Quote:
Originally Posted by Airtime
Aside from Redshift, what is the most compelling evidence that the universe is expanding?
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I think you ask the wrong question. It is not usually the case that you can pick one "evidence" in any physical argument and call it convincing, by itself. Rather, it is the whole collection of evidence, all consistent with the one idea that really gives the one idea strength.
Before the redshift-distance relationship was discovered by
Edwin Hubble (
Hubble, 1929), the expansion of the universe had already been predicted by the Belgian cleric & astronomer
Georges Lemaitre, based on the implications of the theory of general relativity (
Lemaitre, 1931a,
Lemaitre 1931b,
Lemaitre 1934; his original 1927 paper is not available online). The interpretation of the observed redshift distance relationship as an expansion of the universe is fairly obvious, even without any precedent in theory. But the combination of theory and observation strengthens the interpretation of expansion.
Since then we have learned to understand far more about general relativity than Einstein & his contemporaries understood (i.e.,
Will, 2006) but continue to learn more (i.e.,
Davis & Lineweaver, 2004). In 1948
George Gamow and
Ralph Alpher combined general relativity & the expanding universe to demonstrate how this physical scenario could reproduce the relative abundance of hydrogen & helium in the universe, and to predict that the present universe would be filled with a background electromagnetic radiation left over from the infancy of the universe (
Alpher, Bethe & Gamow, 1948;
Genesis of the Big Bang by Ralph Alpher &
Robert Herman, Oxford University Press, 2001). The relative abundances have blossomed into the science of
Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and we now recognize the ubiquitous background as the
Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
So we have an observed redshift distance relationship, and observed CMB, and observed relative abundances of elements, and the theory of general relativity,
all of which are mutually consistent with the idea of an expanding universe. It is this mutual consistency between independent lines of evidence that makes
Big Bang Cosmology a strong idea, and not necessarily any one of those lines of evidence considered by itself.