No I would like a serious answer to that question..... Im not kidding please help. I rarely ask for it so altest someone could do is help me a bit on this one.

Sedit, when exactly do you postulate this expansion to occur that you want to measure? When 'light' is observed?

Pretty sure I watched that once, iirc it was a pretty cool show.

I like how Sedit poses a question that would give a theoretical physicist a migraine, then scolds us for not giving him an answer right away

I'm still trying to determine when this expansion occurs, since knowing that would be the first clue about what to look at when it does occur in order to measure some aspect of it.

Movement is something that has fucked with my head more than once. When you get down to it, movement is nothing more than a comparison of two more object's orientation to each other. If there were only one object in the universe it could never have any movement, even if a huge universe sized hammer popped into existence and knocked the shit out of that single object then popped back out of existence. Still, that object that just got smacked would have no movement at all. I believe this is relevant because if everything is expanding equally, it would amount to no movement. I don't mean movement that can't be referenced therefore measured, I mean no movement at all. The movement you want to attribute in your mind to this expansion, is really just the relationship of the expanding object's size and the static size of your mental reference. If everything is expanding at the same rate or along the same wave of expansion, and I mean everything as in everything, from space/time to dark matter to any proposed zero point in space, then that really isn't movement.

This is my best try at an example- If only two spheres existed in the whole universe and they sat side by side, then grew by the same amount yet maintain the same relative position to each other in space (their centerlines were always 2.5 times their radius from each other), in essence they would not move, even though the centers would change their relative positions. The thing that you use to measure the distance, the radius has changed. Your ruler has changed, as you said. It's abstract to say the least, but that's how I see it when I'm full of morphine and weed

That makes measuring this expansion pretty impossible, but fun to think about. Who knows, maybe there is a way.

Ahhh, I was thinking along the lines of what ReDEEMed wrote, but I think I gotcha. Just because relationships are pretty much all we can measure, doesn't mean that's all there is. First step in answering my question of "expansion relative to what". Even so, what would the cause of this process be, and what so to speak is on the ground floor? Superficially it seems to necessitate an ether; what comprises the ether?

Like the case of a single soccer ball in its own universe (excepting that one need an observer, hahaha...), were it moving there would be nothing to measure it against. But that might not "mean" it isn't moving...

Now, if you fear that light doesn't move at all, then the most obvious place to look for clues is in the interaction of light with light, ie. interference. Or even more obviously, what is light? I certainly don't know. It seems to be an oscillation in its interaction with gross matter, but on the finest level it seems to be some kind of raw 'impetus' to change. [And there's something really important to "wave particle duality" that I'm missing right under my nose, and I suspect we all are.]

Well okay, what even is space? You could say space isn't, that works: if you were to go with that, then it would be clear that rather than a pure geometric illustration like relativity, the interpretation of gravity would be as the tendency of [certainly larger amounts, probably any amount] of some property of whatever matter is, to interfere with the directional, proportional so to speak, relationships between objects.

[What I mean by these relationships, consider the idea of dimension. One might or might not choose to include time as one. Not merely how to detect where something is relative to another, but that position seems to be constituted of proportional relationships between events. It became obvious to me long ago that time could (should?) be defined as the measure of change in one 'system' relative to another/others. But one need not defining it in a systemic sense (temporally distinct organisations). Only recently did it occur to me that this same idea of change applies to dimensions as well, but whereas father time caught the cold, his three kids got AIDS.]

Because these relationships are phenomena of observation, this mysterious interference would either have to manifest as an affliction of the observation (interaction) itself.  - one might claim "nothing isn't" implying there is no transit. Or, if there is transit, and gravity acts upon that instead, then things must entirely "disappear" (like the soccer ball above) and then be "found", at least in terms of those relationships. Then the question is how an object "steers".

There might also be a middle ground: if everything is indeed connected but the relationships are thin, expansive and tenuous to varying degrees - then what seems a disappearance is only so from the small perspective. Which indicates either the first case, or that this IS exactly what gravity is. Perhaps like a force that causes heat to cohere into movement?

I need to think about this some more before I come to any conclusions.

[edit: thinking that through tired me out prematurely

If space is, you have something like an ether, a feedstock of reality perhaps, in which it all resides.]

You reply deserves much more then I am about to write at this late hour bluebottle but I would be best to say this why its on my mine.

The issue with the aether is what started me thinking about this some time back. The Michelson–Morley experiment becomes invalid if there equipment is flowing along with the very substance they are attempting to measure. They where looking more for an aether flow which went against the grain instead of one that flowed along with it.

If you use the old car or train analogy to determine relative motion the only way to tell if there is movement is to view the background such as the trees passing both trains at 50mph letting you know that there is indeed movement of your frame of reference. Photons seem to be the most likely candidate I can think of so far as a background material. The condensation of these tiny waves into more ordered structures gives an artificial appearance of matter. Watch high frequency standing waves on a pool of water sometime to see what I mean. You will see clumps of waves which move around thru the other waves as though they where solid objects.

Here is the main problem with that. Photons would have to be part of this substance meaning using them to measure it would be similar to the resolution issues we have when attempting to use light based microscopes on really small objects. You end up having issues where your resolution is based on your wavelength size hence the reason we use electron microscopes for all high resolution work. What would you use to view an electron directly...ect...ect...?

would you use to view an electron directly...ect...ect...?

I am not that good at physics at all but isn't electron an elementar particle with
same nasty properties like photon!?
By that I mean it will "vanish" when it stops moving insanly fast.

Apart from LSD and similar equipment I don't see any other means to observe it.

BlueBottle, as for my calling the aether a zero point, that's just my damaged brain when it's full of chemicals renaming something that already has a name, the aether or ether. I called it that because in the context of this discussion, that's what it is, for the purposes of my own visualization anyway. It is the background mesh of reality and the closest thing I can think of that you would measure the expansion of the universe with. Considering we are talking about expansion in 4 dimensions, not just 3, you need something like the aether to even think about measuring that expansion. Though my concept of a zero point is not the same as an aether, it's the closest thing I can think of and for the purposes of this discussion I see them as almost interchangeable.

Twenty years of programming cnc machines is probably to blame for that choice in words. Sometimes you just have to write me off as not making any sense. It's something I've learned to live with and it will likely never change lol.