I love hearing about science conspiracy theories. My new favorite, that I stumbled across the other day, is that Earth is increasing in size, and that expansion is the only plausible explanation for what looks like the continental drift.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjgidAICoQI&feature=related [no longer available]
This interests me because years ago I proposed a thought experiment about gravity, where I noted that if all matter in the universe were expanding, you would appear to be attracted to other objects when all that was happening is that those objects were growing and closing the space gaps between them.
Naturally there are many holes in this theory, including the lack of evidence that planets are getting larger. But now I discover this theory that the earth has indeed grown. And it must be true because it is on Youtube!
My theory of gravity held that if you and the earth were the only things in existence, and you both grew at the same time, you wouldn’t notice the growth because all the reference points are growing too.
One of the big criticisms to this theory is that mass would increase if size increased. Originally, I waved my hand at that problem and just said the theory includes an ongoing shift of the laws of physics to keep everything in balance, such as orbits and the relative strength of structures.
But isn’t the mass of earth increasing? People are being born and new trees are growing every day. Perhaps that increase in mass is borrowed from other places, such as dust landing here from space, but clearly some objects are gaining mass, as the expanding matter theory of gravity requires, and the source of that gain is not obvious to the eye.
For the expanding matter theory of gravity to be true, you’d expect some things to expand at different rates than others. That’s consistent with the youtube video on how the earth expanded while the land mass didn’t change much. It’s also consistent with the universe itself expanding, which we observe.
The expanding matter theory of gravity isn’t a serious one. It’s just a fun mental detour. And like all fringe theories, you can always find clues that make it seem as though it all fits together, so long as you don’t know too much about science.
[Question: Photons have mass. What happens when all those photons from the sun hit Earth? Does the mass stay here?]