🚀 go-pugleaf

http://io9.com/5528758/ask-a-physicist-why-believe-in-dark-matter
"And don't even get me started about Dark Energy. It's the stuff that
accelerates the universe, and if you think you've got a problem with
Dark Matter, wait'll you see Dark Energy. It's no so much that we
don't understand where Dark Energy could come from; it's just that the
"natural" value (the one that comes out of reasonable assumptions
based on vacuum energy) is about 10^100 times the density that we
actually observe. For my money, this is the absolute biggest problem
in physics."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

An explanation of the Hubble redshift that might be referred to as
"the elastic wavelength explanation":

http://www.littleindia.com/news/143/ARTICLE/6359/2010-04-06.html
"When light begins its long journey from an exploding supernova, it
has to confront an expanding universe along its path. This expansion
of pace "redshifts" the light waves. In other words, the wavelength of
light is stretched to the red end of the spectrum. The level of
redshift and the distance of the explosion allow us to measure the
rate of the expansion of the universe. These observational data form a
large number of supernovae record the expansion history of the
universe. Some unknown force is prompting the acceleration. This force
is greater than that neutralizing the combined gravitational pull of
normal and dark matter. This discovery wasn't cause for celebration
among astronomers - rather it was shocking."

The "unknown force" (Dark Energy) may be "shocking" but Einsteinians
know it is a fantastic money-spinner:

http://www.physorg.com/news179508040.html
"More than a dozen ground-based Dark Energy projects are proposed or
under way, and at least four space-based missions, each of the order
of a billion dollars, are at the design concept stage."

Billions are billions and yet, late at night, alone in beds,
Einsteinians indulge in blasphemy: something in the vacuum seems to be
responsible for slowing down the speed of light (sorry, Divine Albert)
and this, combined with the formula:

(frequency) = (speed of light)/(wavelength)

gives an explanation of the Hubble redshift much more reasonable than
the elastic wavelength explanation:

http://www.littleindia.com/news/143/ARTICLE/6359/2010-04-06.html
"This repulsive background energy associated with the empty space
could be dark energy. However, there is no compelling evidence for
that claim. The theoretical calculations suggest that the amount of
vacuum energy is too high for reasonable explanations. Emptiness is
not a true void as was deemed in the past. Quantum theory considers a
vacuum as a pool of virtual particles rapidly popping in and out of
existence. The particles and energy incarnate inside the so-called
emptiness as a result of invisible interactions."

http://www.sciscoop.com/2008/10
"Does the apparently constant speed of light change over the vast
stretches of the universe? Would our understanding of black holes,
ancient supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, the origins of the
universe and its ultimate fate be different if the speed of light were
not constant?.....Couldn't it be that the supposed vacuum of space is
acting as an interstellar medium to lower the speed of light like some
cosmic swimming pool? If so, wouldn't a stick plunged into the pool
appear bent as the light is refracted and won't that affect all our
observations about the universe. I asked theoretical physicist Leonard
Susskind, author of The Black Hole War, recently reviewed in Science
Books to explain this apparent anomaly....."You are entirely right,"
he told me, "there are all sorts of effects on the propagation of
light that astronomers and astrophysicists must account for. The point
of course is that they (not me) do take these effects into account and
correct for them." "In a way this work is very heroic but unheralded,"
adds Susskind, "An immense amount of extremely brilliant analysis has
gone into the detailed corrections that are needed to eliminate these
'spurious' effects so that people like me can just say 'light travels
with the speed of light.' So, there you have it. My concern about
cosmic swimming pools and bent sticks does indeed apply, but
physicists have taken the deviations into account so that other
physicists, such as Susskind, who once proved Stephen Hawking wrong,
can battle their way to a better understanding of the universe."

http://www.springerlink.com/content/w6777w07xn737590/fulltext.pdf
Astrophys Space Sci (2009) 323: 205211
Misconceptions about the Hubble recession law
Wilfred H. Sorrell
"The question is this: Do astronomical observations necessarily
support the idea of an expanding universe? Almost all cosmologists
believe as sacrosanct that the Hubble recession law was directly
inferred from astronomical observations. As this belief might be ill-
founded... (...) It turns out that the Hubble recession law was not
directly inferred from astronomical observations. The Hubble recession
law was directly inferred from the ad hoc assumption that the observed
spectroscopic redshifts of distant galaxies may be interpreted as
ordinary Doppler shifts. The observational techniques used by Hubble
led to the empirical discovery of a linear dependence of redshift on
distance. Based upon these historical considerations, the first
conclusion of the present study is that astronomical evidence in favor
of an expanding universe is circumstantial at best. The past eight
decades of astronomical observations do not necessarily support the
idea of an expanding universe. (...) Reber (1982) made the interesting
point that Edwin Hubble was not a promoter of the expanding universe
idea. Some personal communications from Hubble reveal that he thought
a model universe based upon the tired-light hypothesis is more simple
and less irrational than a model universe based upon an expanding
space-time geometry. The second conclusion of the present study is
that the model Hubble diagram for a static (tired-light) cosmology
gives a good fit to the Type Ia supernova data shown in Fig. 2. This
observational test of a static (tired-light) cosmology model also
proves that it is wholly possible to explain the supernovae data
without requiring any flat Friedmann model universe undergoing
acceleration."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,757145,00.html
Monday, Dec. 14, 1936: "Other causes for the redshift were suggested,
such as cosmic dust or a change in the nature of light over great
stretches of space. Two years ago Dr. Hubble admitted that the
expanding universe might be an illusion, but implied that this was a
cautious and colorless view. Last week it was apparent that he had
shifted his position even further away from a literal interpretation
of the redshift, that he now regards the expanding universe as more
improbable than a non-expanding one."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26essay.html
"The worrying continued. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist from Arizona
State, said that most theories were wrong. "We get the notions they
are right because we keep talking about them," he said. Not only are
most theories wrong, he said, but most data are also wrong..."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have
suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big
issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the
mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is
pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/87150187.html
"Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe (...) "We have a
complete inventory of the universe," Sean Carroll, a California
Institute of Technology cosmologist, has said, "and it makes no
sense."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com