Rank: Advanced Member Groups: Member
Joined: 7/15/2008 Posts: 114 Points: 257 Location: nyc
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anyone ever read this fantastic old book by i think isaac asimov--read it back in the fifties---he gave an example of how we really do not know the size of anything because as we all know we can't remove ourselves from the universe to relate it to anything else--he gave that interesting exercise that since the universe is expanding at a certain rate perhaps everything in it is also expanding so for instance if every 24 hours everything grows 1 inch we would not be able to measure any growth because the instruments to measure would have grown one inch also--come to think of it would lasers or some other contemporary methods overcome this obstacle?
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Rank: Advanced Member Groups: Member
Joined: 3/19/2008 Posts: 981 Points: 2,955
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didn't read that book, but that makes total sense. everything is relative, isn't it? in a similar way, cosmologists tell us that the big bang was not an explosion in space, but an explosion OF space. space has continuously expanded ever since. since the size of objects are measured relative to space (think of space as a grid of points), then if space expands, so does everything else. i don't see anything that could overcome this, as it would then be "relative" to our entire universe.
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