Non-Cosmological Interpretation of Redshift

[SpaceTiger]

In order to quell complaints from those members of the board who feel they are being discriminated against in my recent threads, I would like to directly address the issue of a non-cosmological interpretation of redshift. If you're a layman trying to learn about astronomy, I advise you to disregard this thread and read my other one on the mainstream view. Only a very small portion of the community even takes this seriously. In the interest of open scientific debate, however, I will present the following challenges to nay-sayers:

1) Explain the CMB, including the acoustic oscillations.
2) Explain the abundances of light elements.
3) Explain the formation of large scale structure.
4) Explain the correlation of strong absorption systems in QSOs with galaxies on the sky.
5) Explain gravitationally lensed quasars.

There's much more, but I'd be happy to see an explanation of even one of those things, preferably mathematical.

 

[Chronos]

You are joking, right? I've been asking the same kind of questions for years and guess what... you don't get a reply. Why is that?

 

[Nereid]

It may not come as a surprise to regular readers of PF that I too have been asking questions of this kind to everyone who proposes an alternative to the cosmological interpretation.

Here is some of what I've learned:
- there are many who only throw rocks; they have their pet lists of 'exceptions' or 'anomalies' which they claim 'don't fit' ... but they have no alternative to offer (and are quite honest about this, or sometimes not); maybe more on this line of opposition later
- there are several who can wave their hands, sometimes clearly, in well constructed paragraphs, with all manner of erudite sounding terms; however, almost all of these have failed to come through when pressed to give some math or OOM calculations (again, some - most - are honest about their inability to 'step up to the plate', but some not)
- there is a well-known camp who take pains to say their 'alternative' is 'purely empirical' ... i.e. they have a bunch of observations, and when they analyse them, certain (non-cosmological redshift) trends pop out. I find it particularly frustrating engaging with these folk, not least because their 'empirical relationships' are so loosely (dare one say, 'arbitrarily'?) constructed as to (apparently) preclude any serious tests
- the only folk I've come across (so far) who do seem to be at least attempting to put together a consistent, quantitative alternative are various 'plasma cosmologists' ... if they are serious, I admire their courage and fortitude, and I look forward to reading what they produce.

Oh, and one last comment: have any PF readers come across the 'but what about the Wolf effect?' challenge? Many of you, I'm sure. Has any such challenger yet presented even a vaguely plausible proposal for how to test the extent to which the Wolf effect might be the cause of at least some of the observed 'cosmological redshifts'?

 

[turbo]

If any of you will drop me a PM with your email address, I will be pleased to send you a concise overview of my ZPE gravitation model. It is necessarily non-technical, since I am math-challenged (having ditched engineering school to pursue a double major in English Lit and Philosophy). The model is logically rigorous and is falsifiable by at least 5 methods, including predicted short-term variability in WMAP small-angle anisotropies, CERN's Athena measurement of the gravitational infall rate of anti-hydrogen and several more. To the folks that have already seen a prior version of the overview, the basics have not changed in the least, but there have been several refinements and extensions, including predictions regarding experimental results and observations.

 

[turbo]

You are joking, right? I've been asking the same kind of questions for years and guess what... you don't get a reply. Why is that?

You're joking, right? I have been giving you answers whenever possible. With regard to the formation of large-scale structure (ST's #3), I have pointed out many times that the observation of quasars as large as 10G Msol embedded in host galaxies of Trillions of Msol as far back as z~6.5 poses a real challenge to the heirarchical model, especially since these objects typically exhibit solar or super-solar metallicities. Quasars have been shown to cluster, not unlike local galaxies, posing the question of how these supermassive objects formed larger-scale structure so early in the life of the universe. This is not a problem in a steady state universe.

As for the nature of the CMB (ST's #1), I have also explained at length how that arises in my model, including the nature of the WMAP anisotropies. Please note that Eddington predicted that empty space would have a ground temperature of about 3K back in 1926, which he later refined to 2.8K.

 

[wolram]

I have no problem with Red shift, my problem is understanding," expanding
space", It seems even the ST and QLG people are still in a quandary also.
May be it makes perfect sense to some, but i do not know a robust way of
describing this action.
Space can "carry", galaxies with it as it expands, but can not break the
weakest gravitational bond? Why should it "carry" galaxies with it, why does
it not ignore ,"non gravitationally bound mass", as it does," G Bound mass"?

