“YOUR waistline may be spreading but you can’t blame it on the expansion of the universe.” So says Richard Price, a physicist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, who has worked out that while some objects are stretched by cosmological expansion, others are not.
Cosmologists have long accepted that the universe is expanding, causing galaxies to spread apart like raisins in a rising loaf of bread, as the space between them stretches. But while Price was teaching a summer course, a question from a high-school student floored him. “He asked me if, as space expands, we all get bigger…
