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Shape of the Universe Determined To Be Really, Really Flat
StartsWithABang writes: You might imagine all sorts of possibilities for how the Universe could have been shaped: positively curved like a higher-dimensional sphere, negatively curved like a higher-dimensional saddle, folded back on itself like a donut/torus, or spatially flat on the largest scales, like a giant Cartesian grid. Yet only one of these possibilities matches up with our observations, something we can probe simply by using our knowledge of how light travels in both flat and curved space, and measuring the CMB, the source of the most distant light in the Universe. The result? A Universe that's so incredibly flat, it's indistinguishable from perfection. Which means it's probably even flatter than Kansas.
In non-Euclidean, elliptical geometry the surface of a sphere is by definition flat.
The universe is all of space and time. We have not observed/measured/etc. most of the universe yet to determine its shape. The parts of the universe we have observed are flat. Until we observe more of the universe, we will not know if the universe is flat or not.
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Everything is just speculation from unimaginative scientists who think they know what happened 14 billion years ago at some random spot that they can't even point their finger in the general direction of.
Good grief, no. Where does this idea of science ultra orthodoxy come from? I haven't worked directly with any cosmologists, but every one says "This is what we think happened. "Know" is a completely different thing, and the only people who "know" how the universe was created use a reference book from the middle east, therefore around 4004 b.c.e.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Actually I would argue that when we say that part of the Earth (like the ocean) is flat, we mean that it follows the shape of the WGS84 oblate spheroid, whereas an area the size of Kansas which was geometrically flat would look to us like a bowl, with its centre lower in gravitational terms than its perimeter.
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