Flat Universe

The fascinating April 27 article “A Flat Universe?” provoked basic cosmological questions humans have wrestled with for millenniums, but it didn’t address them directly. If the universe is infinite, how can it have a shape? Aren’t shapes the limits of matter or space? If the universe is flat, what’s above it and below it? If the universe used to be 1,000 times smaller than it is today, into what is it expanding? How can the universe have an age? What existed before it? How can something come from nothing?

These are questions without answers, of course, but it would be very interesting to hear what scientists, philosophers, poets and the clergy think about them, particularly in the context of recent discoveries.

DANIEL HINERFELD

Santa Monica