 

[SpaceTiger]

If any of you will drop me a PM with your email address, I will be pleased to send you a concise overview of my ZPE gravitation model.

There's no need for that. Please address the above points in the context of your model, even if there's no math. If you need to cut parts from or refer to other posts, that's fine. Your posts in this thread so far contain only one nitpick of the standard model (based on very sketchy observations, no lses) and a vague allusion to how you can explain the CMB acoustic oscillations. Obviously, that's not very satisfying.

 

[turbo]

There's no need for that. Please address the above points in the context of your model, even if there's no math. If you need to cut parts from or refer to other posts, that's fine. Your posts in this thread so far contain only one nitpick of the standard model (based on very sketchy observations, no lses) and a vague allusion to how you can explain the CMB acoustic oscillations. Obviously, that's not very satisfying.

In my model (which assumes an infinite Steady State universe), the virtual pairs of the quantum vacuum are polarized by the presence of matter, with antiparticles preferentially orient toward the dominant mass. In the standard model, particles and antiparticles are assumed to have equivalent gravitational mass, but that has never been experimentally demonstrated. A crucial experiment of CERN's Athena project will measure the gravitational infall rate of neutral antihydrogen, once the team has gotten past the hurdles of trapping and cooling the component particles - no small feat.

This vacuum polarization (arising from differential in gravitational infall) results in densification of the vacuum field, since as the antiparticles are preferentially oriented toward the dominant mass of matter, their partner particles are oriented outward from the dominant mass, presenting a unified front to attract and orient the antiparticles of pairs further out. This self-attractive gravitational effect does not result in collapse of the vacuum field, because the fermionic behavior of the particles and antiparticles generate an opposing pressure as they progressively resist being crowded toward the same quantum state (per the Pauli exclusion principle). The PEP pressure and the gravitational attraction are everywhere in dynamical balance to 120 OOM, explaining why the universe has not collapsed to a few thousand kilometers under the gravitational energy of the vacuum fields. The fact that the vacuum energy is so finely balanced is proof that both the pressure and the gravitational energy are aspects of the same field. If the pressure (cosmological constant if you prefer) and gravitational energy of the quantum vacuum were not features of the very same field, it would be impossible to explain the exquisite fine-tuning, and any little imbalance in the contributing fields would have long ago have caused the universe to either collapse or disintegrate.

Now for non-cosmological redshift in this model. The vacuum fields are the aether through which EM waves propagate. Einstein needed a dynamical gravitational aether to model GR, and he admitted that an EM aether was essential for the transmission of light. The problem was that he couldn't accommodate a dynamical EM aether in GR so he punted and said that although the EM aether must exist, it can have no sensible properties. In my model, the gravitational aether and the EM aether are one and the same. EM waves traversing the aether (the EM fields of the quantum vacuum) do not get a free ride. They interact with the fields and lose energy in the process. The more energetic the EM (higher frequency), the more interactions, and the more they will be slowed and redshifted, so there is a level of frequency-dependance in the model. I expect for example that gamma rays will be slowed and redshifted more than infrared, proportional to the frequency difference. If light interacts with the aether, light coming from sufficiently far away will ultimately be redshifted into indetectability. This is analagous to how AC current can be rectified and smoothed into a DC signal which contributes to the ground state of the circuit, but is no longer sensible as AC. EM of a sufficiently long wavelength is no longer sensible to us as EM. This redshifting mechanism moots Olber's Paradox as an objection to an infinite universe, since the EM from objects sufficiently far away is redshifted into undetectability. It cannot be differentiated from the ground state of the vacuum.

Now to the CMB. The CMB is simply the average temperature of the quantum vacuum - the sum of all the energy contributions from all the sources in the visible universe. Eddington calculated this temperature to be 3K in 1926 and later refined it to 2.8K which was pretty astute. Penzias and Wilson confirmed this prediction closely in 1965, and it has since been measured to be very close to Eddington's 2.8K. The CMB happens to be a fine experimental confirmation for a prediction based on a steady state universe. Gamow in his book "Creation of the Universe" had predicted that the CMB resulting from the Big Bang would be 50K. Interestingly, the Penzias and Wilson result was trumpeted as a successful confirmation for Gamow's BB model, not for Eddington's.

