Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999
The Black Hole of Cosmology
Thomas M. Miovas, Jr.
>From: Stephen Speicher
>
>Also--and I have said this before--when cosmologists speak of
>this expansion of the universe, they do not mean that galaxies
>are moving outward into 'empty' space, they mean that space
>itself is expanding. They don't even mean that the distance
>between each atom is growing larger, they mean that the universe
>is itself growing as a large scale structure. There is no need
>to attempt to justify this nonsense.
As I understand this, it's all based on the red-shifting of
light from distant bright objects (usually galaxies). As with
the sound Doppler shift, it is thought that as objects move away
from us at tremendous speeds their light is "pulled out" or
"elongated" into a lower frequency. And there is a correlation
between distance and red-shifting, leading some scientists to
conclude that the further away distant galaxies are, the faster
they are moving away from us because their light is more greatly
red-shifted compared to closer distant galaxies.
Some scientists, with the help of Relativity, conclude that
space is expanding, thereby stretching out the light. The light
that has traveled a further distance through space is stretched
more than light that has traveled a lesser distance, giving a
correlation between distance and red-shifting.
I've always wondered about this, however. Why don't at least
some scientists conclude that light naturally red-shifts as it
propagates? This would maintain the distance to red-shift ratio,
but would not require the universe to be expanding by either the
galaxies moving away from one another at tremendous speeds or by
having space expand. Sounds more reasonable to me, so why is
this idea rejected? If you say there is no evidence for it, I
say the evidence is the correlation between red-shifting and
distance. Sometimes I think scientists have a hold-over from
entrenched Platonism, whereby light is sacrosanct and therefore
can not change, in and of itself, as it propagates.
