I seriously doubt the idea that space is expanding and I'll tell you why. I've lived in this house for a long time and the space in the pantry closet, clothes-closets, linen-closet, storage cabinets, medicine chests and even the rooms themselves hasn't increased an iota. Worse than that, the space has definitely decreased. My garden shed is a good example. Over the course of time I have had to build two extensions to it in order to counteract the so obvious contraction of space to which we are all subject. It's now triple its original size and almost out of space again!

Now I'm not asking any of you to risk your Ph.D. thesis on my idea of the contraction of space. I hope you will believe me when I say that my attachment to the contracting space idea has not biased me against the expanding space idea. However, I must confess that I do have problems accepting the expansion of space idea. It seems to raise many more questions than it answers.

Long ago I learned that the red shift of light from galaxies was a Doppler effect caused by the galaxies moving away from each other. Now everyone says, "No, the red shift of light from galaxies is caused by the expansion of space." Does that mean that the galaxies are not moving away from each other after all? Or does it mean that the galaxies are moving away from each other without causing a Doppler effect for their light? If the galaxies are not receding from each other, what does that say about the evidence for Hubble's law that the recession velocity of a galaxy is proportional to its distance from us? Is Hubble's law a meaningless coincidence? Doesn't the idea that expanding space stretches wavelengths make the expanding space theory smell a little like the abandoned ether theory?

It's all so puzzling. Why should the wavelength of light be the only thing affected by the expansion of space? Beats me. If the expansion of space causes light to lose energy, where does that energy go or what is it changed into as it is being lost? Is light exempted from the conservation laws so that it can just pass out of existence?

Does the expansion of space idea imply that light continually loses energy as it travels through space? If light energy is created as quanta, shouldn't it lose energy as quanta? Does one quantum of light magically (and not continually) split off a femto-quantum from time to time as it travels through expanding space? How would a quantum of light know when to do a femto-shift? Do those femto-quanta somehow get together to recombine so we can detect them? Or do you think we should chuck quantum theory?

Doesn't the equivalence of energy and mass mean that if the expansion of space causes light to lose energy, it should cause material objects to lose mass? Isn't it true that what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander? Who would deny E equals m c squared? If light travelling 99 percent of 15 billion years has lost say 90 percent of its energy, wouldn't the expansion of space have caused the galaxy that emitted that light to have lost say 90 percent of its mass? And where would all that mass have gone? (Now that' s what I would call a real weight loss program!) Would you propose a reverse of the old Bondi/ Gold hypothesis, where, instead, one hydrogen atom would pop out of existence every so often in order to accommodate the expansion of space?

Don't counter that light loses energy because it moves through space but galaxies don't. Are you crazy enough to think that there is any mass object that doesn't move through space? Wouldn't just one thing that doesn't move take us straight back to absolute motion? Do you want to waste the last hundred odd years since the Michelson-Morley experiment and subsequent developments of SR and GR?

If the height of a hill increases as you climb it, you may be dreaming or in an imaginary world. Something like that doesn't happen in the real world. Can't you see that two attempts to explain the red shift raise so many new things to explain that both the previous explanations are probably unrealistic?

This might not be correct (just a guess here) but I think that light isn't losing energy, but that its energy is being more spread out by the expansion of space. So each light photon is just being put farther apart from the others, making it look like the light loses energy.

Hi! This may take a while, so bare with me...

The space in between galaxies is expanding. It's not that our sun and Earth, solar system, and galaxy are growing in size.

I'll try to answer a few...

This is a fairly common misunderstanding. The galaxies are flying apart, causing the redshift. An alternative way of viewing this situation is to say that the space in between us and a distant galaxy is stretching, causing the light to stretch and lengthening its wavelength. The two are alternative ways of viewing the same situation.

Nope... its two ways of viewing the same phenomenon. (Spelling???)

What else should it affect? Gravity holds large bodies together, and electro-magnetic forces hold together smaller physical objects. These forces keep them from expanding with the expanding space-time.

No. The redshifting light is not loosing energy, it's just spreading it out over more time. Think of this. If you put gasoline in a bucket and drop a lit match into it, it explodes, releasing a large amount of energy very quickly. If you put it in your car, it becomes a controled reaction, releasing the same amount of energy, over a greate amount of time. This makes it less energy per second, but the same overall amount of energy.

