The same trick, on a map you already know

Every incorporated place in the lower 48 — 29,460 of them. Click one and the country expands about it — then click another, and that one becomes the center instead

On a photograph of the sky it is hard to be sure nothing is being slipped past you, because you do not know where those objects ought to be. Here you do. Click Chicago and every other city moves away from Chicago, Denver twice as far as Indianapolis because it started twice as far off. Click Denver and Chicago is the one that moves. Nothing about the map changed in between. Zoom in and it holds at any scale: the towns immediately around the one you picked drift off it just as surely as the coasts do, only slower, because they started closer.

Map of 29,460 cities and towns across the contiguous United States State outlines with 29,460 cities and towns marked, dot size increasing with population. A second, expanded copy is drawn over it in red, scaled about whichever city is selected, so that city coincides in both copies and every other city is displaced outward.
8%  

Albers equal-area conic projection, standard parallels 29.5° and 45.5°, with Alaska and Hawaii left out so the frame stays tight on the lower 48. Positions for all 29,460 places from the MIT-licensed US Cities Database — no selection, so there is no question of which were left out. Populations joined by name from the plotly sample datasets, which matched 2,417 of them; dot size follows population where it is known and is drawn at the minimum otherwise. Only the fifty largest carry names, so the points stay readable once the expanded copy doubles them. State outlines from MappingAPI.

What it does and does not show

The map is an analogy and it has a false note, worth saying plainly: a country is not expanding, and Chicago and Denver are not receding from one another. What carries over is the geometry. Multiply every separation by the same factor and each point sees everything else move away from it, at a rate proportional to how far off it was — that is Hubble's law, and it holds whether the points are cities or galaxies.

What the map makes obvious, and the sky does not, is that you cannot tell from the pattern which point was chosen. Every city sees the same thing. There is no privileged city, and no edge to run out to — the expansion is a property of the spacing, not of a place. That is the whole content of the statement that the Big Bang had no center, and it is why the question “where did it happen” has no answer of the form “over there”.

Elsewhere on this site