This is a cosmic topic in a forum for less than cosmic topics. I put it here anyway since there is likely no provable answer to it. The question is the same as the thread title, “Does the universe spin”. Planets, Stars and galaxies all spin, so why not the whole universe? Could the spin of the universe be the origin of Dark Energy?
If the Universe was spinning, centripital force would tend to stretch it out. The universe would expand while its overall spin rate slowed. So does it spin or not?
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centripital force would tend to stretch it out./QUOTE]
The universe in which we’re standing keeps expanding and expanding in all of the directions it can whiz.
Nitpick: centripetal force is the force required to keep an object moving in a circular path; for instance, the tension in a line at the end of which a ball is being swung. Centrifugal force (which, despite what you may hear from high school physics teachers, is in fact a force, if one that exists only within a rotating frame of reference) is the reaction against the frame from inertia of a spinning body.
Physical objects like planets, star systems, and galaxies spin due to the partnership between interia (which wants to make moving objects keep going in the same direction, per Netwon’s First Law of Motion) and the force of gravity (which wants to draw mass toward it), resulting in orbits represented by conic sections. If the inertia isn’t too great, or the velocity sufficiently low, the object enters an elliptical orbit and proceeds to spin about the common center of mass.
Does the Universe spin? Not in the way we think of normal matter as spinning in three dimensions; if it did so, there would be a definite center and a measurable rotation rate against an inertial background. However, it could be spinning about some extrauniversal axis, and in fact Einstein believe that the Lense-Thirring effect (commonly known as frame-dragging) was due to precession against the entire Universe via interaction between the local reference frame, a manifestation of Mach’s Principle, though he could never develop a quantifiable theory to describe this.
Stranger
Only when it gets caught in an embarrassing situation.
Well - assuming the universe is infinite in all directions, how could it spin?
Doesn’t the act of spinning assume there is a finite end that can move (spin), meaning it is contained in an even larger container? So by definition, the universe could only spin if it was contained within an even larger body of sorts, which negates the idea of the universe. Unless the universe is inside a larger universe…but by definition, that can’t be true.
I am not sure if I explained that well - a ping pong ball could easily spin in a shoebox. But assuming the shoebox was the entire universe, there is no room for it to spin.