Expanding means that the objects (stars, galaxies and stuff) are moving further apart, not that any of them is growing on it’s own. Think of a raisin muffin. Before baking all raisins are relatively close but at the end, they moved further away. It’s not that “the other” raisins grow, they are just further away. What grow is the space between them (or dough to stay in the metaphor)
Are they moving apart or are we moving further away by becoming smaller?
Shrinking would require multiple physical constants to change. Even worse, they would have to change in perfect lockstep. Any deviation would radically affect chemistry.
Can you describe what mechanism of shrinking you’re referring to? I assume you’re talking about some sort of compression where atoms remain the same size but get closer together.
Big, huge, unfathomably large structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, are measurably expanding away from each other.
The atoms that comprise your body are not measurably shrinking.
We are not shrinking. Astounding large things that are very far away from us are generally getting further away from us, and other astoundingly large things.
To further the raisin bread analogy:
The raisins are not shrinking, the dough is expanding, making the distance between the raisins increase.
Big, huge, unfathomably large structures in the Universe
Observed from??
Unfathomable distances
I don’t need to defend my position because this is not an academic discussion but it’s not absurd to say we don’t know much about the nature of the universe and if say and entire galaxy were shrinking, or raisin whatever, being a spec in that galaxy we wouldn’t observe that at an atomic level.
So, perhaps I was too flowery with my wording here.
Galaxies are unfathomably huge and distant in terms of a human trying to grasp their size as anything relatable, anything other than an abstract number with a huge exponent.
We can and have and still do measure the actual distances to far away galaxies. Likewise with their size, and likewise with atomic and subatomic particles.
We have observed, measured, and calculated that the father away galaxies are from us, the faster they are moving away from us. This concept is generally encapsulated as Hubble’s Law.
but it’s not absurd to say we don’t know much about the nature of the universe
This is in fact absurd to say, unless you take ‘we’ to mean something approximating 5th graders.
Let me try another angle here:
If we, as in, our entire galaxy, and our sense of scale and distance, were for some reason shrinking, and the rest of the universe was static…
Why would we not observe everything outside our galaxy, or solar system, or planet, or whatever the boundary of your proposed ‘shrinking zone’ is… why would we not observe everything outside of that becoming larger?
If this were actually happening, we could very easily measure and observe this… but we don’t.
Could we actually observe this, please tell us how you would.
Edit: let me guess you would take your raisin and put it on a triple beam balance.
Also, if localized shrinking did exist why would it be unique to our carve out of space?
1 vote for shrinking i hope we find out one day that beyond the edge of the universe. We are inside a man that works as a Supermarket Cashier that looks a lot like a young Martin Short.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were actually just Martin Short. That man is a force of nature.
I can get behind and inside this idea.
It turns out, the idea was inside him all along.
yes… relatively speaking