As to the anisotropies of the CMB as seen in WMAP data: These anisotropies are due to our motions relative to the vacuum fields, which are a semi-Machian reference frame. The motion of the MW gives us the large dipole anisotropy. Smaller anisotropies arise from the rotation of the MW, the Sun's motion through the galactic arm, and the motion of the Earth (and WMAP at L2) around the sun. If my model is correct, the gross features of the WMAP₂ data will agree with WMAP₁ results, but the small-angle anisotropies will not agree. This is because the small-angle anisotropies are artifacts of the movement of the WMAP probe relative to the vacuum fields.

Even the smallest-angle anisotropies in the WMAP data cover immense areas of space when projected back to the era of recombination. These areas are so large that they cannot possibly have conspired to change between years one and two. I predict that there are significant differences in the small-angle anisotropies between the data sets of the first two years, and that the changes will ultimately be found to be due to the orientation of the WMAP detectors relative to WMAPs motion through the vacuum field. In other words, the temperature measured in a particular spot in the celestial background is a sum of all the motions I mentioned above relative to the vacuum field plus the orientation of the detectors with respect to those motions. Higher temperatures in the forward direction and lower temperatures facing away from the direction of motion.

As for the "nitpick" about large-scale structure and high metallicity in the very early universe, some very smart people have been studying and publishing about this. I have cited many of these papers in earlier threads. The Standard Model, being time-limited, can be constrained by things like accretion rates of stars, galaxies, and black holes, the evolution of metallicity, mass budget, etc which is why these authors are interested. They seem to be serious folks, not nitpickers, and you can bet that the observational astronomers among them are already clamoring to reserve time on the LBT and the Webb to push observations far past z=6.5.

http://cosmos.as.arizona.edu/~thompson/pubdb/docs/freudling03a.pdf
http://cosmos.as.arizona.edu/~thompson/pubdb/docs/barth03a.pdf
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aastro-ph%2F0112075
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aastro-ph%2F0205143
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai%3AarXiv%2Eorg%3Aastro%2Dph%2F0311008

 

[hellfire]

1) Explain the CMB, including the acoustic oscillations.
2) Explain the abundances of light elements.
3) Explain the formation of large scale structure.
4) Explain the correlation of strong absorption systems in QSOs with galaxies on the sky.
5) Explain gravitationally lensed quasars.

There's much more,...

I am sure you had this in mind, but may be just for completeness and since they are not often explicitely stated, I will add two phenomena which, together with redshift, are a proof for the cosmological expansion of space:

6) Cosmological time dilation
7) Tolman surface brightness test

 

[Chronos]

Good one, hellfire, time dilation of supernova light curves should be a stake in the heart of any non-cosmological redshift model. Of course there are others, but this one is a no brainer.

 

[turbo]

Good one, hellfire, time dilation of supernova light curves should be a stake in the heart of any non-cosmological redshift model. Of course there are others, but this one is a no brainer.

From my way-long post above:

The more energetic the EM (higher frequency), the more interactions, and the more they will be slowed and redshifted, so there is a level of frequency-dependance in the model. I expect for example that gamma rays will be slowed and redshifted more than infrared, proportional to the frequency difference.

This smears the luminosity curve of a rapid broad-spectrum event, with the forerunner waves being in the long wavelength end of the object's spectrum. If this is true, and if we are lucky enough to have a Webb observation of a supernova host galaxy just before the SN becomes visible in optical wavelengths, the Webb image should show anomalous brightness in the IR prior to the optical brightening.

 

[Chronos]

I would be very interested in reviewing any observational evidence of frequency dependent redshift differentials. Would not this effect be apparent in quasar emission lines when they fluctuate in brightness?

 

[turbo]

I would be very interested in reviewing any observational evidence of frequency dependent redshift differentials.

Frequency-dependent differentials not just in the amount of redshift, but also in light speed. I have looked very hard for evidence of this in papers regarding SN with no luck. Fotini Markopoulou Kalamara expects to see evidence of frequency-dependant delay of high frequency EM in Glast observations (2006 launch). She is a LQG researcher hoping to probe the fine structure of the vacuum by this means. Quick overview here:

http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2003/2/16/152235/209

More detail in Lee Smolin's paper here:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0501/0501091.pdf

Would not this effect be apparent in quasar emission lines when they fluctuate in brightness?

