How is our universe shaped? Alexander Friedmann, a russian physicist, made several models, based upon simple opservations.

When looking at our universe scientists have come to a shocking truth. We are, in fact, at the more or less center of the universe. In all directions, we observe just about as many galaxies and stars at the sam distances as any other direction. We know this, because of the microwave background.

The microwave background was first discovered in 1965 by two physicists in New Jersey. They discovered with their detectors, that a small amount of microwave radiation was emanating from all directions, in the exact same amount all around. This radiation comes from stars so far away, that they are moving very fast away from us (because in our expanding universe, the farther something is away from us, the faster it is moving away). Because they are moving away, their light shifts towards the red spectrum. However, some stars are shifted so much that their light is now microwaves. Weird thing is, this radiation is roughly the same in every direction. This means that everything in the universe must be moving away from us! We are the center of th ewhole universe's expansion!

Isn't that funny? We're back to where scientists were hundreds of years ago! They could have been right saying the Earth was the center of th euniverse! Today's scientists, of course, dismiss this as a fallacy because they are not as egotistic and religously opressed as their predecessors were. One hypothesis was that the universe was infinite, and only seemed the same distance on all sides, because it was infinite on all sides. Infinity, however, is not an easy number to calculate. It scews up all the equations, and makes a big mess of things. Einstein dismissed the infinite universe as preposterous, and opted for a more static universe.

Friedmann came up with a theory that explained the phenomenon. He hypothesized that the universe is on a curved surface, much like the Earth, or a ball. This ball is also expanding, much like a balloon. At one point on the balloon, if you looked in any other direction, you could say that everything is moving away from you! And, any other point on th ebaloon could say the same thing. So, in effect, Every point on the balloon is at the center of expansion!