

Cosmologist claims Universe may not be expanding - xd
http://www.nature.com/news/cosmologist-claims-universe-may-not-be-expanding-1.13379

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swombat
The article contradicts itself...

 _The idea may be plausible, but it comes with a big problem: it can 't be
tested. Mass is what’s known as a dimensional quantity, and can be measured
only relative to something else. For instance, every mass on Earth is
ultimately determined relative to a kilogram standard that sits in a vault on
the outskirts of Paris, at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures.
If the mass of everything — including the official kilogramme — has been
growing proportionally over time, there could be no way to find out._

The way to measure the increase in weight is actually described in the article
itself: observe a shift in absorption/emission spectra.

Of course, such a shift may be infinitesimally small and undetectable over
short timespans. However, this is precisely the sort of theory (like all the
neutrino theories, for example) for which you set up a very long-term
experiment.

The experiment is simple: measure the absorption spectrum of hydrogen in space
with an extreme level of accuracy and a bajillion measurements (that's the
scientific term). Record that for posterity. In 10 years (the equivalent of
observing something 10 light-years away), repeat the measurement. Keep doing
this until you either observe a shift or have made a measurement that based on
observations of the real world (i.e. galaxies drifting away).

The experiment might take 100, 1000 or even 10'000 years, but eventually we'd
have an answer!

UPDATE: Heh. isomorphic points out that this is actually not feasible given
that it's impossible to make these measurements accurately without relying on
mass being constant... So much for this. _retracts_

~~~
isomorphic
How do we measure frequency (or time) precisely if the emission spectra are
changing?

~~~
swombat
We'd need to calibrate against some kind of effect that is more heavily
influenced by forces other than mass. You're right actually, that might be a
lot more tricky than it seems on the surface. If we're left with the Weak and
Strong forces to play with, that makes experimental design pretty difficult
(and perhaps impossible).

Hmm...

~~~
ggchappell
If the two really are indistinguishable experimentally, then might we say that
the expansion of space and the changes in mass are just two different ways of
describing the same phenomena?

~~~
marcosdumay
It's very clear that there is a difference. What is not clear is if we can
observe that difference in a human timeframe (thousands of years or less).

------
aneth4
I became extremely fascinated by null cosmology, which explains red shift as
the result of light losing energy to [background] radiation as it travels.
That [background] radiation becomes essential in the cosmological cycle
involving the endless birth and death of galaxies via black holes.

While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I've not found anything to fully
discredit it.

[http://www.nullphysics.com/pages_cosmology.php](http://www.nullphysics.com/pages_cosmology.php)

Update: I'm writing from my iPhone and haven't looked into this in a while.
When I said radiation I was referring to low energy cosmic microwave
background, which is easily scattered. Read the FAQ if you have questions. I
do not claim to fully represent the theory in the above paragraph.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _red shift as the result of light losing energy to radiation as it travels_

Yet another incarnation of the old so-called "tired light" idea. Just google
it. Or start here:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light)

You run very quickly into all sorts of problems once you assume light gets
"tired" as it travels.

> _While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I 've not found anything to
> fully discredit it._

Start here:

[http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html](http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html)

> _I 've not found anything_

Odd, since a simple google search for "null physics" returns several strong
rebuttals on literally the first page. Maybe you haven't actually looked?

EDIT: Oh boy, this "null physics" thing shows all the signs of crackpot
"science". The author working on it "for decades". Studies physics, but
becomes "disenchanted" and switches to engineering. Is a "visiting scientist"
at a "university" nobody has heard about. His theory is not published in
journals because journals "help the establishment". Compares himself with Ben
Franklin, Bill Gates, and Faraday. The only thing he's published is this book;
no articles, no nothing. On and on and on. There are literally hundreds of woo
peddlers out there like this guy, and all of them are made in the exact same
image.

[http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php](http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php)

That page lit up the pseudo-science detector, firing up another alarm at each
and every sentence. The only thing amazing about this guy is how well he fits
the stereotype. It's surreal.

