| I came up with the analogy of 2 pairs of independent dancers on a large checkerboard floor. Lets say the tiles are 10cm^2 and the two couples start out 10 tiles apart. Every second, the tiles on the floor push away from all their neighboring tiles by one tile width and new tiles appear in their place. The tiles are small enough that the dancers are easily able to adjust their step/grip on eachother to simply maintain their dance routine. However, even tho the dancers can stay together, the couples drift apart at an ever increasing rate. They start 10 tiles apart, after one second the couples will be 20 tiles apart from eachother, 40 tiles apart after 2 seconds, 80 tiles apart after 3 seconds (a new tile is being inserted between each pair of existing tiles). My tiling math is probably slightly off, but I think this illustrates the exponential increase in expansion. The dancers are quarks, atoms, molecules, planets, galaxies, etc. Their grip on eachother is big enough to overcome the relatively small adjustment in the space that was created between them. A few questions using this analogy arise. Do the new tiles actually appear between the dancers, or is it more a case of the force of friction the dancers are applying to the floor prevents those tiles between them from moving apart ? So when 'new space' is being created, is it created around strongly bound things and the things simply slide around through this new space to maintain their current configuration, or do the 'strong' forces prevent new space being formed around them ? If the new space is not being created, what happens to the energy that would have gone into the creation of the new space ? Does it simply get applied to the nearest point where it can squeeze in more space ? If the space is being created and the dancers pull themselves together to overcome it, where does this extra energy come from ? As for the big rip, I always thought it was the equivalent to the dancers finally getting tired and not being able to hold onto eachother hence giving in to the expansion of space. ie. It happens around the heat death of the universe when everything has dissipated its kinetic energy so much that the energy of the expansion is more than is left in the system to keep things together. |