Assume for a second that instead of a 'big bang' marking the beginning of space-time, that the universe isnt expanding at all and is in fact static but the contents of the universe have been shrinking at an accelerating rate since the beginning of "space time?"You can clearly see that our perception of the universe would be precisely the same as it is now. What implications would this have for cosmology?

I don't think we would perceive red-shift in that setting.

Even Einstein said everything is relative, so why not?

There is no point of view where all objects in the universe shrinking in place would be observed as indistinguishable from the current observations.

No local point of view. If you could be a global observer, the contents would indeed appear to be shrinking.

I'm just curious what implications this would have for cosmology. Would it change anything? What about gravity?

I was thinking about this in terms of size as well. When you look at a car in the distance, it looks like a toy car as it's about as big as a toy car would be in a closer frame of reference. So the sizes of things at least appear to be expanding and contracting relative to the observer, just like time. Could gravity shift according to the observer as well, and we only experience the gravitational pull of the 'large' bodies we are in close frame of reference to, such as the sun and earth? What would this do to dark matter/energy theorizations?

Buy a box of Cheerios and take a look inside. Close it and shake the box up and down vigorously and look again. You will see more room but the contents are the same by weight which is why many food container labels mention it.

There! Howard Beale's expanding universe/content conservation solved w/ cereal!

None anywhere.

I'm saying your thesis bolded above is false.

Just as a start, we know from the red shift that objects are receding away from us at a much, much greater rate than if they just shrunk (pulling the near surface away from us, and ours from them.

Also, the Hubble Law would fail under your thesis.

Are you imagining that the universe is moving towards a big crunch or that literally everything including eg the size of the atom or proton and even the constants like the speed of light are shrinking? in our current system the objects are not expanding, only the geometry is expanding without locally changing the scale of things.

Getting things individually to shrink together with geometry also would violate all kinds of laws at first sight.

All the contents are shrinking including the size of our instruments, (perhaps at the rate of c?). This makes the contents of the universe appear to be getting farther from our reference point but really theyre just getting smaller (as are we), increasing the apparent distance between us. I don't know much about cosmology I just thought it was a neat idea and wondering if it's a possibility.

Seems like if this was the case there would be no need for dark matter/energy pushing the universe apart at an accelerating rate but like i said just looking for answers I'm not qualified in this field.

It's a fine idea to explore, but you posited a thesis using the declaration, "you can clearly see that..." without thinking it through and it was not well formulated, and was impossible as stated. That's what I was challenging. You asked about the implications, and they would be physically impossible.

Found this on reddit:

Ok thanks for the input! Please read above and tell me if that's a more rigorous explanation

In our version of the world the speed of light is not appearing to be changing over distances or times because it affects the result quantitatively of certain processes observed that far away as expected here. If the speed of light was not changing but things were getting smaller then evidence would exist in labs and energy wouldnt be conserved that way when you were studying all kinds of reactions over time.

Furthermore the time it takes light to go to a place and then back would still be the same even if it were to connect shrinking objects. We would be able to detect the shrinking as changing of the speed of light if we had no standard of length that we could use that was not changing.

I think it's nonsense. EMR wavelengths aren't observed differently according to the relative size of the observer. Their length is a function of the speed of light over time.
C / frequency = wavelength

Photon frequency can be directly measured as a function of its energy (higher energy = higher frequency).

I think everything we know says that we have to assume the speed of light is a constant regardless of how we observe it (as pointed out by the poster above me).

With bigger atoms, wouldn't photon wavelength be longer cause of lower energy states?

Heres another thread that gets into some more detail. I guess it's called comoving space?

http://www.thescienceforum.com/astro...tml#post292913

Also please understand I'm not arguing Im like the science dog that have no idea what I'm doing.

A quick review of that thread looked to me like the most persuasive arguments were against the possibilty of the shrinking model. They pointed out even more ways it would violate the laws of physics.

Also photons are not atoms or matter.

Ok thanks

One could probably come up with a theory that added some kind of scaling factor to space-time that affects all phenomena. That scaling factor could be made to vary with time in such a way that it precisely matches and cancels out the observed expansion of the universe. But then, not only would the two scenarios in the thread title be indistinguishable by current observation, they would be indistinguishable by any conceivable observation or experiment. This seems like a pointless exercise.

Speed of light is a constant (which has been demonstrated by a gazillion different types of experiments). In a universe where stuff shrinks that wouldn't work. All of these experiments would eventually fail.

Also all the forces of nature (weak, strong, electromagnetic and gravity) operate on different scales. If stuff were to shrink then the ratio of these forces would alter.
(Note that this is somethig that you do not ever want to happen, because that would pretty much make all the matter in the universe unstable instantly)

What is static about a shrinking universe? You must be introducing an imaginary boundary. Which poses even more problems.

No, the universe could still be infinite in his "contents shrinking" scenario.

I'm asking why a shrinking universe could be considered non-static, when he accepts that an expanding is not.

An expanding universe is "static" I think, because its expanding intrinsically, not extrinsically. The overall dimensions of the universe, whatever they are, are not actually getting bigger rather space time is stretching in and of itself.

I didnt understand this before but now I do (I think)