The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them.

William Lawrence Bragg

ALL THOSE SPECULATIONS…

In my previous post, I promised to talk about M&M experiment, and how I won’t need special relativity to explain it to you. It might have been April fool’s day, I’m not sure right now, but turns out I was lying: I’m going to chat about something else now. Do not worry: I’ll get back to you on M&M experiment and other “evidence” of time delation later. I already started to write it and even found a great quote from Karl Freidrich Gauss to serve as an epigraph for it. It goes like this: “I have had my results for a long time: but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.” Nice, isn’t it? Anyway, I’ll do that in the next post, since it’s a bit involved and some of my argumentation may have a thing or two derived from the stuff I’m going to speculate about right now.

One problem I have with scientists of all times is that they always think too much about their current knowledge, it’s like: “yes sure, the previous generation of scientists made nasty mistakes, but now we know…” It seems like we never learn. Take, for example that new fad about the big bang, expanding and accelerating universe. You wanna know how they arrived at these ideas? With a lot of arrogance and over-confidence which often leads to, what I call: “tunneled thinking”… unless I’m wrong and they are right, but we’re not going to seriously consider that possibility, are we?

All started with Edwin Hubble, who was spending all his time looking at the stars and admiring their pretty colors. After watching them for a really long time, Edwin started to notice that most of the far away galaxies (he must be praised for discovering galaxies, by the way) are rather red in color. His first thought was that perhaps communists occupied far corners of the universe, and so he panicked a little, but then he thought about the Doppler shift and that was a great relief for the poor guy raised in a capitalist society. Luckily (or unluckily), scientists already new about the Doppler effect, that is: the property of waves to change their observed frequency depending on the speed of the wave source relative to the observer. If they didn’t know about it, they could have arrived at the correct interpretation, but no: the Doppler shift was a cool explanation and everybody jumped on it with excitement. Have you noticed, that when somebody jumps with excitement they don’t think about alternatives, often they don’t think at all: it’s jumping time.

So, since we know about Doppler shift, then the red color must mean that most of the galaxies are moving away from us. Then, using Doppler’s formula, we calculate the speed of the expansion, then, it’s easy to calculate how long ago the universe started to expand from a single point. Why? Isn’t it obvious? You just roll back this expansion and the universe bound to converge into a single, infinitely small point in some distant past, of course.(that was a sarcasm, by the way). Now, again: obviously, it was a big explosion which made universe expand with the speed significantly higher than the speed of light (otherwise how would 14 billion year old galaxies be 28 light years apart from each other? But scientists say it’s because the space itself was expanding faster than light speed, (just assume it can do that, OK?), and, according to new observations of the red-shift, and the attenuation (explained below) from very far away galaxies, they are expanding with higher and higher speed. Don’t ask me how come we started from the speed higher that the speed of light and still accelerating… I don’t want to think about it.

Anyway, here we are with few observations: further away is a galaxy (most of them, at least) higher is the red shift, and the attenuation (just wait, I’ll explain it in a minute) is higher than “expected” (like they know what to expect from the light that travels for billions of years through the wild place called: “the universe”). That’s all, and we came up with all that crazy $%&! And then comes ME, an ignorant person who refuses to look at the Friedmann equation (and few hundreds of other equations, for that matter) with the hope that the common sense alone may magically change the course of the history of science. And here’s what ME has to say: have you guys listened to the thunder recently? (You knew this was bound to happen eventually right?) Have you noticed that further away the thunderstorm is, lower is the highest pitch of the thunder? If it’s really far away, you just hear low rambling of it. Or recall that idiot in the traffic who has his music going at 100 decibel, but all you can hear from your car is the sub-woofer booms. Well, there is reason for that, namely: lower frequencies travel further. No, no, no: I’m not discovering anything new here: when wave propagates through a media it gets absorbed by it (this is called: attenuation; here, I explained it), and, generally, higher the frequency, higher the attenuation. Radio waves, which are electromagnetic waves, just like visible light, are also totally cool with that idea and travel further through the air at low frequencies. And scientists knew about it, but… tunneled thinking.

So, wouldn’t it be natural for the light coming from very distant galaxies behave similarly and attenuate away it’s higher frequencies as it travels to us for billions of years? The space is not completely empty, you know, and when you travel really long distances you bound to hit some minor nebulae or some stranded particles along the way. And if there is something like ether filling out the space, I bet it would join the “attenuating” frenzy at every inch of light’s propagation. And, further away the galaxy is, redder and redder would be their color.

Of course there is a Doppler effect too, but having second ingredient to the red shift totally spoils the expansion/acceleration/big bang fairy tail, doesn’t it? We may not be able to tell for sure if the “redder” galaxies are moving away from us or towards us, unless we calculate attenuation accurately, which we can’t really do without knowing exactly what was in the path of the light from a specific galaxy. One thing we can say for certain though: those few galaxies, which do not demonstrate any red shift, are definitely moving towards us and with much higher speed than we previously thought.

Now, I may be totally wrong and my interpretation may tell only small part of the story, but, at least, it might make you think about the multitude of possible alternative interpretations of the same observations and do not run to conclusions and “tunneled thinking” too quickly.

Just few random thoughts, before I attack the M&M observations and other “evidences” of STR in my next post.