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Title: You can’t blame the cosmos for your fat ass anymore. Post by: koboshi on October 01, 2005, 08:06:18 PM Quote Cosmic expansion is not to blame for expanding waistlines 09:58 01 October 2005 NewScientist.com news service Zeeya Merali "YOUR waistline may be spreading but you can't blame it on the expansion of the universe." So says Richard Price, a physicist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, who has worked out that while some objects are stretched by cosmological expansion, others are not. Cosmologists have long accepted that the universe is expanding, causing galaxies to spread apart like raisins in a rising loaf of bread, as the space between them stretches. But while Price was teaching a summer course, a question from a high-school student floored him. "He asked me if, as space expands, we all get bigger too," says Price. "I knew the standard answer was 'no', but I couldn't explain why not. And when I consulted my colleagues, neither could they." Since atoms are made up mostly of empty space, with electrons "orbiting" the nucleus at distances typically many hundreds of times its diameter, it seemed reasonable to ask whether the electrons would be dragged away from the nucleus by the stretching of space. Price decided to examine the simplest system, that of a hydrogen atom, with one negative electron orbiting a positive proton. He found if the force involved - electromagnetic in the case of atoms - binding the system together is stronger than a certain critical value, the system will be entirely unaffected by the cosmological expansion (www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0508052). "This means that the solar system - which is quite tightly bound by gravity - doesn't expand. Your desk doesn't expand. Your dog doesn't expand," says Price. "But clusters of galaxies, which are only loosely bound by gravity, will feel this effect." Price also found that the atoms never experience just a little stretching - either they must totally ignore the expansion of the universe or they will be completely torn apart. "This all-or-nothing effect is a startling result," says Roy Maartens, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the UK. "This question has been knocking around since the 1930s, but nobody has found this before." Of course the, "Yo' momma's so fat that food is drawn to her by gravitational forces alone" insult is still up for debate. Title: Re: You can’t blame the cosmos for your fat ass anymore. Post by: Cheddar on October 01, 2005, 10:24:00 PM Explains my thighs. Which are purrrrfect.
Title: Re: You can’t blame the cosmos for your fat ass anymore. Post by: Llava on October 02, 2005, 12:24:01 AM I sorta thought that the idea was that everything else would get bigger too. So sure your waist gets bigger, but so does the rest of your body and everything AROUND your body, so as far as you can perceive nothing has changed.
Title: Re: You can’t blame the cosmos for your fat ass anymore. Post by: SurfD on October 02, 2005, 01:15:22 AM well, if that was true, then theoretically, no one would EVER know it was happening, so they couldnt prove it.
Think about it, EVERYTHING actually gradually increased in size in correspondingly equal ratios, then all our measuring equipment would also increase proportionally. If an "inch" gradually increased to 1.2 "inches" you wouldt really know, because your rulers would also have increased a correspondingly appropriate amount, so when you measuerd the newly longer "inch" your meauring equipment would still say it was an inch long...... or something like that. I would prefer to think that "space expanding" doesent really evenly distribute over everything (like painting something on a piece of rubber and then "stretching" it to expand the image) but rather is more like a container that gradually gets bigger, and things inside it proportionally shifting around inside the container relative to other things. The things themselves shouldnt get bigger, but the distances between them might. Title: Re: You can’t blame the cosmos for your fat ass anymore. Post by: El Gallo on October 03, 2005, 07:22:28 AM They call them fingers but I've never seen them fing. |