This is an interesting perspective! The frontier around dark energy / space accelerating in its expansion etc is interesting to me.
A bit unrelated, my pet theory is that a dwindling of some quantity creates the things we're measuring as acceleration. My naive intuition is that celestial bodies aren't flying away from each other accelerated by some unseen energy so much as getting smaller. If two things shrink in place, the distance between them grows.
Maybe there's some obvious reason why that couldn't be the case, i'd be interested to know!
The amount of space for us to shrink into is absolutely miniscule compared to the space available to expand between us and distant galaxies.
The metric expansion of space appears to be an extremely weak, small effect. It just adds up to something measurable in the vast gulfs between galaxies.
Furthermore the amount of acceleration away from us is proportional to the distance from us (farther things are accelerating away faster). The shrinking hypothesis only makes sense of that data if it posits that we are the center of the universe.
Atoms can’t shrink because they’re already (ish) in their quantum mechanically minimal state. I think that minimum state depends on the value of the Plank constant. Humour me for the sake of the thought experiment: what would we observe if it wasn’t constant, and changed in a way which allowed atoms to shrink very slowly?
(I’m really tired right now, forgive me if this is a dumb question)
I don't know. And this has nothing to do with the metric expansion of space, since we don't observe it between atoms or even between stars in a galaxy. It's only between galaxies that we observe expansion.
A bit unrelated, my pet theory is that a dwindling of some quantity creates the things we're measuring as acceleration. My naive intuition is that celestial bodies aren't flying away from each other accelerated by some unseen energy so much as getting smaller. If two things shrink in place, the distance between them grows.
Maybe there's some obvious reason why that couldn't be the case, i'd be interested to know!