Posted on 02/13/2022 5:54:10 PM PST by nagant
George Costanza knows all about the perils of “local shrinkage”... (Probably the funniest Seinfeld episode.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85MZ4c1EWkM
“I was in the pool!!”
It depends “when” you see it. If an object 400,000,000 light years away changed course and started accldeating toward us to day you would no see that change until 400,000,000 years from now. The deeper into space you look, the further you are “looking” into time. In a galactic context it makes no sense to be concerned by any of this as the Sun will be burned out, the Earth a cinder, and our civilsation long-long gone before any of this makes the slightest difference.
At the outer limits we are seeing light from the distant past not the present.
This whole body of speculation is based on the premise that light actually travels at a uniform velocity in all directions; which decided to be so by convention, not observation, which, some say is not possible to do.
Oops.
Way back in 1966 when I was a junior in high school, I attended a lecture on Relativity by George Gamow. This guy's lecture was presented every bit as good as Gamow's.
Also if shrinkage has started, the must have been a point in time in the past when the universe stood momentarily still - just as it stopped expanding and before the start of the shrinkage. Is there an observational or theoretical way to determine when that occurred?
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It finally occurred to me that, if the gravitational model’s expansion slows and stops like you say, the subsequent shrinkage will accelerate. And acceleration is what cosmologists are observing.
We may only get 10 billion more years out of this model no matter how well we maintain it. Maybe Dr. Hooper understands that many viewers would dislike news that all that we see is coming to an end, and that’s why he didn’t expand on this topic.
From fossil records we see that most animal species are increasing in size with succeeding generations. I wonder if somehow this is due to shrinking space. This would imply some inherent genetic ability which supersedes space/time constraints.
“Maybe Dr. Hooper understands that many viewers would dislike news that all that we see is coming to an end,”
Which could be the start of a new beginning according to the theory of the oscillating universe.
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