First off, when you recieve several quanta (photons) of light, and measure their properties, such as wavelength, and direction headed, according to quantum mechanics, there is no way you can say that that's how they left. You can't even say that as many photons left the source as you collected. You also can't really say that they merged on the way or anything like that, because that would mean you knew the energy of each photon when they left the source and when they arrived at your detector.

Since light doesn't loose energy, matter doesn't loose mass.

Ummm.... relative to what?

Ummm... no... I make no claim that anything is inheritently "stationary."

I'm afraid I don't follow...

The "two attempts" are one and the same attempt viewed in two different ways. It's like saying "light is a wave" and "light is a particle." It's two different ways of looking at one specific thing, called particle/wave duality.

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This should help.

Hehe :-), well, there is a hypotesis that says something like "data expands to fill the available storage", You know how that new big hard disk seems to fill up in no time?... I guess the same goes for physical storage areas...

Though i do think the universal expansion is something occuring over large areas of space, so that objects are farther from each other, its probably not expansion like stretching of the universe, I dont even think that would be noticed, not directly anyway, since it would skew our perception of space too... its probably more like there is coming more space inbetween the objects, and the objects gravity and other forces keeping it together, so you cant get expansion in your house this way... ;-)

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Game over, you lose, we hope you enjoyed playing the exciting game of Thermodynamics...

To add one little thing: whether you consider the galaxies themeselves to be moving or the space in between them increasing, the doppler shift works the same way. The second is the more "correct" way to model it however because of relativity and the problems caused by objects moving at faster than C relative to each other as is the case with objects that are VERY far apart in the universe.

Thanks, Russ.

Yeah... I meant to say that both ways of viewing it yield the same results.

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Hey, Richard, do you plan on following up any on this?

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No, however you can contract for more space. That should solve your storage dilema. I call it my Theory of the General Space Contractor. Some wood and nails, and you're in business.

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"Oh no no no I'm a rocket man Rocket man burning out his fuse up here alone." -- Sir Elton John

J Pax

It certainly helped me. I'm new here, and mostly I just intend to read and make a few amusing comments since I've just recently changed my major to Physics and don't feel quite educated enough to offer significant comments to the science discussions.

So far, being here has been really enjoyable. I read some of the crazier theories, and I don't know how they're crazy, just that they are. Then, I read a little farther and find rational explanations that support my instincts.

I will be so glad when I've learned enough of this stuff to be able to explain, if only to me, why certain ideas have no scientific merit.

Anyway, reading the faq really set my mind at ease about this whole expanding space thing. Thanks.

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"The oxen are slow, but the earth is patient."

I think that the "Accelerating Universe" is the most exciting thing which has happened in Astronomy/Astrophysics/Cosmology -- at least in my own lifetime! The "Standard Candles" for this study were Type 1a Supernovae, which are thought to be white dwarf stars accreting mass from a companion (bloated) star. It is thought that when the white dwarf star accretes 1.44 Solar Masses (the Chandrasekhar Limit), the white dwarf star explodes violently in a Type 1a Supernova and becomes a "standard candle" because of its uniformity to other Type 1a Supernovae observed. The folks who originally began this study were attempting to find out how fast the universe was DECELERATING. They did not believe their data when the opposite result (ACCELERATION) was the obvious (and seemingly only) conclusion. As I remember it, the paper was printed in NATURE on January 1, 1998 (Perlmutter, et al.) and another paper by the HI-Z SN Search Team confirmed the results. This became the 'Discovery of the Year" in 1998 in SCIENCE.

Here there are observations which completely changed the knowledge of the Universe. I think that there is enough evidence to show that these astrophysicists/cosmologists are on the right track.

I have no problem with the Accelerating Universe. Whee!

ljbrs =D>

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"There is in the universe neither center nor circumference." Giordano Bruno Born 1548. Torched 1600.

dare to cite other source than the two you provide.
Why do you think it is so exciting?....Speed?

Hi Richard J. Hanak

I think some of the same issues you are thinking about are the same as the ones I have been thinking about. I read your posting and thought that the examples you used could be used to illustrate the need for a uniform expansion of space.

(In case you do not know I am pushing a theory call the uniform expansion theory. It proposes that not only is space expanding, but matter is also included in the expansion www.uniformexpansion.com )

Using you storage area problem, notice that as you increase the amount of stuff it becomes increasingly difficult to add anything else. Eventually it would be so stuffed that there would be no way for anything to change, there is no room to move.

This is a philosophical basis for believing that the expansion of space must include matter itself. In order for there to be change, there must be room for that change to occur.

snowflake