# Is redshift the only way by which we can tell that space is expanding?

There's another question on physics.SE whose answer, if I have understood it correctly, explains that the farther the points are in space the faster they are moving away from each other.

Actually, the apparent speed with which two of the points on the circle in a distance $D$ of each other would move relative to each other will be $v = H_0 D$ where $H_0$ is the speed the balloon itself is expanding.

This means that even the ruler sitting on my desk is expanding, just that the expansion is very very slow owing to the ruler's small size relative to the cosmic scales. However, if everything is scaling then everything should apparently be of the same size to an observer in such an expanding space. The size million pants quote from the show "The Big Bang Theory" comes to mind.

To be able to counter that, there're some phenomena that we can observe which are scale invariant. Red-shift would be one such phenomenon. But is red-shift the only way we can tell that the space is expanding? Is there a logical flaw in my thinking? I know that red-shift is a result of the Doppler effect - there's bound to be a decrease in the frequency of a signal, as perceived by an observer, emitted by a source which is moving away relative to the observer.

• Even Hubble's law is only an argument for the expansion of space if combined with the Copernican principle (that we are not at a special point in the Universe). – Rob Jeffries Oct 5 '14 at 10:03