We live in a box we can't see out of. Quite literally, because light has a speed (186,000 miles per second), as we look out into the night sky, the farther out we look the farther back in time we see. And since the Universe has an age (our best current guess is just shy of 14 billion years), it has an observable limit. More Universe surely exists beyond the limit of our visibility some 45.7 billion light years away*...but we won't ever get to see it.
Not only that, but we won't personally get to see most bits of the universe that are inside the observable limit, simply because what's going on there "now" won't be visible to us til the light reaches us. A star 7,000 light years away from us could have ceased to exist yesterday, and we won't know it for another 7000+ years. To us, that star is still shining. Light and time, those phenomena easily detected by our senses, have set boundaries around us. Even though the geocentric theory of creation has been roundly debunked on several orders of magnitude, in one very important way it is still valid. The point of observation is, by definition, the center of the observable universe.
We still keep searching for ways to escape the box, though. We keep dreaming up new theories, testing and wringing new data from the stuff that makes up our physical reality. We sit at the center of the Universe, but the edges of it are right here as well, nested in the folds of the human mind.
Read more here: Five weird theories of what lies outside the universe via io9.com and here: Observable Universe via Wikipedia.org
*The Universe is expanding at an apparently increasing rate. This means that what we can see is farther away than the age of the Universe in years times the speed of light, because space keeps getting "bigger." Weird enough for ya yet?
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