What Is The True Universe?

I have been hearing more and more talk that the universe is not what we think it is. It does make you wonder what is meant by this, especially when astronomers and physicists are saying this. I have looked into this and what I have found is even more puzzling than people saying this. The reason for this is when someone says this, it does not necessarily mean it is different for the same reasons someone else is saying it. You can hear an advocate for a holographic universe saying this and offering what they feel is all sorts of proof for their position. They think if we get out of our solar system we may find there is nothing else which is real, only that which has been put there to fool us. Supposedly someone or something has put a three dimensional picture in the sky to make us think we are just another cog in a gigantic universal wheel, but we are something else, something else we don’t understand.

There are those who think we are nothing more than a microscopic spec under a microscope in a lab somewhere where the beings are so huge they would dwarf the heavens. They relate what we are, to microscopic beings living on an atom sized particle to what we think is a universe but which might turn out to be a leaf or twig in a world so large we cannot begin to understand it. Along with this, some of these people believe our lives only last a split second in this world and our life span is equivalent to the lifespan of a crashed particle to these giants. This idea has been around for a long time, much longer than the holographic universe theory.
Another theory says scientists are wrong when they say we live in an insignificant part of an insignificant galaxy. They point to the fact there are certain alignments, so many of them in fact, that it seems impossible for these to have happened randomly. An example is a recent find by scientists that the Hubble Space Telescope has discovered we are aligned with over a hundred planetary nebula despite their different shapes. The question is why are they aligned with each other? The question really is since no two planetary nebula have been created the same way or in the same place and look different why do they have this alignment in common with us? The planetary nebula are located in the galactic bulge. One astronomer said, “For them to line up in the way we see, the star systems that formed these nebulae would have to be rotating perpendicular to the interstellar clouds from which they formed, which is very strange.”

There are those scientists who now believe there is something wrong with our idea that the further away a galaxy is the older it is. There is something called a red shift which is used to determine the speed of objects in space. It is also used to determine distance. The thought was there was a Big Bang of a super atom which created the universe and the galaxies, stars and worlds. They are speeding away from us as the universe expands and the redder the light they put out the further away they are. This theory seemed to work fine until we started finding objects in space which were far away, but didn’t have the corresponding red shift which seemed to mean they were as old as they should be, or so we think. The question becomes how can an object which was subject to the same exploding force have been newer but traveled further than objects which were ahead of it?

Time has always been a topic which was somehow connected to our universe. We hear about theories which talk about time slowing and which seem to have been proved. We also hear of stories about people who claim to have stepped through a sort of portal where people were sent back in time before returning. I know it seems I am mixing science with fiction, but some of these people who have claimed this are quite reputable, so how does one explain this? One theory states our universe may not all exist in the same time period. How would we know if we set foot on some alien world and it was thousands of years in the past or future? Time is tricky and knowing exactly where someone is in time might not be easy to figure out if they are not on earth.
Some scientists believe our universe is only one of many, like a marble in a gigantic pack of marbles. Some of them also think there are worlds out there where we all exist and everything we do has many choices and there is a world just like this one for every choice we could have made and we are also there. This is truly a mind blowing theory. I know I can’t accept this without proof, but there are some physicists who believe this is true. I can’t help but believe there are limits to what calculations can prove and this is one of them.

This brings me to the theory which states none of this really exists and the movie, “The Matrix” was really based on what some believe and that is we are all asleep dreaming we are where we are and doing what we are doing. Are our bodies being used as a power source and we don’t know it and is the universe we believe in non-existent?

Another theory states things only exist while we look at them, therefore the universe ceases to exist after we look at it and will only exist when we look at it again. I really don’t get this one because it seems to indicate to me if we all stopped looking skyward the sun would disappear along with everything else plunging us into darkness, which doesn’t seem to be the case.

What this all boils down to is we do not have a complete understanding of what the universe really is yet. Time could be different, there could be more than one universe, there may not be a universe, we might be asleep or we might even be special. Someday maybe we will know what is going on.