Considering the length of the typical quasar light curve and the integration time required for making spectra of very faint sources, I doubt that the effect could be discerned unequivocably. We would get our best chance to see this effect if an IR telescope detected an anomalous brightening in a distant object, and on short notice an optical-or-shorter wavelength instrument could be trained on that location to catch the rise in luminosity in those wavelengths. In other words, an IR-wavelength detector on a Swift-type platform could catch a SN or perhaps a GRB before the fireworks started in the shorter wavelengths.

 

[SpaceTiger]

The vacuum fields are the aether through which EM waves propagate.

Let's start here, since this seems to be your explanation for the redshift. If the particles and anti-particles had different masses, they would tend align with the gravitational field, as you say. This would create a giant polarization field around massive bodies. As in dielectrics, the level of polarization would determine the speed with which light propagated through it. Thus, we should expect that the speed of light will depend on the strength of the local gravitational field? Is that correct?

 

[Nereid]

Nice one turbo-1.

Without math or numbers, I'm not sure we can get very far, but let's try.

In the standard model, particles and antiparticles are assumed to have equivalent gravitational mass, but that has never been experimentally demonstrated. A crucial experiment of CERN's Athena project will measure the gravitational infall rate of neutral antihydrogen

Fast forward a couple of years ... the Athena results are in, and they are:
a) that matter and antimatter 'fall' at the same rate, to within the limits of the experimental errors. Is this a 'killer blow' to turbo-1's idea? If not, why not?
b) that they fall at a different rate, 0.1% different. Is this confirmation of turbo-1's idea?

The more energetic the EM (higher frequency), the more interactions, and the more they will be slowed and redshifted, so there is a level of frequency-dependance in the model. I expect for example that gamma rays will be slowed and redshifted more than infrared, proportional to the frequency difference.

Just want to make sure I'm reading this correctly ... so we could test the idea by comparing the redshift observed in 'radio lines' with that in the NIR/optical/UV and with that in X-rays? We could plot any observed 'discrepancies' (e.g. (z_radio - z_UV) against z, and see if there is a correlation?

If light interacts with the aether, light coming from sufficiently far away will ultimately be redshifted into indetectability.

Again, just to make sure I'm following this right ... as the universe is infinite, and steady-state, it's 'turtles (a.k.a. galaxies), all the way down'? IOW, we will eventually be able to 'see' galaxies with z = 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, ...?

SpaceTiger also listed "Explain the abundances of light elements." - does your idea address this too?

 

[turbo]

Nice one turbo-1.

Without math or numbers, I'm not sure we can get very far, but let's try.Fast forward a couple of years ... the Athena results are in, and they are:
a) that matter and antimatter 'fall' at the same rate, to within the limits of the experimental errors. Is this a 'killer blow' to turbo-1's idea? If not, why not?
b) that they fall at a different rate, 0.1% different. Is this confirmation of turbo-1's idea?

a) Yes, it's a killer blow. I can envision no other mechanism for vacuum polarization. It must be a mechanism that arises from a fundamental property of elementary particles (followed by all particles and antiparticles everywhere in the universe).
b) One-tenth of one percent? Theoretically that would provide some force for vacuum polarization, but given the strong lensing and the excess binding we observe in clusters, my gut feeling is that the gravitation infall rates will be found to differ by something (considerably) more than that.

It may be possible to estimate the infall rate differential from the energy ascribed to the gravitation of the vacuum fields, but I'm not that talented. Since that theoretical energy is about 120 OOM larger than what we actually observe (due to the dynamical balance of the field's gravitation with the pressure of the Pauli exclusion principle) one would naively expect a substantial differential.

Just want to make sure I'm reading this correctly ... so we could test the idea by comparing the redshift observed in 'radio lines' with that in the NIR/optical/UV and with that in X-rays? We could plot any observed 'discrepancies' (e.g. (z_radio - z_UV) against z, and see if there is a correlation?

Yes. For any very distant celestial event that is luminous in a broad range of frequencies and shows a rapid rise in luminosity, we should see a rise in radio luminosity, followed by a rise in IR, an increase in optical flux, etc. An object exhibiting a rapid drop in luminosity should show the same time variation, with the lower frequencies falling off first. The arrival times of the various frequencies will be smeared because longer wavelengths propagate through the aether with less "friction" (they lose proportionately less energy through interaction with the aether than short wavelengths). The signature of this activity in a distant SN is a temporal stretching of the luminosity curve and a compression of the overall spectrum, with higher frequencies being redshifted proportionately more than lower frequencies.

