Articulating this idea will be more difficult than understanding the concept itself. It's easy to blow up a balloon but explaining it takes longer.
So here's my attempt at explaining the importance of the balloon.
It's generally accepted by physicsy people that the Big Bang is the cause of our current being. It explains where we were and how we came to be (atoms and chemicals, I'm not talking philosophy).
Evidence of this is from radiation within our Universe (currently at microwave I believe but the ozone saves us from being too gooey, so we're safe - stop using aerosol cans!) and also from red shift (essentially everything is expanding away from everything and this suggests were in an explosion).
I agree with the aforementioned concepts of the Big Bang. However, and this I'd where the HanPlan kicks in, I believe the Universe itself is not expanding in the way we generally accept.
An explosion gets bigger as time goes by. A solid rapidly turns into a gas and that energy is the explosion. Its circumference (or area it occupies) gets greater. But what if our Big Bang is not taking up any more area? What if the area is exactly the same as it was 13.7 billion years ago...
The best way of imagining this is to measure the distance between where the center of the universe was at the beginning and the radius it was occupying. Like measuring the distance between a ball in the center of a spherical room and the edge of the room.
At the beginning of time this distance would be significantly smaller than the distance it is today.
Now imagine the spherical room does not get larger, but the ball gets smaller. The distance would be greater if the ball were getting smaller and smaller. Even if other objects were in the room, the distance between each object would get greater as everything decreases in size.
And this is what I think is happening. As we're inside the room, and everything is getting smaller at the same rate, we cannot see the goings on. If someone were to stand outside of the Universe, would they see the objects inside exploding? Or would they see everything getting smaller?
There is nothing extraordinary about this concept. Either way everything is getting away from everything else.
