Word: bondie
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Last spring, British Mathematicians Raymond A. Lyttleton and Hermann Bondi attributed the expansion of the universe to the presence of thin hydrogen gas between the galaxies, suggesting that the hydrogen atoms may have slight positive charges and therefore push one another apart by electrostatic repulsion (TIME, June 22). A still-later theory comes from Professors Thomas Gold of Cornell and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge. England. Gold and Hoyle also think that the mysterious force comes from intergalactic hydrogen gas, but they argue that its urge to expand comes from high temperature, not from electrical repulsion...
...page paper, Lyttleton and Bondi suggest that it is the protons that have the bigger charges. In a "smoothed-out" universe of newly created hydrogen, the atoms will all be slightly positive, and they will repel one another by electrostatic force, as all objects do when they have the same kind of electric charge. Thus the smoothed-out universe of hydrogen must expand as fast as it is created...
Peaceful Condensation. The real universe is not a smoothed-out gas. It contains condensations: galaxies and clusters of galaxies, each made of billions of stars and surrounded by clouds of gas. Inside these units, say Lyttleton and Bondi, there is no electrostatic repulsion. Instead, some of the hydrogen atoms between the stars are ionized (i.e., separated into a proton and an electron) by light and other radiation. These ions form a kind of electrical conductor: free protons move to the outside of the unit until they have carried away enough positive electricity to make the interior electrically neutral...
Lyttleton and Bondi believe that cosmic rays are the protons that were expelled from galactic units to make their interiors electrostatically neutral. Those expelled from big units have the highest energy, perhaps many billion billion volts. They cross intergalactic space at close to the speed of light. They are not bothered much by the thin hydrogen gas between the units; they can travel through it for trillions of years without encountering anything that will check their progress...
Lyttleton and Bondi challenge physicists to devise experiments that can measure the charges of protons and electrons with new precision. If the charges prove to differ, the difference will explain both the expanding universe and cosmic rays...