Article content

Whenever trying to grasp the expansion of the universe, the image of milk being poured into coffee inevitably comes to mind.

Heck, I’ve waded through Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein until my brain hurts, but just when I’m almost there back comes that darn cup of coffee imagery.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Nelson: Today's climate science can be tomorrow's mistake Back to video

If we, as part of the universe, are the white milk, then what’s the black coffee? Isn’t that universe too? After all, to be universal means to be everything so how can we expand into something if that very something, by definition, is already part of the everything?

Physicists will roll their eyes at such stupidity — the way I do when someone misuses an apostrophe. (We’ll ignore imbeciles who plonk down an exclamation mark to end every sentence then compound the horror by using at least three.)

But I digress. My concern isn’t so much the expansion itself but its speed. Not long ago we were assured by brilliant scientific minds this was slowing, but now we’re reliably informed, in fact, it’s speeding up.