BADecker, if you think "flatness" doesn't really exist, then get ready for a mental curveball...
The universe is the biggest thing we can conceive and perceive. And by all accounts, it's flat as a pancake. Same goes for many (most?) galaxies - circular, yes, but flat. So, on the contrary, when you look at the big scale of things, you end up with flat things, not spherical things.
You talk so silly. Pancakes have thickness, even as do lenticular galaxies. But the stars in those galaxies are globular, even if they are not spherical.
"But average all those small-scale effects out and look at the big picture. When we examine very old light — say, the cosmic microwave background — that has been traveling the universe for more than 13.8 billion years, we get a true sense of the universe's shape.
And the answer, as far as we can tell, to within an incredibly small margin of uncertainty, is that the universe is flat."
Quoted from: "The Universe is Flat - Now What?" -
https://www.space.com/34928-the-universe-is-flat-now-what.htmlAnybody can write or say just about anything. All you need to do is look in any direction at night to see stars. They are far enough away that without special calc and equipment, we can't tell how far. No flatness there.
BB theory and 13 to 14 billion years is all fun and stuff. But just like flat earth, so far it is fictional.
When you get into atomic theory, it's very easy to think that atoms and/or subatomic particles are spherical, but much harder to prove. In fact, science says that only certain atoms are roughly spherical, the light ones. And that's a guess at best.
Here's an interesting quote from a science forum discussion on whether atoms are spherical or not:
"Not only is it not technically possible to make those measurements, quantum mechanics itself forbids such measurements at the atomic level.
An atom not only is "not" spherical, the very idea of "shape" is meaningless here. You might as well ask what color an atom is!"
http://www.sciforums.com/threads/are-atoms-spherical.25576/By the same logic, there is no 3rd dimension. By the same logic, there is no thickness. By that logic, the earth is flat, the sky is flat, and we are flat, right in between. No dome. However, to all appearances in everyday life, there is no flat.
Consider graphene. One molecule "thick." Not flat. Thick.
Chemistry textbooks typically include illustrations of atoms, but with caveats. The drawings depict atomic nuclei surrounded by electron orbitals—fuzzy spheres, barbells, tripods, and so on—but those figures represent the probability of finding an electron at a certain place around the nucleus rather than an actual “shape.” Researchers have now managed to image the electron orbitals and show for the first time that, in a sense, atoms really look like those textbook images.
...
The pictures look, well, textbook, although only the outermost orbitals appear, which shroud the inner orbitals and the nuclei. By changing the intensity of the current, the team could switch the energy of the last atom’s outermost electron from a lower level to a higher level. Correspondingly, the shape of the orbital changed from spherical to barbell, as theory predicts. The group also observed electrons switching spontaneously from one state to another—for reasons that are unclear, Mikhailovskij says—and stranger shapes that may result from the presence of impurities, in the form of other atoms such as hydrogen. The results are in the October Physical Review B.
When you search for it, you find that there are shapes that are not flat. But you never find anything that is absolutely flat.