Brilliant quote from a link I posted above:

 _Much crackpot literature gives the impression of an old grudge being played
out: "I learned quantum mechanics from some book that made me feel dumb;
thinking up Quantum Aethro-Gyromechanics on my own made me feel smart." The
sad thing is, this illustrates a sort of can-do spirit that's admirable in
fields other than science. Stubbornly defying a swimming coach ("You'll never
be an Olympian, kid") or editor ("Your manuscript 'Harry Potter and the
Philosopher's Stone' does not meet our needs at this time") or venture
capitalist ("Forget it, Mr. Fred Smith, there is no market for nationwide
express delivery"), turns out to actually work sometimes; the people who pull
this off are praised as heros. But science isn't like that. Whereas coaches,
editors, and entrepreneurs have to rely on (fallible, human) gut instinct for
many of their evaluations, science relies on explicit, rigorous go/no-go
tests. I think that the dissonance between the value of stick-to-it-iveness in
entrepreneurship, versus the value of mathematical rigor in science, is the
root cause of a lot of physics crackpottery._

~~~
lukifer
Honest question: how you do you prevent your pseudo-science detector from
succumbing to confirmation bias? I'm willing to wager that if you gathered up
every single so-called crackpot on the planet and looked at their ideas in 50
years, there's at least a single person that will have turned out to be right.

Love the quote, by the way.

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kghose
I found this a rather good explanation (well written article). My favorite
para is in the closer:

"Others say that Wetterich’s interpretation could help to keep cosmologists
from becoming entrenched in one way of thinking."

I like this attitude. Science is about playing with hypotheses and trying out
new ideas. The most important thing for me is for my viewpoint to be zipped
around and turned on its head - just for fun. I think it makes the mind more
nimble.

Also, could a physicsy person elaborate a bit more on why we can't test
increasing mass? Is it in the same class as 'we can't actually measure the
increasing distance in the cosmic expansion, because locally, nothing is
expanding'?

Thanks

~~~
Zikes
Mass is relative, measured by a standard object of arbitrary mass to which
we've given a value. What we consider a "kilogram" is determined by one
specific object sitting in a vault somewhere, and if that object were to be
halved or doubled without us realizing it, then the official value of the
kilogram would be similarly halved or doubled.

Since we determine the mass of things by comparing them against that object,
if everything in the universe changes mass in precisely the same way at
precisely the same rate then we would have no way of knowing. All we can do is
compare them with each other, and relative to each other the masses would
remain the same.

~~~
roc
What about astronomical objects that are distorted by gravitational lensing?
Even if the mass of everything is increasing, couldn't we still note any
otherwise-anomalous universal change in the presentation of many such systems?

~~~
dllthomas
This seems to make assumptions about a relationship between mass and gravity
that may or may not hold as "mass changes" in this way, but it's certainly
something to look at.

------
Steuard
The research here is based on the interesting premise that "the masses of
electrons and protons were smaller" in the early universe, leading to
different emission spectra that we have thus far interpreted as an expanding
universe. I have not read the original research article in detail, but it is
my impression that all masses would have to scale at the same rate in order to
avoid changes in fundamental physical behaviors. (This seems consistent with
the article's premise that the effect comes from some sort of field
redefinition in the Lagrangian.)

As a particle physicist, I see this as highly unlikely. The first big obstacle
that I see for such a theory to overcome is that electrons and protons get
their mass from entirely different sources. As far as we know, electrons are
fundamental particles: their mass is a fundamental parameter of the theory
(presumably encoded as the electron coupling to the Higgs boson). But although
protons are composed of three fundamental particles (two up quarks and a down
quark), the quarks' fundamental masses are only a tiny fraction of the total
proton mass. Instead, the vast majority of a proton's mass results from
complicated non-linear QCD (strong nuclear force) self-interactions that draw
on both the fundamental masses and things like the QCD interaction strength.
We've had some success at simulating those QCD interactions in recent years,
but there's no known way of just reading off the proton mass from a
fundamental equation.

