Question: Where is the center of the universe?

Answer:

You’re standing on it. So am I. A spot just to the left of the moon is also the center of the universe, as is the center of a star in another galaxy. The rotting cheese in the back of your refrigerator occupies the exact center of the universe too, as does a manhole cover in New York City. If you are standing on the center of the universe, and take a step forward, you are still standing on the center of the universe, and the spot that you vacated is still also the center of the universe.

Yeah... right....

No, really! Every single spot in space is in fact the exact center of the universe.

To explain this, let’s take a small red ball. Now, hold the ball in your hand and point to the ball’s exact center. Ah, you probably pointed to a spot inside the ball. Tricky. But technically, the ball is just the material that encloses the air within it. When I ask you to point to the ball’s center, I mean, point to the center of the skin of the ball.

Harder, right? Ok, let’s deflate the ball to half it’s size. Now, with many fewer points to choose from you should be able to point to the center of the skin of the ball.

No? Well, let’s completely deflate the ball then. Let’s pretend our ball is capable of deflating until all that is left is a single red point (you can’t buy these balls at K-Mart). Now, with only a single point available, tell me… where is the center of the ball?

You got it – that one point! That single point is both the ball, and the exact center of the ball. It has to be – there’s only one point for you to choose from.

Now let’s reinflate it to half its full size. Where’s the center of the ball now? Here’s a hint – when the ball was a single point, you were able to define the center of the ball. It was that point, and that point was the entire ball. Nothing has changed. That point has grown a little (ok, a lot) but the fact is that the center of the ball is still “the ball”. Whether the ball is made up of only a single point or a million points, so long as “the ball” is the center, any point on the ball must also logically also be the center.

When we inflate the ball to its full size again, the answer still has not changed – although there may be a huge numbers of points associated with the skin of the ball now, “the ball” and “the center of the ball” are still synonymous. Any and every point on the ball is the center.

What does this red ball have to do with the universe? Everything. The entire universe was at one time in the distant past a single point. It was at this moment in time that you could say, “The center of the universe must be here and only here, because there is only one point that defines the entire universe.”

The universe inflated and expanded in much the same way as our red ball did. It grew from a single point to a universe defined by vast quantities of points. However, “the universe” and “the center of the universe” are still the same thing even today. Any single point in the universe can equally be thought of as the center of the universe.

Now, to go back to our red ball, a lot of people make the point that you could poke virtual pencils through the red ball, and end up finding the point where all the pencils cross, and that would be the center of the ball. But those pencils don’t intersect on the skin of the ball, do they? They intersect within the ball. This red ball is defined by its skin alone, and not the air inside it. Your pencils don’t intersect on a point on the ball – they intersect at a point on the air within the ball. And the point they intersect at isn’t a point in space, but instead a point in time.

Remember, when we had the ball half-inflated and then when we entirely inflated the ball again? What happened to the half-inflated ball? Well, it became the fully inflated ball, right? Still, that half-inflated ball exists. Not some WHERE, but some WHEN. The half-inflated ball exists in the past. You can think of the air within the ball as the past forms of the ball. It was once a single dot, then a billionth inflated, then a millionth inflated… then half inflated, and now in present time, entirely inflated.

The same is likewise true with the universe. Although you could think of the universe as something you can poke pencils through and find the exact center, that center will be a point in the universe’s past. Yesterday, the universe was slightly smaller than today, and today it is slightly smaller than it will be tomorrow. Fourteen billion years ago, the universe was a single point.

The point your pencils cross on is the exact moment of the universe’s birth when the universe was a single spot. That spot grew to become the universe (and every single possible spot in the universe) that we know today. No one spot is special – they all come from the center of the universe, and the universe and its center are the same thing. Thus, no matter how you look at it, every single place that could exist in the universe is the exact center of the universe.

Next time you’re feeling down, take a moment to remember that you are the center of the universe. Just try not to get too big a head about it.

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