Questions about Physics, Biology and perspective

[bennyboy]

I am not sure what you mean by somethings "scaling in size Relatively due to its speed"  If the thing is the universe, then I believe the wave length of Light traveling in the universe would expand, or red shift, or scale, if you will, in proportion to the expansion of the universe, irrespective of which direction the light, or the emitter of the light,  is going in the universe.    It is also a separate effect from which direction the light, or the emitter of light, is going with respect to an observer.    If an object is moving towards the observer, but it is sufficiently far from the observer such that in the time it take for light to reach the observer, the universe would have expanded appreciably, then the color of the light the observer would see is a combination of two effects, blue shifting because the emitter was moving towards the observer, red shifting because the wave length scaled with the size of the universe, and the size of the universe increase between when the light was emitted, and when it was observed.

If the light of something moving near us is blue shifted, then the blue shift would be a function of Both velocity of the emitting body and the direction it is moving.  But because it is near us, light from it need not travel a long time to reach us, and the universe would not have expanded much in the time it takes for the light to travel to us, therefore little of its observed wave length would be due to light wave length scaling with the size of the universe.

That brings me to another question, actually.

If the universe is expanding, then how does this affect the value of "c" over time? Do those kilometers themselves stretch out, meaning that light will still take the same time to travel, or does the distance the light have to travel actually increase while it's "in flight"? I suppose it must be the latter, since light emitted 14 billion years ago has taken a long time to reach us on Earth, and at the Big Bang everything was packed into an infinitesimal volume.

The other thing is-- if space is expanding uniformly, wouldn't the light transmitter, the light itself, and the receiving mechanism all be expanding identically, meaning that you'd "sense" the light as being the same frequency as when it left the emitter? Why would there be any sense of relative change at all?

I suppose that means that the red shift isn't a transformation but really is only a Doppler effect. But would that mean that objects in the far reaches of the universe are actually traveling away from us at greater than the speed of light, or will it be kind of like an inverse Black Hole, where all very far objects appear to flatten into a tremendous sphere at massive distance? Why isn't there a "wall" of super-low frequency light crushing us right now?