Why would it only expand in one plane not every direction like you’d expect?
Also how is a flat universe even possible? Surely since we live in 3 dimensions the universe needs to be a 3 dimensional shape.
Im probably misunderstanding what physicists are trying to say but that’s why im here.
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We have the globe, a spherical depiction of Earth. We also use Mercator projection maps, which is a flat depiction of our spherical Earth. As a consequence of this model of Earth we made (the Mercator projection map), some of the distances and sizes get warped.
You see, Earth is 3-dimensional but the Mercator projection map is 2-dimensional. The universe is a lot more dimensions (we think), but since we’re stuck in this 3-dimensional scope, we can only render maps of it with less dimensionality. According to our models, this depiction is flat. Reality isn’t **really** flat, though, it just appears so from our models.
This Mercator projection of reality is also why we get weird results from our equations. Like length and time contraction due to Special Relativity. Spacetime isn’t **really** contracting and expanding, they’re just a consequence of our Mercator projection in the same way distances and sizes get warped on our Mercator Earth map.
TL:DR – reality isn’t “flat”, our models of reality are “flat” – which is all we get.
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