Musings of a Madman

I have insufficient knowledge of the big bang model to evaluate its validity. Knowing what I do about how science operates, I am confident that it is as good as anything can be currently, but I would not say that I agree with it, because I frankly barely know what "it" entails.
I don't know the "speed" at which the universe expanded. Speed being the absolute value of the time derivative of location, I do not even know that speed is an appropriate quantity to measure the expansion. Now whether at some point the distance that was produced over the time said production took was faster than the distance light travels in a vacuum per unit time, I do not know. I do not know whether that was even possible in the first moments of the universe nor if it possible right now nor whether it was at any stage inbetween or whether it will be possible in the future. What I do know is that whenever the universe would expand at such a rate, what ever intelligence were to observe it, there would be a finite age difference they could see into the past. Now that I think of it, this is the case with the universe as we know it, yet there are, again, as far as I understand, other observations that make it unlikely that such is the case.
Now as for spatial limitations of expansion, again, I do not know, but it seems to me from a purely classical perspective that the extent of space as it would make sense for us to define it is the greatest distance any two points that are in principle identifiable would have and we do even have estimates of that number for all three types of geometry consistent with measurements taken. While such a definition of space would technically make it finite for any given point in time, it would still be a function of the expansion and thus implicitly of time, and no maximum size limit would be set by it, regardless of whether there are other limiting factors. It is perhaps also important to keep in mind that a metric space of any dimension can in theory be both finite and unlimited at the same time. Such a universe would however, as far as I can tell, be closed, and we do have indication to the contrary, so I wouldn't bet on that for the time being, but here it is for the sake of completeness.

i found this fascinating

https://www.khanacademy.org/partner-content/big-history-project/what-is-big-history/welcome-to-big-history/v/bhp-big-bang-crashcourse

JLSpinner wrote: Do you think the universe expanded at the speed of light?

Faster, actually. Scientists are suggesting now that the speed of light is slowing down. Google "speed of light slowing down". You'll see what I mean

Interesting. I wonder what the cause is for light showing. Perhaps it is related to the increase in dark energy. Since light is effected by gravity, an increase in repulsive forces might account for it.

So I did google speed of light slowing down, found a number of popular science magazines talking about slowing down light through refractive media and a few creationist websites.
Now one of those isn't talking about the natural constant c and the other is talking anti-science by principle. While the speed of light is defined as constant, there is nothing technically wrong with viewing the speed of light as a variable and other things as constant in its stead; it's just incredibly inconvenient seeing how almost all of physics would have to be discarded and written anew. But anyone and everyone is welcome to go ahead and try that and I'm sure the first one to succeed will go home with a Nobel Prize that day.
On another note, gravity is not a repulsive but an attractive force and dark energy is not the same as negative mass. When astronomers or physicists speak of dark matter or energy they mean such that does not register on spectrometers, not one that is in any way twisted or the opposite of their conventional counter-parts. And speaking of gravity, when we say force we don't mean some magical thing that affects things either, but rather the time derivative of momentum. Now, in classical mechanics that would mean the product of velocity and mass time derivative added to the product of mass and acceleration. However, light does not have mass, so the mechanical momentum can't be it. Instead we know - from relativity - that it's energy is the product of its velocity and momentum. At the risk of losing you here or making a whole bunch of mistakes or both, I shall not go ahead and deduce that from Maxwell's equations. Anyway, the energy of a unit of light I shall henceforth call photon is proportional to its frequency and as with any wave, the speed is the product of wavelength and frequency, so we end up with the momentum being inversely proportional to the wavelength and I shall henceforth call the scale factor Planck's constant.
Of course what we have now is the magnitude of a momentum that does not depend at all on time and doesn't involve speed. So therefore the time derivative of that magnitude is zero and the photon's speed doesn't change, eventhough a force - gravity - is present. But of course momentum being a vector quantity it has not only a magnitude but also a direction, so that must be what the force is acting upon and this is what we observe: In the vicinity of a gravity well light bends towards the well. It changes direction but retains speed.