Looming Looming Looming is a term found in the study of perception, as it relates directly to psychology. Looming refers to the rapid expansion in the size of any given image. As the image becomes increasingly large on the perceiver's retina, i.e., when an object "looms", there is an automatic physiological response to perceive the object as an approaching object or surface, instead of one that is stationary or receding. Evidence indicates that looming perception is not limited to the visual modality, but can occur due to auditory or even tactile stimuli. There is a different type of mirage that is
Expansion of the universe in terms of travel time - in that case a straight line is a poor choice of metric because the shortest distance by road is not normally a straight line, and even the path nearest to a straight line will not necessarily be the quickest. A final example is the internet, where even for nearby towns, the quickest route for data can be via major connections that go across the country and back again. In this case the metric used will be the shortest time that data takes to travel between two points on the network. In cosmology, we cannot