Again, just to make sure I'm following this right ... as the universe is infinite, and steady-state, it's 'turtles (a.k.a. galaxies), all the way down'? IOW, we will eventually be able to 'see' galaxies with z = 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, ...?

No, we will not. The universe is steady state and infinite, but our visible universe is limited. The light from sufficiently distant objects will never be sensible as light because it is redshifted into undetectability. If we want to see further into the universe than we do now, we will have to do so at longer and longer wavelengths. At some distance, though, the EM from these distant galaxies will be redshifted so strongly that it will be indistinguishable from the CMB.

SpaceTiger also listed "Explain the abundances of light elements." - does your idea address this too?

I have only been working on the model for about a year and have not gotten into the chemistry. I have been concentrating on the mechanics of gravitation, the optical effects of the polarized vacuum fields, and the fine-tuning of the gravitational energy of the vacuum with the expansive pressure (CC). I also have a full-time (and more!) job.

Regarding elemental abundances, an infinite steady-state universe requires a mindset somewhat different than that required by a BB cosmology. An interesting side-effect of this model is that due to the polarization of the virtual particle pairs, black holes will preferentially capture antiparticles, producing a net excess of real matter particles in the form of Hawking radiation. A tiny effect, but in a temporally infinite universe...?

 

[turbo]

Let's start here, since this seems to be your explanation for the redshift. If the particles and anti-particles had different masses, they would tend align with the gravitational field, as you say. This would create a giant polarization field around massive bodies. As in dielectrics, the level of polarization would determine the speed with which light propagated through it. Thus, we should expect that the speed of light will depend on the strength of the local gravitational field? Is that correct?

That is correct. This allows us to model gravitational lensing in the terms of classical optics. The density gradient of the field, the shape of the lensing area, the angle at which an impinging wave-front encounters the gradient, etc, all contribute to the lensing.

QFT tells us that there is no such thing as empty space, even at 0 deg. K. Once we admit the principle of vacuum polarization, the "speed of light in a vacuum" must be variable, based on the density of the field through which the light propagates. In the experimental predictions of my ZPE gravity model, I postulated an increase in the speed of light in a rarified quantum vacuum (between the plates of a conventional Casimir device). I was pretty proud of that, until a prominent ZPE researcher pointed out that Klaus Scharnhorst had proposed this back in 1990. I'm a little late to the cosmology party, so there's a lot of research to catch up on.

 

[SpaceTiger]

That is correct. This allows us to model gravitational lensing in the terms of classical optics.

So let me get this straight. You're challenging not only standard cosmology, but also general relativity, a theory that has been tested to high precision in the weak field? Furthermore, your implication of a non-constant speed of light and the explanation of gravitational lensing by classical optics negates the mass-energy equivalence (since lensing is expected even from SR). In order to be consistent with observations, your theory needs to explain everything that SR and GR explain within the bounds of experimental tests. In other words, you're challenging a large portion of modern physics and yet haven't done a single calculation. That sir, is crackpottery.

 

[turbo]

So let me get this straight. You're challenging not only standard cosmology, but also general relativity, a theory that has been tested to high precision in the weak field? Furthermore, your implication of a non-constant speed of light and the explanation of gravitational lensing by classical optics negates the mass-energy equivalence (since lensing is expected even from SR). In order to be consistent with observations, your theory needs to explain everything that SR and GR explain within the bounds of experimental tests. In other words, you're challenging a large portion of modern physics and yet haven't done a single calculation. That sir, is crackpottery.

My initial motivation (about a year ago) was to describe a mechanism for gravitation that is consistent with quantum theory and can produce observed optical effects (lensing, redshift, etc) without inventing any entities beyond those already proven to exist. I first looked for intersections where GR and QFT are incompatible. The curved space-time model of gravitation seems to be a real sticking point for QFT. The fine-tuning of the gravitational attraction of the quantum vacuum field (nulled to 120 OOM) poses a bit of a quandry for GR, as does the fine-tuning of the CC. Intractible problems are usually signs that we are not asking ourselves the right questions or have framed the problem incorrectly. I asked myself questions about what we know and what we "assume" we know (epistemology), and decided that GR's mathematical gravitational model of curved space-time needed to be underpinned by a mechanical process, and that perhaps the vacuum fields were part of the process. A few months into the process, I found out that Sakharov had suggested years ago that mass and inertia arise from the interaction of matter with the vacuum fields. That was encouraging, but I found no significant extensions of that idea, so I continued on my own. You have not seen all of the model, but I guarantee you that it is logical, self-consistent, and falsifiable by several experiments, including two that are ongoing.

