uh. wow? (time, pt. 3)
So I’m utterly unqualified to evaluate the arguments found here (download the three pdfs on the right sidebar). It could be a big joke and I suppose I wouldn’t know the difference. Which is to say, I see the math in there, mumble “uh huh … uh, so what’s phi, again? or wait: was that one with the little curly-cue lambda?” and skip to the next bit of prose and pretty pictures.
This fellow has made an addendum to relativity and uses it to overthrow the dominant cosmological model of the last century. Intuitively, and in its breadth, to someone who’s sort of fascinated by the subject and has tried to figure out (with greater or lesser success) what all the real scientists are all talking about, it’s very compelling.
THEO: YOU MUST READ THEM. When you have time.
The upshot: the big bang didn’t happen. The data that motivated its proposal is accounted for better by a (lovely, IMHO) geometrical model of time implied by the addition to relativity mentioned above. (And I admit I don’t quite follow the leap from gravitational transverse redshift to the geometrical model of time.) Also addressed: the formation of stars, galactic evolution, dark matter (it’s unnecessary, of course), black holes, white holes, why Mars may have been wet and warm, periodic mass extinctions and a whole bunch of anomalies that don’t fit current models.
Yes, periodic mass extinctions. So the universe is ageless. We’re back to (net) steady state?
I just wish my hairline had been steady state since around age 19.
February 8th, 2006 at 1:21 pm
Hmmm… Link gives me “access forbidden”.
So I guess Hubble is wrong? What about the red shift, galaxies moving apart from each other all that? And isn’t the problem of a static model that matter would overheat or gravity would collapse matter or something like that? (trying to remember my metaphysics class)
I suppose that’s all taken into account. Sure like to read that stuff somehow (the prose, not the math).
February 8th, 2006 at 2:01 pm
ai. bummer about that. he has his own domain which currently redirects to the Stanford site, but presumably will be its own thing soon.
i can email you two of the pdfs which i downloaded. they’re about 30 megs total, so let me know. or i could put them up here and send you the url.
so yeah, there is no cosmic expansion/contraction, no inflationary period, etc. if i understand correctly, redshift is accounted for by the fact that “time dilates with distance.” observer A, a large enough distance from another observer B, will see B’s clocks running slow, and B will see A’s clocks running slow. so the “clock” of light frequency appears to slow down the further away we look: redshift. look far enough away and the redshift increases to infinity, and this is our cosmic horizon past which we can see nothing.
this happens because every coordinate in space implies a distinct “coordinate” in time. the geometry is in four dimensions — he says the universe is a hypersphere — but there are a couple of pictures in the slides that show how it works flattened down to 3D.
hm. not sure about the gravity collapse thing, but it may be solved by his black holes that tunnel to white holes on the “other side” of the hypersphere. these are observed as a particular kind of very hot galactic core. i guess they keep matter distributed? not sure on that.