Hard to wrap my mind around this one. Anyone have any good analogies that fit?
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There aren’t any great analogies, in the sense that none of the analogies you’re going to encounter are actually fully analogous. As human beings, we’ve never experienced in our lives anything even approximately accurate to what happened during the Big Bang.
The most straightforward analogy is the balloon analogy. Imagine you have a balloon and you use a Sharpie to put a tiny dot on that balloon. That dot represents the entire universe at the beginning of the Big Bang. Now imagine blowing up the balloon. The dot gets bigger. But it doesn’t get bigger from expanding away from a particular location. All of the little tiny ink particles in the dot are moving away from all of the other tiny ink particles and it doesn’t matter where you are in the dot at the beginning, you see the same amount of expansion as you’re blowing up the balloon. If you imagine sitting on top of one of these tiny ink particles, no matter where you are, all of the other ink particles you see are moving away from you at the same rate.
There are some flaws to this analogy, but I’m not going to mention them because it might actually make it easier for you to understand if I avoid pointing out some of the holes.
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