From: Andrew Clough (aclough@mit.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 15 2002 - 11:31:21 MDT
At 10:17 PM 8/15/2002 +1000, you wrote:
>At 07:57 AM 8/15/02 EDT, Mitch wrote:
>
> >The balloon analogy, that astronomers frequently use, really stinks.
>
>True. The simplification they should stick to, although maybe it's regarded
>as too `girly' (ugh, *cooking*, we don't need to know about no steenking
>*cooking*) is the cake or fruitloaf that expands in all directions as it's
>heated and cooked, moving all the raisins apart from each other in an
>unprejudiced way; the raisins, like galaxies, retain their integrity.
>
>Damien Broderick
There does seem to be a difference between the two analogies, though. If
an ant walks along the outside of a balloon for far enough, it will
eventally come back to where it started. On the other hand, an ant
tunnelling through a fruitcake will eventually get to the outside of the
fruitcake. As far as I've heard (and I'd welcome someone who knows more
about cosmology weighing in here) the balloon analogy is better in this
sense. The fruitcake does have the advantage of being three dimensional
though, so I guess its really a trade off of "Unreachable outside" vs. "3-D."
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