https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1KLC-mK63lrH_2F_T3gz5D8Z7Fap8REUGDGIQ_qxePVEContrary to popular belief, the big bang never actually happened. The big bang is a hypothetical consequence of an expanding universe. And for as long as I remember, I had just assumed it actually happened.
Now I have some serious doubts.
We think the big bang happened because we think the universe is expanding. And we think the universe is expanding because we think all the universe's galaxies are receding from ours.
We think the galaxies have actual recessional velocity proportional to their distance.
Why exactly do we think that?
For starters, we observe redshifts in the light coming from those galaxies.
The easiest way to explain the observation of redshifts is by assuming that it is a Doppler effect. If the Doppler effect is causing the redshift, then the galaxies must be moving away from us. If the galaxies are moving away from us they must all be moving away from each other, space must be expanding, and at some point in history, there was a big bang.
But is that what's really going on?
The redshifts in the galaxies' light were discovered in the late 1920's, and earlier in that same decade we didn't even know that there were galaxies outside of our own. We didn't even know what a galaxy was.
So let's consider another possibility. Let's say, hypothetically, the observed redshift isn't caused by the motion of the galaxy. In fact, let's say the cause of the light's redshift has nothing to do with the galaxy at all. The reason for light's redshift is light itself.
In the short amount of time between discovering that there is more than one galaxy in the universe, and discovering the redshift from distant galaxies, we did so under the assumption that since the laws of physics governing light were the same whether you were dealing with distances of 1 foot, or 1 mile, or to the moon, or to Neptune, or to the nearest stars or the end of the galaxy or to the next galaxy over, that light would behave the same way indefinitely. We assumed that life travels forever, and has no limits to the laws that work in our solar system and laboratories.
However, the evidence is that the farther and farther you look, that is apparently not the case. Light essentially dies out and then everything goes black.
It might be a good idea to ask:
What would the universe look like if light had a finite range?
At some point out in the cosmos, light would stop coming to us, which observationally seems to be the case.)
And, unless it came to an abrupt stop, we would see effects of it dieing out, which we do as redshifts.
Now how about making future predictions that can be validated by observation? We’ll discover there are mature galaxies in the young universe that defy theories on how galaxies form in the time allowed by the big bang.
That too has been observed, and if light has a finite range, it will continue to do so.
Beyond observing old galaxies in a young universe, the big bang has other considerable problems explaining the evidence. Most of the expansion of the universe had to occur super fast early on in a period called “inflation”, otherwise the theory simply doesn’t fit the evidence. Is dark energy real? Would we even need it in a universe where light has a finite range?
The man who discovered the redshift never himself accepted that the apparent recessional velocity of distant galaxies was due to an expanding universe.
He believed it was an indication of a new principle of nature.
"… if redshift are not primarily due to velocity shift … the velocity-distance relation is linear, the distribution of the nebula is uniform, there is no evidence of expansion, no trace of curvature, no restriction of the time scale … and we find ourselves in the presence of one of the principle of nature that is still unknown to us today … whereas, if redshifts are velocity shifts which measure the rate of expansion, the expanding models are definitely inconsistent with the observations that have been made … expanding models are a forced interpretation of the observational results"
— E. Hubble, Ap. J., 84, 517, 1936
"[If the redshifts are a Doppler shift] … the observations as they stand lead to the anomaly of a closed universe, curiously small and dense, and, it may be added, suspiciously young. On the other hand, if redshifts are not Doppler effects, these anomalies disappear and the region observed appears as a small, homogeneous, but insignificant portion of a universe extended indefinitely both in space and time."
— E. Hubble, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 97, 513, 1937
I propose that the new principle of nature is the finite range of light. Light doesn’t travel indefinitely.
One possible mathematical description of this principle I’ve considered can be found by changing Hubble’s relationship between apparent recessional velocity and distance, to the speed of light and the distance to its source.
the speed of light in a vacuum = c - H0 * distance it has traveled
v = c - H0 * d
Because the speed of a wave v = frequency * wavelength, if over cosmological distances light’s speed diminishes, either the frequency or the wavelength has got to give. And it is an observed fact that over cosmological distances, the frequency of light gives.
With this specific hypothesis, the range of light is Hubble’s Limit.
Back in Hubble’s day, the active exploration of ideas about the laws of physics for the cosmos at large was interrupted by some world wars and looking at the universe on a very different scale: inside an atom.
