I'm Not a Physicist, But I Play One in My Head.......

Naming the stuff of the final frontier

I am not a physicist as the title to this piece suggests.  I'm a writer.  That said, since when has a lack of credentials ever stopped a writer from naming things. The term "robot" was invented by a writer. A "waldo" is a mechanical hand, named after a sci-fi story by Robert A. Heinlein.  Writers also gave us words like zero-G, gas giant, terraform, android and its diminutive form - "droid", deep space, computer "virus" and a host of other words.  Even the very idea of orbiting telecommunications satellites, sprang from the mind of a scientist turned writer, the inimitable Arthur C. Clark of "2001 a Space Odyssey" fame.

So in the grand tradition of writers poking their noses into areas they know only enough about to get themselves confused, I am proposing a new handy term for physicists to use for something they don't yet understand.  I know, thoughtful of me, right? 

Here's the problem.  The universe seems to be expanding at a rate that is not so fast that it tears itself apart, nor so slow that gravity collapses everything in on itself but at a speed which, for the sake of a stable cosmos, is "just right".  Physicists have a lot of theories about why this is so, but they don't have a really good term for it, so I am wading into the fray to help at least give us a working word to use when we're talking about it.

I propose we call this "just right" speed of cosmological acceleration the "Goldilocks Expansion Constant". I know, cool right - the whole fairy tale imagery and stuff?

And as to all that so-called "dark energy" they say is driving the Goldilocks Constant?

I call Him God. 

© 2013 by Tom King