is it true dinosaurs were the size of peas?

I’m not mad, I just like a good sensationalist topic title and I’m basing this on one of those ideas you run across as a child that just sticks in your head. What I mean is that given that the universe is expanding “like the surface of an inflating balloon” since the big bang, how is it doing so? Is it that:

A) Just the universe is expanding, ie the space between galaxies is expanding and they are all getting furher away from each other, or

B) same as above, except that galaxies are also expanding, with planets and systems growing further apart, or

C) same as above, except that everything is growing further apart from everything else, every piece of matter is getting stretch away from every other bit slowly, that atoms are further spaced apart than they were millions of years ago or

D) same as above, only this means that because of this action dinosaurs really were in absolute terms the size (taking up the same area of space fabric) of modern peas (to use an arbitray amount - the actual amount doesn’t matter so much as whether the effect exists at all).

Hopefully someone into cosmology or similar can clear this up for me :slight_smile:

Dan

So you’re saying “if the universe is expanding, and every object within it including our measuring instruments is expanding at the same rate, would we notice?”

I think the idea of universal expansion is that the distance between objects on a galactic scale is increasing, not that the distance between particles on a sub-atomic scale is. I’m pretty sure that a bananna today is the same size as a bananna would have been had they existed in the same form 300 million years ago.

Well, asking, not saying, but yes that’s the general question I’m asking, since space is stretching due the the big band is everything getting further apart?

Dan

IANAPhysicist but I’ll venture a guess …

As far as I know A with a slice of B, basically there are things that are held together by gravity and other forces, as these forces are fairly stable and strong at small(ish) distances things like solar systems and galaxies stay mostly as they are. The space between galaxies and solar systems is what is increasing.

If this where to happen then the laws of physics would have to be changing or we’d need other laws to fix the problems with things falling apart (due to gravity and other forces being too weak to keep things together).

SD

When we talk about the universe expanding, we generally are assuming that the fundamental constants which control the strength of gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force (etc.) are unchanged. Yes, there are some current theories which postulate that the constants may have changed since the Big Bang, but those theories aren’t meant to address the fundamentals of Hubble expansion.

Therefore, tightly bound objects (like nuclei, atoms, molecules, and solids/liquids) would not have expanded. Their sizes [bond lengths] are unchanged. Very large, less tightly bound objects, like galaxies and local galactic clusters will have been large enogh to experience some expansion as the universe expanded, but their properties would also change (i.e. they would assume the shapes and behaviors of less dense galaxies, because they would interact more weakly internally on average) When we get to extremely large features, like galactic sheets and voids, there is very little long-diastance interaction between objects to begin with (try measuring or calculating the pull of even a nearby star, much less galaxy)

On scales larger than a solar scale (e.g. a gaseous cloud condenssing into a star and planet) the higher density of the early universe meant conditions were very different, so astronomical structures evolved differently (also, the amounts of various elements were different, before stellar fusion from early generations of stars produced heavy elements beyond hydrogen and a trace of helium)

The expansion in the mere hundred million or so since the dinosaurs hasn’t been enough time to really do all that much expansion. Also, Hubble’s constant (which can be used to estimate the rate of expansion) has decreased, as the average velocity of various astronomic objects is decreased from their initial Big Bang values, due to mutual gravitation. (As the “rubber band” between galaxies got stretched, the galaxies losewed down)

The time since the era of the dinosaurs was about 2/3-3/4 of 1% of the time since the Big Bang, but the net expansion since then was even less. In the late 20th century, Hubbles “constant” was estimated as 50-100 km/sec per megaparsec. (the best current esitmate seems to be 72 +/-8 ). Since a megaparsec is 3x10^19 km, you can see that the expansion is very slow indeed, even over very large distances [This is a crude impression, complicated by the fact that we can only observe very distant objects where they were, and as they were, hundreds of millions of years ago. – on year per light year of distance)

[QUOTE=KP]
When we talk about the universe expanding…QUOTE]

Dammit. An excellent answer, thanks, its just disappointing there weren’t pea-sized dinosaurs :smiley:

I did consider attraction between atoms etc, but I wasn’t sure whether this was important - ie whether the stretching of space fabric was stretching not just the absolute size of the space between the atoms (ie, causing them to be further apart, causing less gravity, causing things to fall apart) but was stretching the atoms themselves too, such that everything was simply getting scaled up gradually.

I blame it on the darned baloon analogy. Never show kids a simple analogy for such a complicated reality! Thanks for setting this straight in my head.

Dan

There were some small dinos. Until recently, Compsognathus at 1m long and 2.5kg was considered the smallest “non-avian” dinosaur, but recently Chinese scientists have described the even smaller Microraptor at 39cm. I’d guess they’d have been pea-sized during embryological development.

Let’s see . … Twenty years ago, I was a size 6. Now I’m a size 12. I’d say your theory definitely has some validity.

Yes, but the peas were huge.
RR

Thank you KP.

I was about to post a similar question and now I’ve gotten a solid answer.