Smorgasbord for Thought..

[baudrunner]

I think a good background for this month's theme might be provided by a visit to Baudrunner's Space wherein I have posted a few short articles on this very subject. A site search for expanding Universe produces this link: a collection of discussions which deal with the concept of the expanding Universe.

I received a favorable email response from Brian Schmidt, the renowned Australian astronomer and primary recipient of the Gruber Prize for Astronomy for his proof of the accelerating expanding Universe, when I pointed out that reality might very well be an illusion, provable by a simple demonstration using an elastic band, a ruler, and a ball-point pen.

It should be noted that physicists and astronomers are like doctors: no doctor or medicine actually promises a cure for anything, that the objective of medical treatment is only to alleviate suffering. Likewise, the jury is still out, and might be forever, on the subject of the fundamental nature of reality and of creation.

[neutralino]

Erm.. I hate to burst your bubble, but Schmidt's response is merely saying that lambdaCDM could be wrong, but he doesn't say that you are correct in your thought experiment. The point is that Hubble's law does say that the further away something is, the faster it is recessing. However, it has also been shown that Hubble's law is only valid for small red-shifts (i.e. objects close by). More recent data has shown that for larger redshifts, the objects do not obey hubble's law and thus we come to the conclusion that the universe is accelerating in its expansion.

[baudrunner]

Thank you for your timely response. My answer to you is a suggestion that you read my post Dark energy = dark understanding, which proposes a perfectly viable alternative -- and most likely correct -- explanation for the ambiguity of the observed Doppler anomaly.

[neutralino]

Your theory is basically a "tired-light" theory. These came around in the 1920's, but no-one really takes them seriously anymore. See this page, off Ned Wright's website: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm

[baudrunner]

Refutations of "Tired-light theory" are based on the assumption that the photon is a particle responsible for illumination and it travels across vast distances unimpeded until they strike the eyes, whereas in reality we exist in a quantum Universe comprised of localised deBroglie wave interactions where a photon is merely represented by the amount of energy required to effect a transitional/semi-transitional change in electron cloud behaviour - ie. oscillation of the outermost electron shell/cloud. Your eyes are merely EM wave detectors tuned to the visible range in the optical spectrum and light hue and intensity are just interpretations of the brain as a function of EM wave characteristics modulated on the particles of the transmitting medium. Hysteresis effects are measurable in the laboratory and need to be accounted for in engineering. The Universe is just one great big laboratory.