to us. All universes are supposedly causally disconnected from each other and therefore forever fundamentally unobservable by each other. I’ll be happy if I just can understand our universe better.

    Lorne Booth

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