I'm not claiming expertise. In fact, I'd happily qualify as making up stories, if they, at the very least, help me to better understand what's going on. When I first started reading physics, thirty years ago, I had no further expectation. The idea which started me on this concept was a point Hawking made in his book, A Brief History of Time, that for the universe to be as stable as it is, Omega had to be very close to 1. Being a simple-minded sort, I immediately thought a convective cycle(rising heat/collapsing cold) would explain that relationship far more neatly then the anthropic principle. Given the level of the popsci I was reading at the time, the idea which first occurred to me was that mass and the space it defined were being drawn into black holes, into another dimension and re-emerging as vacuum fluctuation. This way, the expansion was integral to the space and not simply that everything was flying apart from a singularity. So that the further light traveled, the more expanding space it crossed, this compounded the effect, so that it eventually seemed as though the source was receding at the speed of light and this created a horizon line, beyond which light couldn't travel, creating a sphere of visibility. Someone with far more education pointed out that light made a perfectly good vehicle, so I dropped the other dimension.

I'm almost surprised at the number of occasions I've witnessed amateurs suggest some version of balanced relationship between this expansion of space and the contraction of gravity. One of the more memorable was on a local radio show(Mark Steiner, WYPR. Baltimore. The Hubble is run out of Johns Hopkins) It variably gets laughed off.


I thought a flat or open universe simply meant that it wouldn't contract back to a point?

If expansion is a property which is balanced by gravity and assuming all gravitational effect is currently in effect, it presumably would neutralize the expansion of space, so that the universe as a whole isn't getting any bigger, because these two effects cancel one another.

Pardon my ignorance, but could you give a thumbnail?

Obviously, or there would be no BBT. The idea is whether radiation/light is actually the source of the cosmological constant. I don't see it as disproving Einstein, but rather tying a couple of the loose ends to each other.

Yes, but first you have to figure out what causes it, before you can really figure out what it does.

I'm trying to tie the concept of convection to this larger process. In fact, convection would be an aspect of this larger process. Matter cools and falls until it does it heats up and rises. In the convection cycle, this energy would then cool down and fall back to earth. What would be the comparable aspect of the cosmic process? The light, having been redshifted off the chart.....to the mass which starts condensing out of the most ethereal intergalactic gases to eventually falling into the galactic vortex..... (story making any sense?)

In a cycle, like a wheel, one side tends to be the same diameter as the other.

IF it is space that is expanding lightwaves and not the galaxies flying apart, then the reason the furtherest galaxies appear to be receding at the speed of light is because the light from them has crossed the most space and the effect is compounded, so that the further light travels, the greater the multipler effect, thus the faster the source appears to be receding, NOT because these galaxies are traveling fastest because they are at the dawn of the universe and everything has been slowing down since then.

The additional expansion for which dark energy was proposed and has recently been shown to compare to the cosmological constant, means that something is augmenting the presumably slowing expansion, such that the space itself appears to be expanding. If it is a lensing effect and not the galaxies actually flying apart from one another, then you don't need the massive amount of energy required to actually be pushing them apart.

I like to read a lot and it wasn't something I noted down. Possibly it was on the Nature site. I get their email update. Would you have a link to the study of active black holes? It sounds interesting.

Part of the reason Inflation theory was proposed was to explain how the CMBR would be so even, at 2.7k, across the universe, when this would require information traveling faster then the speed of light. Possibly this level(2.7k) is due to a natural phase transition, such as the density above which some effect causes the radiation to start condensing into elemental mass.

Pretty much anything to do with the quantum realm.

My mistake.

Stories came long before the math. No story, no math. Quantum theorists have this notion that it's only the math that makes sense. It only means the story lays beyond their comprehension and they only see the highlights.