In my previous post I lampooned the Washington Post article that heralded an assumed fact that the entire universe would soon quit accelerating and may even decelerate. Sometimes one has to visualize what is being said to get the joke. There was an unimaginably large and massive universe, that at some point decided to accelerate its expansion, but now seems to be recanting that decision and may relax back to its usual universal expansion. You don’t think that’s a joke? If you’re not laughing at this now, I conclude you’re stupid. Well… that may be a little harsh. No one wants to be the only one in a convention hall teeming with tenured talent, laughing. And there might be facts associated with wanting you papers published, which is how you keep food on your family. So there are those obscure reasons for not laughing. But it is rather funny, right?
For those of you who still don’t get the joke or just want more justification for laughing, let me explain it as simply as I can: Hubble discovered that the spectra of galaxies were becoming increasingly redshifted as a function of their distance from us. The functionality seemed linear out to a few megaparsecs, but there is the fact that the logarithm and other functions are linear for small values. Distance was assessed by their faintness of galaxy spectra using the time-honored inverse square reduction of light intensity. The question became, “Why does the spectra change at all?” Every physicist was familiar with the recessional Doppler redshift effect and, try as they might, no one could come up with any other reasonable alternative explanation. “Tired light theories” were lampooned as attempts by naive crackpot physicists to shed light on any other alternative explanation. They just couldn’t handle the real world… well, universe. Meanwhile Einstein had misinterpretted the Poisson equation (using invalid assumptions and boundary conditions) to conclude that the entire universe had to be collapsing. So he introduced a kluge term to save our universe from that calamity. But following Hubble’s discovery he acknowledged that introducing the kluge had been an error that was unnecessary since the universe had begun with an initial expansion and Poisson’s equation could only be used to slow it down. So the Big Bang and an expanding universe were conceived and redshift became a measure of the supposed expansion. I say ‘supposed’ because it was the evolving model that was expanding, not the universe.
No measurement other than redshifted spectra of galaxies suggests that velocity has anything to do with what is observed; cosmological redshift is a distance-dependent phenomena. The only thing close to such a velocity-related measurement is the centrifugal motion of galaxies in clusters and stars within massive galaxies. And when these measurements were compared with the otherwise determined masses of the clusters and galaxies, the necessary velocities required orders of magnitude more mass than was observed, so unobserved mass had to be invented without the thermodynamic properties of ordinary matter, so it has become familiar as ‘dark matter’. And that’s the closest excuse you will find for cosmological redshift being associated with recessional velocity.
Surely at some point you’re starting to get the joke.
Okay. Let me throw you a bone and repeat the quote from Geller and Peebles (1972) that I included in the previous post.
“… the reasons for the widespread acceptance of the expansion hypothesis is the lack of a reasonable alternative basis for redshift…We ask whether a tired-light cosmology can do as well. If it cannot, the result may be interpreted as evidence for expansion. Of course, the evidence would not be conclusive, for in the absence of even a tentative physical basis for the tired-light effect we are free to add as many embellishments as necessary to secure agreement with observation. Therefore, adequate establishment of the case is a matter of judgment.”
Of course, as I told you in the previous post, “This is logic gone amok!“
Since you didn’t get the joke, I suppose you accept Geller and Peeble’s feeble logic at face value. Okay. Let’s address their excuse for accepting such bad logic, which is, “the lack of a reasonable alternative basis for redshift.”
There is a reasonable alternative: The plasma scattering model whose predictions I showed in the previous post, that did not require the universe to hop up and down just to fit a model. It is reasonable for you to not take my word for it. I could have just taken a marker and drawn a curve that fit the data (much better than any standard model) just to fool you as some kind of alternative perverse joke. But I didn’t. Those were actual plots based on a mathematical model that was derived from the data and accepted physical theory of high temperature intergalactic plasma and its affect on light passing through it.
In subsequent posts I’ll present a summary of the derivation of plasma scattering model and demonstrable effects.
But it’s still a joke complete with logic gone amok.
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