Not to say it couldn't work some other way -- I'm not a physicist either! But (as these things always seem to end up) it would have to be a little more complicated. (Part of the "rolled-up dimensions" side of string theory is that the extra dimensions can't meaningfully attenuate the effects of gravity.)
[0] I don't think this is the one I read, but it rings the right bells: https://www.sciencealert.com/gravitational-waves-have-ruled-...
[0] http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/~banchoff/Flatland/
Also, not having a border is not the same as being infinite. Zogg from Betelgeuse started a great series on the topic [1], but disappeared after two episodes. I highly recommend it! But, long story short, it's entirely possible to have a finite universe that, nonetheless, has no edge. Go far enough in one direction and you might end up back where you started.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_k3_B9Eq7eM
Assuming there's a physical edge to our universe, there's still the problem of the "observable universe" -- there's a lot more of the universe that we will simply never be able to see or reach, because it's moving away from us too quickly. That defines another kind of edge, one that's much "closer". Entities beyond our observable universe can't affect us gravitationally; it takes time for the effects of gravity to propagate from one point to another, as "gravitational waves", and the universe is inflating too quickly for those to reach us.
You might say that things further away from us, but within the observable universe, might be affected by things beyond, because they're "closer" to it than we are. I think that's correct, but by the same token, I think the information about those effects would never reach us in finite time.
That's why I was thinking in terms of extra spatial dimensions. You might have a bunch of matter "nearby" but totally inaccessible to you, because we're incapable of moving along the extra axis. But that gets back to the research I linked.
Now imagine there are two such spheres near to each other. Two beings whose physical laws and interactions were entirely confined to their respective surfaces would be unaware of each other and unable to influence each other in any way - gravity for example is only able to travel around the surface of the sphere, not into whatever 'space' lies in between. The surface of each sphere is its own universe.
There's no reason to believe our "common sense" or "intuitive understanding" has any relevance to how the universe is or isn't.
According to an ant's common sense humans for sure have antennas somewhere on their bodies, even if not visible to an ant.
Also, we see far away clusters or galaxies receding faster than light away from us. This is impossible in a non expanding universe since faster than light travel _through_ spacetime is impossible but spacetime between two objects expanding faster than light is.
The alternative is that the thing on which our universe depends (being careful not to say 'caused' here) is beyond our ideas of cause and effect, and certainly passes human understanding.
Ha! No, there does not. Humans use create a hallucinated duality as a means of navigating a non-dual reality.
Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead?
As Julian Barbour puts it: "We see from this that time has no role to play as an independent element of reality."
http://www.platonia.com/nature_of_time_essay.pdf
You should read his whole book, it's time to wake up!
> Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead?
This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum.
> There has to be a beginning and end.
Wrap your head around this: if there is a "beginning" and an "end" to our universe, both would define discrete stop points, thus there would be some way to say "before" or "after" these discrete points, and thus the universe sits inside something that has time.
But then either this something of a container either has infinite time (which goes back to square one of things not having beginning and end) or has a beginning and end itself.
But again, if this container has a discrete beginning and end then you can apply the same logic that you applied to our universe in the first place. So there's another container of the container, to which you can recursively apply the same logic (assuming logic itself somehow applies to this container). So if you want all these container things to have beginnings and ends, it implies there's an infinite set of nested containers.
The alternative is that time exists within our universe, but our universe doesn't sit within time. Thus "beginning" and "end" are not discrete points but concepts that only exist as limits (in the mathematical sense of "limit"): by travelling the arrow of time forward or backward you can only move closer and closer to either but never actually reach these because these points don't actually exist.
Such a universe could be freestanding (as in: it's all there is), or it could have a container of sorts, and maybe even neighbour universes. But since time only exists within our universe, there could very well be no concept of time in the container (or other universes), or similar concepts but behaving entirely differently. In any case these (the container, the other universes) would be unbelievably incomprehensible to us.
These concepts of unreachable zero, unreachable infinite, or unreachable value do exist in other areas: absolute zero is basically unreachable, reaching c velocity requires infinite energy†...
† which creates other interesting conundrums such as a pair of photons travel at the same delta speed whether they go away or towards each other, or there's no "velocity = 0" either, or tachyonic vs baryonic realms.
It was not misleading, it was a question. What person does not think they were born or that someone died?
In my experience, time does not exist. It is an illusion. Have you read Barbour's book?
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Thou shalt not multiply entities beyond necessity.
Are you the one who started this whole movement ? Or in fact you just rehash the same bullcrap ? Closer to the universe edge he says, not defining the universe or an edge...