Physicist Believes He Has Located God. Unfortunately, They Are Around 439 Billion Trillion Kilometers Away

First off, we should of course explain that this is entirely speculative, and is not science, let alone accepted science. Guillén mixes passages about God found in the Christian Bible with a physics concept known as the "cosmic horizon" to make his argument.

We can only see light that has made it to our vantage point, meaning that there is a limit to how much of the universe we can see – known as the observable universe – as the light has not yet made it to us. 

If the universe were static – or not changing in size – the only thing that would be stopping us from seeing those distant objects (as well as the Doppler effect) would be the time it takes light to get to us. In a static universe, as time went on, we would detect more and more light from distant objects and our Hubble horizon – the amount of universe we can observe – would grow. At some point in the far-off future, the rest of the universe would become observable to us. 

Unfortunately, we do not live in a static universe, but one that is expanding, and this expansion has implications for our view of the universe. Rather than merely giving "more for us to love", the expansion of the universe means that we will see a smaller and smaller part of it as time goes on, with further objects being kept forever out of reach from our point of view.

Known as "Hubble's law", more distant objects are receding faster than objects that are closer to us, due to the expansion of space in between us and the distant objects. 

"But, here’s where it gets really interesting," Guillén wrote in a piece for Fox News. "Theoretically, a galaxy that’s 273 billion trillion (273,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) miles away from Earth would move at 186,000 miles per second, which is the speed of light. That distance, way 'up' there in space, is called the Cosmic Horizon."

Light from beyond this "cosmic horizon" could never be seen by us, as the intervening universe in between is expanding faster than light itself can travel. 

Guillén adds that the Bible states that heaven is inaccessible to humans while we are alive, and that heaven is supposedly inhabited by immortal, non-material beings. He links this, tenuously, to the cosmic horizon.

"Our best astronomical observations – and Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity – indicate that time stops at the Cosmic Horizon. At that special distance, way 'up' there in deep, deep, deep space, there is no past, present or future. There’s only timelessness," he writes. "Unlike time, however, space does exist at and beyond the Cosmic Horizon. Which means the hidden universe beyond the Cosmic Horizon is habitable, albeit only by light and light-like entities."

While that may sound poetic, it isn't how scientists see the cosmic horizon. Time is not thought to be frozen at the cosmic horizon; in fact, in current models of the universe, that's a pretty nonsensical statement. 

Picture yourself on Earth. That's pretty easy, it's where you are. Now picture the cosmic horizon, all those billions of light-years away. Light from just inside this horizon would take a long time to get to Earth, but would eventually get here, redshifted to hell though it may be. Because of the expansion of the universe, the event, whatever it may be, appears far slower from our perspective, as the light is stretched out by the time it reaches us.

That doesn't literally mean that events are slower, or stop, at the cosmological horizon. It just means that from our perspective, those events appear slower as the expansion of the universe stretches out the light as it traverses the universe. Imagine you were at Earth's cosmic horizon and looking back. The Earth would look slowed down or stopped, and yet here we are continuing to walk around, making coffee and new entries to the Fast & Furious franchise.

Cosmic horizons are observer-dependent, rather than a physical place in the universe. We are somewhere's (or perhaps some species') cosmic horizon, and yet we continue, and the last time anyone checked we don't appear to be deities for some far-distant civilization. 

While Guillén's claims about God outlined in the Bible are beyond the scope of a science website, the cosmology he uses to support his idea is incorrect, treating an observational boundary as if it is a physical place. Other than being "really far from Earth" (who could blame He/She/It?), it's not clear why God would want to hang out there.