The answer is there’s no such thing as absolute distance. Because there’s no such thing as absolute position. Quantum garuntees inaccuracies in position.
And your right. We can’t actually measure the expansion of the universe directly. It’s actually because of the red shift we do.
The reason we can see the red shift is because the universe holds the speed of light in a vacuum constant.
So if the universe is expanding, and the speed of light is expanding with it, in-order for the speed of light to stay the same, it has to travel more distance in a time. Meaning it’s stretching it’s wavelength as it moves. Just like something moving away from us does. IIRC it’s because of observations that everything is constantly moving further from us, the further out you go, the faster it’s moving away.
But everything is moving from everything, including itself.
I do apologize if I’m a little muddy, I did my physics degree about a decade ago.
Edit as for why gravitational waves travel at the same as E&M waves is because “information” is what travels at the speed of light. For an electro magnetic wave that’s disturbances in E&M. For gravity that’s ripples in the fabric of space-time. For quantum there’s experiments showing that entangled particles will collapse together, if sperated by distance, the lag time is also the speed of light.
EDIT 2:
The only thing faster than the speed of light, is actually the expansion of the universe beyond a certain distance. Don’t remember what it is. But because distance istself is expanding, that’s proportional to distance. So the expansion rate is actually faster than the speed of light far enough out. But no SINGLE point is expanding faster than the speed of light.
The answer is there’s no such thing as absolute distance. Because there’s no such thing as absolute position. Quantum garuntees inaccuracies in position.
And your right. We can’t actually measure the expansion of the universe directly. It’s actually because of the red shift we do.
The reason we can see the red shift is because the universe holds the speed of light in a vacuum constant.
So if the universe is expanding, and the speed of light is expanding with it, in-order for the speed of light to stay the same, it has to travel more distance in a time. Meaning it’s stretching it’s wavelength as it moves. Just like something moving away from us does. IIRC it’s because of observations that everything is constantly moving further from us, the further out you go, the faster it’s moving away.
But everything is moving from everything, including itself.
I do apologize if I’m a little muddy, I did my physics degree about a decade ago.
Edit as for why gravitational waves travel at the same as E&M waves is because “information” is what travels at the speed of light. For an electro magnetic wave that’s disturbances in E&M. For gravity that’s ripples in the fabric of space-time. For quantum there’s experiments showing that entangled particles will collapse together, if sperated by distance, the lag time is also the speed of light.
EDIT 2:
The only thing faster than the speed of light, is actually the expansion of the universe beyond a certain distance. Don’t remember what it is. But because distance istself is expanding, that’s proportional to distance. So the expansion rate is actually faster than the speed of light far enough out. But no SINGLE point is expanding faster than the speed of light.