If you see logical inconsistencies with my model, feel free to point them out. Simply dismissing it out-of-hand because it challenges things that are widely believed is illogical. My model can explain the fine-tuning of the CC. How does the standard model explain it?

 

[SpaceTiger]

If you see logical inconsistencies with my model, feel free to point them out. Simply dismissing it out-of-hand because it challenges things that are widely believed is illogical.

No, what's illogical is believing in a theory with no mathematical backbone. Relativity is widely believed because it is widely tested. You need to show that you can produce the same results in the regimes in which relativity is tested, otherwise your talk is gibberish. Anybody can wave their hands, point out problematic observations, and claim they've solved physics, but unless you can actually show your theory to be consistent with the observations that have already been done, you should really keep quiet about it.

 

[turbo]

Relativity is widely believed because it is widely tested.

May I remind you that many of the critical tests of GR have failed to support GR? So far, no graviton, no Higgs boson (the expected energy level keeps getting pushed up, leading to more powerful accelerators), no dark matter detection, no dark energy...yet the believers still believe, and will not allow the falsification of the standard model under any circumstances. I do not have a monopoly on illogical beliefs.

You need to show that you can produce the same results in the regimes in which relativity is tested, otherwise your talk is gibberish. Anybody can wave their hands, point out problematic observations, and claim they've solved physics, but unless you can actually show your theory to be consistent with the observations that have already been done, you should really keep quiet about it.

You started this thread and threw out some challenges. I responded. You called me a crackpot and now you're telling me to shut up. Are you incapable of considering the possible validity of a concept without having it quantitatively nailed-down? If so, just wait for Athena. If I'm right, you'll be swimming in equations in mere weeks after the results are made public.

And now a challenge for you: As I mentioned above, the gravitational energy of the quantum vacuum and the pressure of the vacuum (CC) are exquisitely fine-tuned. This is possible only if both arise from the same vacuum field, as in my model. This fine-tuning is compelling evidence that both gravitation and the repulsive force of the CC (NOT Einstein's biggest mistake in my book!) arise from the vacuum field.

Can you come up with an explanation for this fine-tuning using the rules of the standard model - apart from the impossible cosmic coincidence that these forces arise from unrelated fields and yet have somehow conspired to stay in perfect balance for 13.7Gy?

 

[SpaceTiger]

May I remind you that many of the critical tests of GR have failed to support GR? So far, no graviton, no Higgs boson (the expected energy level keeps getting pushed up, leading to more powerful accelerators), no dark matter detection, no dark energy...

Those aren't tests of GR, they're tests of particle physics and cosmology. Furthermore, none of those things are "failures" simply because they haven't been found yet. Do you even know what the tests of GR are?

You started this thread and threw out some challenges. I responded. You called me a crackpot and now you're telling me to shut up. Are you incapable of considering the possible validity of a concept without having it quantitatively nailed-down?

That makes no sense. Obviously, the current theories can be described conceptually, but nobody will believe them without the quantitative support. Do you know what the scientific method is? Do you understand why quantitative support is necessary?

If your conceptual arguments are right, then you should be able to come up with a quantitative backing. There are countless conceptual arguments that can be made to describe the universe, but without the numbers, there's no way to distinguish them. This is why I think you should be quiet and this is why I think you're a crackpot. I don't care if you have a science advisor ribbon, your "science" is utter garbage.

If so, just wait for Athena. If I'm right, you'll be swimming in equations in mere weeks after the results are made public.

Why do you need to wait until Athena? If you were capable, you could just put them together now.

Can you come up with an explanation for this fine-tuning using the rules of the standard model - apart from the impossible cosmic coincidence that these forces arise from unrelated fields and yet have somehow conspired to stay in perfect balance for 13.7Gy?

I don't have an answer to your challenge, but I assure you that my first attempt to solve it would not be to throw away the entirety of modern physics and come up with a vague abstraction pieced together from a hodgepodge of obscure QFT ideas.

 

[turbo]

Those aren't tests of GR, they're tests of particle physics and cosmology. Furthermore, none of those things are "failures" simply because they haven't been found yet. Do you even know what the tests of GR are?

