Word: bondy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...Bondi, are backers of the theory of continuous creation, which holds that matter is still being created. The newly created matter is generally believed to appear throughout space in the form of hydrogen atoms (one proton and one electron each), but Gold and Hoyle now think it may first appear as neutrons. Since neutrons are unstable, they break up almost immediately, yielding equal numbers of protons and electrons. This neutron decay releases so much energy that the resulting "cosmological material" has the temperature...
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...