"Astronomers have pushed NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to its limits by finding what is likely to be the most distant object ever seen in the universe. The object's light traveled 13.2 billion years to reach Hubble, roughly 150 million years longer than the previous record holder. The age of the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years."
The next generation of telescopes may be interesting in confirming or refuting Big Bang. There are alternate theories, like the minority who think the universe has simply always existed in various forms but much as it is today.
So if your telescopes get good enough to see further than 14 million light years (more than the supposed age of the universe), you would disprove Big Bang (but not relativity). At the rate of advance in space telescopes, we could do this in a decade or so. After all, Hubble was very limited to begin with.
Falsifiability is an essential element of science. This is likely a way to put Big Bang to the test.
#16. To: TooConservative, Dead Culture Watch, All (#3)
So if your telescopes get good enough to see further than 14 million light years (more than the supposed age of the universe), you would disprove Big Bang (but not relativity). At the rate of advance in space telescopes, we could do this in a decade or so. After all, Hubble was very limited to begin with.
I don't think you have this quite right. All the 13.2 billion light years says is that the Universe is at least this big. It has nothing to do with the orign or center of the Unoverse (i.e. the reference point for the location of the Big Bang).
"It has nothing to do with the orign or center of the Unoverse (i.e. the reference point for the location of the Big Bang)."
Shouldn't we be able to easily pinpoint that, given that every object in the universe should be rushing away from it?
I wouldn't think so because we are receiving light basically from objects that surround the Earth in a 360 sphere. For example, if the Earth was at the center of the Universe it would be receiving light from 360 degrees in all directions. That would mean that we would receive light from 13 light years away coming from the north of the sphere around us and from the south pole. This would indicate that Universe was at least 26 light years across.