I submit that the detection or non-detection of particles mediating mass and gravity in the standard model have a critical bearing on whether the curved space-time concept of GR gravity is accurate. The existence of non-baryonic dark matter is proposed (in fairly well-defined masses and distributions) keep GR gravity predictive on galactic and cluster scales. Detection of DM is critical to GR - it should be falsifiable on the basis of non-detection at some level.

That makes no sense. Obviously, the current theories can be described conceptually, but nobody will believe them without the quantitative support. Do you know what the scientific method is? Do you understand why quantitative support is necessary?

Yes, I do, and if you will read about Einstein, you will see that his theories started out as thought-experiments. In the case of GR, it took him many years to come up with the math, and he had help with that. I have very poor math skills, and at my age, I won't be going back to college to remedy that. The conceptual model is there, and it is rigorously logical.

If your conceptual arguments are right, then you should be able to come up with a quantitative backing. There are countless conceptual arguments that can be made to describe the universe, but without the numbers, there's no way to distinguish them. This is why I think you should be quiet and this is why I think you're a crackpot. I don't care if you have a science advisor ribbon, your "science" is utter garbage.

Nice. Feel free to petition the advisors to remove the ribbon, if it will make you feel better. For younger students plowing through this thread, please understand that not all physicists are rude and will call you names. Some are very pleasant people and some (notably Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein in their days) will encourage you to question long-accepted assumptions (this is called epistemology) and ask "why"? This is one way scientific progress is made when theories encounter a logjam - you re-evaluate your assumptions and see if they could have a bearing on the intractable problem.

Why do you need to wait until Athena? If you were capable, you could just put them together now.

I have absolutely no idea what the magnitude of the infall rate differential might be, nor have I yet explored the question of whether virtual particle pairs can exist for longer times or might arise at higher energies in highly polarized (massive) environments. It's still early days, yet, even if I had the math skills to model the field, which I have told you I don't. Be assured, though, that if a differential is found, you will have all the equations and papers you want, courtesy of swarms of eager young folks desirous of meeting the king of Sweden.

I don't have an answer to your challenge, but I assure you that my first attempt to solve it would not be to throw away the entirety of modern physics and come up with a vague abstraction pieced together from a hodgepodge of obscure QFT ideas.

I haven't thrown away all of modern physics. I have simply tried to provide a mechanism for gravitation, which is absent from GR, and explain how some basic properties in the vacuum (from QFT) might be reconciled with the GR concept of gravitation. In the course of this, it became evident that it is possible to model gravitational effects as the behavior of polarized vacuum fields in Euclidean space. There are some wonderful benefits to cosmology if this model is true, because it removes a couple of nasty fine-tuning problems at once.

 

[Nereid]

Without math or numbers, I'm not sure we can get very far, but let's try.Fast forward a couple of years ... the Athena results are in, and they are:
a) that matter and antimatter 'fall' at the same rate, to within the limits of the experimental errors. Is this a 'killer blow' to turbo-1's idea? If not, why not?

a) Yes, it's a killer blow. I can envision no other mechanism for vacuum polarization. It must be a mechanism that arises from a fundamental property of elementary particles (followed by all particles and antiparticles everywhere in the universe).

Hmm, so here's where it gets difficult (for the turbo-1 idea) ... if you don't have any idea of the quantitative size of the expected effect, you surely cannot know if the experimental result was a killer blow or that it simply wasn't sensitive enough.

b) that they fall at a different rate, 0.1% different. Is this confirmation of turbo-1's idea?

b) One-tenth of one percent? Theoretically that would provide some force for vacuum polarization, but given the strong lensing and the excess binding we observe in clusters, my gut feeling is that the gravitation infall rates will be found to differ by something (considerably) more than that.

Ditto; while it's nice to paint word pictures of speculative ideas, engineers learned - painfully - a long time ago that without numbers you can't even build an enclosure, much less a 10 m telescope to go in it.

Just want to make sure I'm reading this correctly ... so we could test the idea by comparing the redshift observed in 'radio lines' with that in the NIR/optical/UV and with that in X-rays? We could plot any observed 'discrepancies' (e.g. (zradio - zUV) against z, and see if there is a correlation?

Yes.

OK, good.

