Why Does the Universe Expand? The Standard Model Can't Explain It
Copernicus replaced the geocentric model's epicycles with a Sun-centered system that explained retrograde motion through our off-center perspective. Today's standard cosmology, with its ad hoc patches like inflation and dark energy, resembles Frankenstein's monster more than Newton's elegant physics. After a century, it still cannot explain why the universe should expand, only that it does. The author argues we must ask what broken symmetries we're missing.
One cannot deny the possibility, but it is difficult to see what mental satisfaction such a theory is supposed to afford.
- bionhoward
I feel cosmology ought to grapple more with, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” That question and this question are certainly linked. If expansion is a mirror of collapse, how do we get from some initial nothingness to a point where there is something capable of collapsing? Starting with an infinite amount of stuff everywhere feels like cheating.
- chasil
I understand that, for a stationary black hole without spin (which does not exist), an object that falls into it will freeze, then the image will redshift until it disappears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon
I also understand that there is a cosmological (event) horizon, where galaxies freeze, then rapidly redshift in the same way. This happens because these distant objects are accelerated away from us faster than light.
It appears to me that we are seeing black hole event horizons from the outside, and the cosmological event horizon is seen from the inside.
The similarities do give one pause.
The mechanisms are different; one is gravity, and the other is dark energy.
- mellosouls
Note this website appears to be based around the personal theories of a scientist rather than a presentation of the consensus of the field.
Perhaps similar to somebody more famous like Harari in that respect.
The author appears to be legitimate in his scientific background but the repeated implications of the revolutionary nature of his work are somewhat crankish; this is a personal blog so possibly he just needs a good editor (he says he is published elsewhere).
Just something to bear in mind as you read - not that there isn't anything to gain from it; but the boundary between well-grounded theory and speculative philosophic beliefs may not be clear - which to be fair arguably comes somewhat with the territory here.
- cryptonector
Edward Arthur Milne's proposal was that the universe started out expanding. That is Milne cosmology, and oddly enough it's equivalent to Standard cosmology when you take out the gravitational effects of mass-energy. What's odd about that is that in Milne cosmology you have a big bang at one point with the edge moving at arbitrarily close to c and with uniform distribution of stuff and velocities, while in Standard cosmology we speak of the big bang happening everywhere all at once. This oddity is resolved when you realize that Milne is hyperbolic, so you if you "unfurl" a Milne universe it then looks the same as Standard excluding gravity.
- BoiledCabbage
Because our universe is actually the inside of a blackhole.