In the image above we see John and his one meter long stick. We could place John into a gravitational field, and shrink both John and his one meter stick, and get two possible results. If width dilation occurs at the same time as length dilation, then John becomes a well proportioned miniature version of himself. However if width dilation does not occur, then John becomes a distorted wide yet shortened midget.

In the image above we show a circular galaxy, and then we apply dilation to the image of the galaxy only along one dimension while leaving the other untouched. What we wind up with is an ‘elliptical galaxy’.

One hypothesis I have been entertaining is that the appearance of a galaxy might somehow be relative to the position of the observer within a gravitational field. Our sun is out in the suburbs on the edges of galaxy, as represented by the short wide midget at the top, and our view of the galaxy is then distorted to match our own distorted image. On the bottom we see a planet of people who are even more length distorted than we are, because they are not in the suburbs but nearer to the center of the galaxy where the gravitational forces are more powerful. When they look at the universe they see galaxies that appear even more elliptical than those that we see.

Whether or not any of these hypotheses make any sense would depend upon whether or not width dilation occurs within a gravitational field. The problem then becomes to devise an experiment whereby we could measure width dilation without being fooled by our own results.