http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2008/02/q-a-the-age-and-size-of-the-universe.php

Dark Matter and Dark Energy..

You should read..

TROTTA, ROBERTO (2007) Dark Matter: Facing the Arche-Fossil. Collapse Vol. II: Speculative Realism. March 2007

But this is also interesting:

http://astro.ic.ac.uk/rtrotta/public-lectures-courses-and-exhibits

Think of the poor pre-Copernicans and their idea that the universe moved around the Earth’s fixed position. How do we know that our assumptions, metaphors, and models aren’t just as flawed?

As a very casual observer, to me it looks like we might be at an analogous stage: instead of having a theory that helps us make sense of new information, new information seems to make our theory make less sense… (This is just the impression I get as an outsider.)

This line from the NASA article (via @laurenweinstein and @markoff) is telling:

“By definition, the universe encompasses all of space and time as we know it, so it is beyond the realm of the Big Bang model to postulate what the universe is expanding into.”

So — I’m just waiting for the proverbial apple to fall on someone’s head.

Of course we have no such design that could sustain constant acceleration and if we did the blue shift of cosmic background radiation would be a daunting issue. But the main point is that elapsed time depends on the details of your path and it is zero for photons. That is related to why we know neutrinos have non-zero mass: they could not oscillate among three states otherwise which is observed when measuring solar neutrinos. Sorry for the detour but spacetime is much more interesting than it is usually portrayed.

The 13.2 billion light-year number is an oversimplification. During the period light traveled from there to here, the space between expanded. When you’re dealing with expanding space, the word “distance” has to be (re-)defined before you can even have this discussion. (See “comoving distance” in the Wikipedia article.) You touch on a slightly-less-simplified version when you say that _by definition_ if it took 13.2 billion years for the light to get here, it’s 13.2 billion light-years away.

BTW, the universe _is_ expanding faster than the speed of light, if you measure by the change in distance between two sufficiently-distant objects. The objects’ velocities as measured in space aren’t faster than light, but space itself is expanding between them. This means there are parts of the universe we will never see, because space is expanding too fast for their light ever to get here. The boundary is called the “observable horizon”.