So for the idea behind this proposal to work, it seems to me that both the
fundamental particle masses and these complicated QCD effective masses would
have to scale _completely_ in parallel. I'm not at all clear on whether a
field redefinition (as proposed here) would work that way. Maybe it would be
more natural than it seems, but that's my first big concern with the proposal.

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gizmo686
Neat idea. If/when the paper gets published I hope I stumble upon it.

One thing that I don't get with the hypothesis is how it deals with
conservation of energy. Its well understood that mass is a form of energy, so
if atoms were to simply grow in mass, then that would either require some
other energy source, or violate conservation of energy. Obviously, this is a
huge an obvious problem that should preclude this hypothesis from serious
consideration. The fact that this does not do so suggests to me that this
issue is somehow resolved within the theory.

~~~
JonnieCache
Consider yourself stumbled. The paper is here:
[http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878/](http://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6878/)

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omegant
Is it possible to difereciate between a expanding universe due to the big
bang?, or an expanding universe due to this part of universe coming out of a
more compressed stream (like coming out of a 3d venturi tube). I don't know if
that makes sense. And if red shifted light is not red due to the expansion,
but due to some kind interaction with dark matter?. I suppose this questions
are dumb, and surely they have been discarded and replyied lotsof times, but
never found that info. Does any body know a place were this kind of thinks are
explained?

~~~
cpleppert
I would say not really! The real problem isn't the effect can't be replicated
it is that replacing cosmological expansion with something else requires the
something else to exactly mimic all the other things we can observe about the
universe.

Dark matter is a great example. Due to gravitational lensing this can mimic
directly the redshift we can observe. But then you have to explain how all
this dark matter is distributed(not to mention created) in a way that doesn't
mimic cosmic expansion in one part of the sky but everywhere at once.

I found the teaching company course on cosmology(from what I saw of it) to be
absolutely fantastic as a general introduction:
[http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.asp...](http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=1830)

~~~
omegant
Thank you very interesting, I´ll check it. Some times I get the feeling that
somehow in cosmology there is some kind of advanced modern day epicycle squeme
that is giving correct predictions but is not really what is out there. I just
love to follow the advances in cosmology.

------
cpleppert
I'm not sure I understand how this effect actually works. Cosmological
redshift isn't due to galaxies moving away from us but the expansion of the
universe occurring underneath light as it travels in an expanding universe. So
replacing velocity with mass increases doesn't actually work as far as I can
tell because the mechanisms aren't equivalent. You actually need some physical
mechanism that produces this mass increase over time that happens to be
exactly the same as that observed by cosmological redshift.

~~~
cma
Are you sure about that? There is blueshift and redshift as you move towards
or away from light sources.

While the speed of light doesn't ever change no matter your reference frame,
the frequency/wavelength indeed does.

~~~
cpleppert
I'm not sure we disagree. Cosmological redshift doesn't rule out additional
changes in observed frequency that compound due to the ones we observe by the
expansion of the universe. Hubble originally explained his observed redshifts
in other galaxies entirely due to the doppler effect but changed his mind when
he observed a correlation between the distance of a receding galaxy and its
redshift. If the doppler effect could explain cosmological redshift then
galaxies would seem to have to 'know' how far they were from the observer!

If you go back and see the original 46 galaxies that hubble plotted by
comparing observed redshift to the distance hubble had observed you can see
considerable 'scatter' in the observations. This scatter is due to the Doppler
effect.

The velocity distance relationship in hubble's law isn't due to the doppler
effect but a model that relates recessional velocity to the general expansion
of the universe.

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xanderstrike
I don't like how similar the words "Cosmology" and "Cosmetology" are.

I was very confused upon first reading the title of this article.

~~~
kenj0418
My cosmetologist told me I was gaining mass too. She recommended a diet though
- not further research.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
Ah yes, I've also been to the "Girl, your ass is gettin big" symposium.

