voids, stretching light, and an infinite universe
Sunday, 22 May 2005 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI recently read a rather neat article refuting the tired light explanation of redshift (finally!). I have been looking for such a thing for many years. In the article it said that supernova explosions that are nearby last a week, whereas ones that are greatly redshifted look like they last longer. If tired light was the explanation for redshifting then it wouldn't matter how far away they were, they would still appear to last the same amount of time. I don't know how many examples they base that conclusion on (I'll have to find out), but if it is correct then I'm happy to drop tired light as a primary reason for redshifting and that light being stretched by expanding space may have something going for it (despite it implicitly resurrecting the discredited aether concept). However it seems to me that the big bang still doesn't make any sense. We can still have the universe expanding without needing it to come start in a big bang.
Divide infinity by two and you still have infinity. Visualise it this way: there is an infinite amount of integer numbers. Remove all those divisible by two and you still have an infinite amount of odd numbers.
In the same way I don't see a problem with the universe having always expanded and continuing to do so forever. The need for a big bang comes from the belief(!) that the whole universe is expanding at the same rate all over the universe. But why should it be spread evenly? If it is unevenly distributed instead (like everything else is) then not only does it make it possible for the universe to have always expanded forever, but it can also be a very simple explanation of the hitherto unexplained strange, bubbly structure of the large scale universe. In those giant voids a repulsive force could be pushing things away, like an antigravity. On its way towards us light passing through those voids could become stretched. The further light travels, the more of these voids it is likely to travel through. They don't need to be restricted to just the large structure voids either, smaller repellent voids may well exist between galaxies as well.
There is another interesting aspect to this possibility of the universe expanding in a grainy fashion instead of evenly. It could perhaps also create new matter as suggested in Hoyle and Gold's Steady State theory. Over the long term this would tend to balance, to some degree, the black holes crushing matter out of existence. The Steady State theory is not a necessity for this kind of expansion, I just have always felt that it was always too quickly dismissed, especially after its revision fitted it better with later observations.
The big bang just strikes me as no explanation at all. In the same way as a religion says a god created everything and we can't know beyond that, the big bang theory gives us a similar creation event, saying that we can't know what is beyond that. Not only does that bother me, it seems intuitively wrong... and don't get me started on the absurdity of all the universe starting from a quantum dot.
Divide infinity by two and you still have infinity. Visualise it this way: there is an infinite amount of integer numbers. Remove all those divisible by two and you still have an infinite amount of odd numbers.
In the same way I don't see a problem with the universe having always expanded and continuing to do so forever. The need for a big bang comes from the belief(!) that the whole universe is expanding at the same rate all over the universe. But why should it be spread evenly? If it is unevenly distributed instead (like everything else is) then not only does it make it possible for the universe to have always expanded forever, but it can also be a very simple explanation of the hitherto unexplained strange, bubbly structure of the large scale universe. In those giant voids a repulsive force could be pushing things away, like an antigravity. On its way towards us light passing through those voids could become stretched. The further light travels, the more of these voids it is likely to travel through. They don't need to be restricted to just the large structure voids either, smaller repellent voids may well exist between galaxies as well.
There is another interesting aspect to this possibility of the universe expanding in a grainy fashion instead of evenly. It could perhaps also create new matter as suggested in Hoyle and Gold's Steady State theory. Over the long term this would tend to balance, to some degree, the black holes crushing matter out of existence. The Steady State theory is not a necessity for this kind of expansion, I just have always felt that it was always too quickly dismissed, especially after its revision fitted it better with later observations.
The big bang just strikes me as no explanation at all. In the same way as a religion says a god created everything and we can't know beyond that, the big bang theory gives us a similar creation event, saying that we can't know what is beyond that. Not only does that bother me, it seems intuitively wrong... and don't get me started on the absurdity of all the universe starting from a quantum dot.