Orac, I don't know the answer to the question of whether the universe is infinite or not. Right now nobody has a good answer. I don't know if we will ever have a good answer. But I don't think that your answer is a good one. What I would like to have happen is for people to accept that we don't know, and not just make positive statements when there is no hard evidence to support them. Speculation about the matter is quite acceptable to me, dogmatism isn't.
Bill Gill
What I am disappointed at is that a group of educated people in 2014 can't work out is the answer is larger dependent on the framing of the question. One can be dogmatic about the answer because that's the way the question is framed, you consider the answer but you don't think about the question.
Bill S asked the question about something from nothing, even a mob of goat farmers and fishermen in BC times worked out to invert the question and wrote a book about the answer. Even prompted not one educated person on here thought to invert the question because it removes one poorly defined entity.
The dogmatic answers are not the problem, even your question above has two poorly defined entities "universe" and "infinite". Therefore the only answer possible must itself be a poorly defined entity (of which at universal scope there are very few). You can't prove an infinity you will be going to even define it, so the question is fundamentally flawed in the same way as Bill S's "nothing" question was.
So for me on fundamental grounds I would never start with anything being infinite because I could never test that because it gets tricky.
I should ask at this point have you ever run across the expression bounded and unbounded?
"Bounded" here refers to the fact that something has limits within the context of a particular property. An example of something that is finite yet unbounded is a circle. The circumference has no end points, but it is of a specific length.
So the circle is infinite & finite depends totally on the framing of the question and we are talking about a circle drawn on a piece of paper not something as complex as the universe.
Perhaps we need more goat farmers and fishermen in the world
