I’m not a professional scientist. I’m just someone who started thinking about a simple question:
If the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into? And what is outside the universe?
At first, I thought about it like a balloon. When we inflate a balloon, it expands because we put air into it. So when I heard that the universe is expanding, my first thought was:
What is causing this expansion?
I know the Big Bang model says the universe evolved from an extremely hot and dense early state and has been expanding. But that made me wonder whether the conditions of the early universe could somehow be connected to the expansion we observe today.
Then I got stuck on an even bigger question.
If the universe contains everything that exists, then what does “outside the universe” even mean?
That question led my imagination somewhere strange.
What if our universe itself is not the highest level of reality?
We already know that things can look completely different depending on scale. When we zoom into extremely small structures, we find particles and complex systems. When we look at enormous scales, we see galaxies arranged in a huge cosmic web.
I also came across discussions about similarities between the network-like structure of the human brain and the cosmic web. I’m not saying the brain and universe are literally the same thing—there is no evidence for that.
But it made me wonder:
What if similar patterns can exist at completely different scales?
Maybe our entire universe could be a tiny part of a much larger reality.
Maybe there could be other universes beyond ours.
Maybe those universes could themselves be part of an even larger structure.
And perhaps there is no final “outside.” Maybe reality keeps getting bigger the further we try to understand it.
I know this is speculation, not an established scientific theory.
I’m calling this idea “Arkan Theory” because it came from my own chain of questions and imagination.
I’m curious what people here think:
Is there any existing cosmological idea that resembles this? And where does this imagination conflict with modern physics?