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vital
Say, you are deep inside a huge forest with your eyes closed all the time.
Then, you blink once. Can you from the information received via that blink
deduce if the forest is expanding or shrinking? Did it have a big bang or a
small one? Just asking... On the other hand given the situation one needs to
be extremely delusional and detached from any sense of reality to consider any
bang fantasy seriously.

------
fargolime
A much simpler explanation that adds no new assumptions and shows that space
itself need not be expanding to explain what we observe is at
[http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/expanding-space-
obvia...](http://finbot.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/expanding-space-obviated/).
It also solves the flatness problem, a major problem in cosmology.

~~~
cpleppert
That doesn't make sense at all. The whole point of cosmological expansion is
to explain relations between redshift and distance. That is what was suggested
to Hubble back in the 1920's when he plotted this relationship. If you don't
hypothesize any global relationship between these two values then every galaxy
just happens to have a larger velocity depending on distance. The link doesn't
explain why this would happen.

I'm a little concerned about some of the other stated problems that the
'theory' tries to solve. For instance,

>>They believe that sufficiently large objects stretch or break apart, and
proffer explanations as to why smaller objects, like galaxies, don’t do
likewise.

Spacetime isn't an object! I think gravity is a great explanation why galaxies
don't break apart..

~~~
fargolime
> The link doesn't explain why this would happen.

Physics doesn't answer _why_ on anything. Hubble's observations still apply.
He didn't try to explain why the observational data is what it is.

> Spacetime isn't an object!

Where was the opposite claimed? I don't see it.

> I think gravity is a great explanation why galaxies don't break apart..

That's fine, but you still have a flatness problem that also needs an
explanation. If you don't need your explanation (by obviating the expanding
space paradigm) the flatness problem vanishes.

~~~
cpleppert
You can edit my response and change the 'why' to 'how.' Doesn't matter. The
author still posits no mechanism for why the distribution that Hubble observed
holds for every galaxy in the sky nor does he ever address this point _at
all_. He doesn't say it isn't relevant or can be explained in a simpler way he
just ignores the evidence.

So given a proposed explanation that explains observed phenomena the author
claims _nothing at all_ except that it would be consistent (if you get rid of
the observed phenomena) to not have the theory. That is a nonsensical argument
that begs the question.

I.e. if gravity didn't exist apples would still be red Q.E.D. gravity is
unnecessary

> Where was the opposite claimed? I don't see it.

He wants to say that because galaxies don't break apart but the universe does
somehow there is an arbitrary limit on the size of objects that 'break
apart.'(Do you think some other object other than the universe if being
referred to here? What is breaking apart that is larger than galaxies and
would remotely make sense here?)

This is rather strange because gravity(and the atomic forces) are far stronger
than cosmological expansion so his 'point' doesn't make sense.

~~~
fargolime
> The author still posits no mechanism for why the distribution that Hubble
> observed holds for every galaxy in the sky nor does he ever address this
> point at all.

Hubble found that the galaxies are moving apart from one another in the
simplest possible way they could do that. (If they weren't moving apart from
one another they'd be moving toward one another, or some mixture.) No further
explanation is needed unless one thinks that movement violates some other
tenet of physics, like the cosmological principle or Einstein's speed of light
limit; in that case you need an additional explanation like the expanding
space paradigm so you can save the other tenet(s).

Also note that the expanding space paradigm just shifts the why / how question
to some other chapter of physics. What is the mechanism that expands space
itself? Nobody has that answer.

> He wants to say that because galaxies don't break apart...

Not he/she, not the author. What you quoted was about what cosmologists
generally accept today. Cosmologists generally accept that there is some limit
on the size of objects that break apart due to space itself expanding. Below
that limit, gravity and the atomic forces keep the object from breaking apart,
they believe.

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Tcepsa
It seems to me that this should be able to be tested by checking whether the
gravitational force between two objects of a given mass increases over time.
If it does, then their mass has increased. If it doesn't, then their mass has
not. (Of course, if the gravitational constant is correspondingly decreasing
then this idea goes out the window.)

