Bulging Earth:
The world is bulging if you mean the population is excessive; I think most people would understand that and many would agree. But the solid earth beneath our feet, that’s supposed to stay the same size, give or take tiny amounts of rock coming in from space and instruments sent outward.
First let me remind you that there is a theory I spoke of
http://nobabies.net/Open%20letter%20to%20Kip%20Thorne%20about%20black%20holes.html
in which time is proceeding in the opposite direction from what we generally assume. At the time it had been noticed that something in the accretion disc around a “black hole” was moving outward rather than inward in contradiction to what anybody but I would have expected.
There is another possible test I dreamt up all those long years ago when I was interested in such matters. My observation was that the Atlantic was widening at a known rate. If you used the Hubble constant, predicts how fast a galaxy must be scooting away from us given its distance, and calculate how fast Europe should be speeding away according to the same rule, the match is pretty close.
If it’s the same process and going on at the same speed then one ought to be forgiven for wondering whether it is due to the same mechanism. The Atlantic should be spreading for cosmic rather than geologic reasons. Sure it sounds mad. It would require that at the core of the earth, and more likely at the core of the sun, stuff is being pushed out in ordinary time because it is being swallowed in reversed time. The whole universe according to that logic is obliged to accumulate information as we approach the Big Bang, also getting hotter and more crowded, and in some places cramming matter down black holes.
So if you could make an actual measurement of the diameter of the earth and watched it for a while you should see it expanding as we get farther away from the Big Bang. Such a measurement would be difficult because the earth does seem to be a bunch of relatively light continental plates and relatively heavy oceanic plates drifting around on a liquid mantle and bumping into each other so that one slides beneath the other or getting pulled apart so that new ocean floor is created by magma coming up through the cracks. There are many plates, and the speed with which they move is on the same order as the expected (Well I’m not sure I really expect it. Let’s say the “calculated.”) the calculated cosmic effect.
Since nobody with resources is going to look for such an effect nobody is going to look for it. For decades I have wondered whether somebody might stumble on such a phenomenon.
That stumble may be coming soon. (Mansi M. Kasliwal Seeing Gravitational Waves SCIENCE vol. 340 no. 6132 May 3, 2013 page 555) The search is on for “gravitational waves” caused by such things as merging black holes. Something out there moves and the gravity here jiggles. If it were a big jiggle you could detect it by having a big field with beacons around the edge and watching optically while those beacons moved relative to each other. Such a technology would be inadequate, but they are pushing in the same direction, talking about accuracy of a billionth of a nanometer over a distance of a kilometer. Don’t worry. That’s really accurate. And they are talking about using three to five instruments so as to make the baseline instead of a field to be the whole earth.
Well when I recalculate the rate the earth would be expanding if it is doing so as a cosmic phenomenon I get about .69 inches per year. That’s a lot bigger than a billionth of a nanometer. So they could be looking at a time of frustration. Having calculated how all the tectonic plates of the earth’s crust are caroming around they will set it up so that everything is balanced and the instruments are, after suitable corrections, at rest with respect to each other. And that, a few years hence, will be a moment of truth.
However it works out there will be little of practical value coming from it. It might be necessary to re-tweak our GPS systems. Boffins will shout themselves hoarse. But that’s all in the normal course of events. What it will mean to our long term fate is a different matter, but I shall try to leave that for the time, should it come, when lots of people get surprised.
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