I read everywhere the famous, but offhand statement that "the universe began from a single point" and this bugs me because that surely isn't true.
My understanding has always been that this was an oversimplification for the sake of explaining it to children when it fact the universe is - and always has been - infinite. The observable universe has a size, but surely no one is seriously suggesting that the observable universe is all there is? That's just the farthest we can see, what with space expanding faster than light and what not. But surely the truth of it is that the universe goes on forever in every direction and has no "centre".
Then it seems to me that the concept of everything start from a "point" is just silly. Infinite density, yes. But surely it still had infinite size? I had always thought it quite obvious that the universe "started" as an infinitely dense, infinitely sized, "clump" of energy which gradually expanded and cooled as the energy was distributed over a larger space (because space itself is expanding, not because the "point" expands).
Am I at odds with the scientific community on this? Do people honestly believe everything start from a literal singularity? A single point? Or is that just the result of only talking about the observable universe which has a definite size? But the universe as a whole is infinite, surely, so how it possibly have come from a single point? I understand that if you assume the observable universe is all there is then when you extrapolate backwards in time you end up with a singularity, but the observable universe is just a bubble in an infinite universe.
