The universe has been studied for thousands of years, but never has it been examined the way it is being today. I guess we must thank new technology for making our examinations possible. The new, super powerful, telescopes have really aided our studies of our surroundings as have many other powerful instruments and computers on spacecraft and on Earth. Einstein had said that the universe was curved and if you sent a beam of light out from Earth that it would eventually return to where it started. We have talked about this concept many times, at least I have. Some scientists didn’t exactly believe this, but many of them didn’t want to contradict Einstein, after all, who were they in comparison with the great one?

Some scientists and people believed that the universe was infinite and went on forever. I have to admit that is what I believed and still do. I look at that great expanse of space and I have to say to myself that space is basically nothing and how can nothing come to an end without there being a physical something at the end of it? This is just my humble, unscientific opinion and one that no scientist would ever listen to. To those that might say I am nuts and that nothing can go on forever, I have to ask them how do they know that? Maybe our universe leads into a different dimension that we can’t enter because we are of the wrong physical properties. I guess after this kind of question people will really think that I am nuts. Well so much for me.

Two years ago (2004) a new study was conducted into the shape of our universe. The study brought us results that suggest that our universe is a dodecahedron. Wow you say, what the heck is he talking about? I am talking about a 12-sided object. It looks something like a ball but has 12 flat sides. I find that hard to swallow, but this time I am not alone. Some scientists just scoffed at the idea. This doesn’t mean it is wrong just because some scientists laughed at it, because some of them laughed at the idea of airplanes, while others laughed at the radio. So how in the world could any scientist prove this shape was accurate?

They claim that they looked back it time with powerful instruments until they went so far back that they could see the remnants of the “Big Bang”. This may sound crazy to non-astronomy types, but it is quite logical. For example, the further away you look with a telescope, the longer it takes light to reach your lens. If you look further enough away the light that is reaching you is the same light that was created when the universe started, if you believe in the “Big Bang” theory. By the way there is a small but growing movement that no longer buys into the “Big Bang”.

Some scientists claim that they can measure what the density of the universe was right after the explosion and that this is accomplished by measuring background radiation and the slight differences of it across a broad area of space. I hate to bring this up, but there are many other sources of radiation in space. I wonder how the scientists can be sure that everything that they are measuring came from the "Big Bang"?

So here I am flying in my mythical space ship. It is very fast and I can travel from one end of the universe to the other end in 1 day. Do I just bump into an invisible wall when I reach the end or do I merely fly some sort of almost unperceivable curved path that leads to where I started? How does this darn dodecahedron work?

When scientists say that they believe that the cosmic microwave background is left over light from the “Big Bang”, it is one thing to believe that but another to be absolutely sure. Anyway, they think that not only can they measure the prior density of the universe as stated above but that they might be able to measure this background radiation and derive clues to the shape of the universe from that. You would think that by now, if there ever was a “Big Bang” that everything in space, including background radiation, would have drifted around quite a bit and that things with a load of gravity, like black holes and dense stars would have caused things to move quite a bit out there.

If the scientists that believe that we live in a 12-sided universe are correct, than when we look out into space, there is a point where we see the same things again but from a different angle. This means that our universe is much smaller than we first suspected. Can you picture this, not only is our universe limited, but it is way smaller than first thought? Sorry friends but this is giving me a headache. Things seem to be closing in on me.