🚀 go-pugleaf

Dark minds make confessions:

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..."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

The only reason behind Dark Energy:

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."

Sometimes the correct solution to the problem (the speed of light
decreases with distance and this causes Hubble's redshift) is hinted
at in Einsteiniana but then billions may not come and Einsteinians
promise not to hint anymore:

http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2008/10/30/41323/484
"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."

In the end dark minds enter the stage and things get irreversible
(billions are guaranteed):

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."

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.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7522026/Hubble-telescope-shows-Universe-expansion-is-speeding-up-and-proves-Einsteins-theory.html
"And the astronomers found that the universe was growing faster and
faster with time, as predicted by Einstein in his theory of general
relativity. Scientists claim that the universe is made up of three
different components - normal matter, which is the physical objects in
the universe such as the planets - dark matter, which is invisible
matter that creates the gravitational pull that causes galaxies to
form - and an unknown energy referred to as "dark energy", the force
which causes the universe to expand. Einstein's theory of general
relativity claims that space and time are a geometrical structure
which can be changed by the behaviour of the matter inside it. So
proof that the expansion of the universe is speeding up shows that the
contents of the universe, such as the "dark energy" causing it to
inflate, are influencing its structure. Ludovic Van Waerbeke, of the
Department of Physics and Astronomy at Leiden University in the
Netherlands, said: "Our results confirmed that there is an unknown
source of energy in the universe which is causing the cosmic expansion
to speed up, stretching the dark matter further apart exactly as
predicted by Einstein's theory."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com