Talk:2516: Hubble Tension

Having noticed that 85 KPH is slower than 85 MPH, it took me a while to work out that 85 MPH is much slower than 68 km/s (and I was blindly assuming that the universe is at least one megaparsec in radius), after which the title-text joke started making sense. Congratulations on being almost too subtle for me.00:46, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Is the 85 mph number significant in any way? Why does "Dave" who points radar guns in random directions get this number? 108.162.245.167 03:41, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Well, it's probably over the speed limit in most places. Maybe Dave is a traffic cop? --172.68.129.137 04:55, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the explanation only explains the things everyone can read on the internet anyway. 85 mph or 85 km/h have the wrong unit, because for the expansion speed we need to look at two points of space, measure how fast they move away from each other. Obviously this should be a number that increases linearly with the distance of the two points (if space is created equally everywhere in the universe). Thus the 85 km/h misses the length. Is the joke here that a random dudes results are reported equally (false equivalence)? --162.158.93.142 04:41, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Dave again: "But when they hit 88 mph, we're gonna see some REALLY weird shit!" RAGBRAIvet (talk) 06:50, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Just a thought: maybe Dave is talking about Fords Galaxies? -- 162.158.183.222 08:39, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

I had already added that before I saw your comment. --Kynde (talk) 10:37, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Relating (coincidentally) with several of the above comments, I added in a "what Dave could be measuring" paragraph (ultimately: just traffic!), via a diversion where I totally messed up a factor and it sent me down a rabbithole of completely the wrong distance! ((Sanity-check my new figures, please: e.g. 85mph => ~0.038km/s => ~0.0005588(of the 68km/s/Mpc figure) => therefore 558.8pc, etc and onwards)) Anyway, perhaps Dave just is/wants to be a traffic-cop? (If you can find humour in the 'all directions' - presumably away from - then obviously supercede the 'both directions' bit.) 172.70.134.47 09:16, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

I believe a radar speed gun pointed at the sky would actually display something like "no reading" when it doesn't receive any radar echo, rather than 85 miles/h. It wouldn't do to fine drivers for speeding when the measurement fails. 162.158.183.208 09:39, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Dave is measuring Ford Galaxies that are all speeding away from him, either way too fast, or if kph just moderately speed for a normal road between cities. --Kynde (talk) 10:37, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Unless it is actual some kind of a Ford MPV Owners' Club 'burn out' session of some kind, I read it as more general "large, relatively unwieldy family-style vehicle passing in conspicuous quantities and not actually holding up the rest of the traffic" rather than truly committing traffic violations (in excess of any other vehicle on the road). To "book it" is to hurry, but (more colloquial understandings allowing) more as in the "not dawdling" sense. (They'd be noteworthy only for narrative punning reasons, really, as one of the comic's hooks. But that's only meta.)

Though (outwith the most obviously speed-trapped areas) my personal experience is indeed that driving at the posted speed limit often means being treated as an inconvenient mobile-roadblock, by more than half the rest of the vehicles that come up behind and tailgate or pass, I would still consider hugging-the-limit (whatever it is) as going fast and not actually slow. 162.158.159.11 12:49, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

I think we've missed an important joke in the last panel. Dave says the galaxies are moving at 85mph/kph and "booking it". However, KM/S/Mpc is going to be on the scale of several thousand times faster than 85mph/kph. Dave's reference to "booking it" is actually moving quite slow. Pconwell (talk) 12:57, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Dave is used to measuring car speeds, and 85 MPH is very fast (significantly over the speed limit) in most places. The joke is that he's totally out of context and measuring the wrong thing, but it happens to be a number in the same ballpark as the Hubble Constant. Of course, this is just a coincidence, since the units are different. Barmar (talk) 14:20, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

How is the expansion rate different from an acceleration? The (correct) units surprise me. 172.70.130.87 14:15, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

In acceleration, the velocity increases over time. In expansion, the velocity increases over distance. Barmar (talk) 14:20, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

With all this talk about units, I would like to mention that Google ever-so-helpfully says that 1 km/s/Mpc is "3.24077929e-20 hertz". 172.70.126.195 16:22, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

I see two things to comment on about Dave's response. First, if everything measured always shows the same velocity, then the "per megaparsec" part of the result becomes largely irrelevant, as Dave's results are the same regardless of this value. This means that Dave's results are "it doesn't matter how far away, it is all 85 MPH!" If taken seriously, this would be a challenge to the standard model of an expanding universe much bigger than the actually existing controversy.

Second, I believe the joke here is that Dave's radar gun is a police model that consistently reports that anything being measured is speeding. A recurring accusation, and occasional actual problem that requires police radar units to be tested regularly to avoid, is that radar guns that report speeds higher than they actually are are used to issue tickets unfairly. When used as an accusation, or in fictional media, it sometimes comes with an accusation that this happens with the full knowledge of a cop who cares more about issuing tickets than doing his job properly. In this case it appears that either every Ford Galaxy, all traffic, or even possibly the sky itself, is consistently "speeding" in this fashion.Geek Prophet (talk) 20:34, 16 September 2021 (UTC)

Dave's radar could have been pointed at a Galaxie: https://mystarcollectorcar.com/the-out-of-this-world-ford-galaxie1959-to-1974/ 172.70.178.191 09:09, 17 September 2021 (UTC)