In the public domain, there are hundreds of papers reporting observations of distant objects, in a great many wavelength bands. We're all familiar with reports of the optical and NIR spectra (and redshifts) of even quite high z objects; in how many of these same objects have 'radio lines' (inc microwave, e.g. masers), X-ray lines, and gamma lines been observed? What frequency-dependent redshifts have been noted? When you examine the published data, do you find any hint of such?

Over the past decade or three, there have been many papers on the constancy (or not) of the fine structure constant. These studies have involved accurate wavelength determinations of lines in the spectra of high redshift objects. While the wavelength range is relatively small, the precision is high ... what does this compilation of high quality data have to say about the frequency-dependent redshift relationship?

 

[SpaceTiger]

I submit that the detection or non-detection of particles mediating mass and gravity in the standard model have a critical bearing on whether the curved space-time concept of GR gravity is accurate. The existence of non-baryonic dark matter is proposed (in fairly well-defined masses and distributions) keep GR gravity predictive on galactic and cluster scales. Detection of DM is critical to GR - it should be falsifiable on the basis of non-detection at some level.

Unfortunately, it will be hard to rule it out by a non-detection because we don't know just how weakly-interacting the matter is. Even if the solution involved a modification of gravity (like MOND), my point is that GR is still tested very precisely within certain regimes. Your theory has to produce this same results in those regimes. This can be tested with equations even if you don't know the relevant scales, because we have this thing called algebra. It allows you to construct equations and give the scaling behavior. Show me that this matches GR in the regimes we tested and I'll take you more seriously.

Yes, I do, and if you will read about Einstein, you will see that his theories started out as thought-experiments. In the case of GR, it took him many years to come up with the math, and he had help with that. I have very poor math skills, and at my age, I won't be going back to college to remedy that. The conceptual model is there, and it is rigorously logical.

Oh, please don't compare yourself to Einstein. Einstein was not a mathematician (neither am I, for that matter), but he was certainly competent in algebra and could show how his theories behaved in different regimes. I've read his thought experiments and they all gave very rigorous arguments for why certain behaviors should be true in certain circumstances. Your hand-wavy arguments don't even approach that kind of logical rigor.

Nice. Feel free to petition the advisors to remove the ribbon

If it were up to me, that would have been done long ago. I have to admit to not understanding why you're tolerated when anybody else who repeatedly claims to have toppled GR (or plasma physics, for that matter) gets quickly banned. Heck, I've even seen crackpots with mathematical support for their theories get banned. I'm not mad at you for responding to this thread (as I obviously asked you to), I'm mad at you for responding to the countless other threads in which your input wasn't asked for. This was your chance to show me that you could support your theory, but without even any scalings (and I'll note, you only even barely addressed some of the points I brought up as challenges), I don't see how you possibly can.

if it will make you feel better. For younger students plowing through this thread, please understand that not all physicists are rude and will call you names. Some are very pleasant people and some (notably Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein in their days) will encourage you to question long-accepted assumptions (this is called epistemology) and ask "why"?

Give me a break. You're not asking why, you're trumpeting a theory with no rigorous backing on a forum with impressionable students trying to learn astronomy and physics. It's for their sake that I'm getting angry at you. You're a nice person and I understand that you've been around a while, but I really think you should have a little more humility in the face of a hundred years of scientific research. You've displayed a blatant misunderstanding of even those fields that you claim you're certified in (see here). If you want your point of view to be treated equally, you need to at least show that your ideas can be consistent with the observations so far. Unless you can provide quantitative support for your ideas, then I can't argue with you because you can always cook up some extra factor or claim that the scaling matches the observations in tested regimes. I'm certainly not going to go and work through all the relevant equations myself, so the burden is on you.

 

[Berislav]

If I may add that your theory will also need to explain why particles and their corresponding anti-particles have different mass.
In quantum field theory the notion that they have the same mass arises directly from the fact that their \psi-operators contain the same creation and annihilation operators.
This is crucial as the equations from which this is derived also predict the existence of vacuum field (which your theory is based upon).

One cannot challenge a fundamental part of a theory and then use another part of it to base a new theory upon.

 

[turbo]

Hmm, so here's where it gets difficult (for the turbo-1 idea) ... if you don't have any idea of the quantitative size of the expected effect, you surely cannot know if the experimental result was a killer blow or that it simply wasn't sensitive enough.

That is correct. This is an unknown. A on-line lecture I audited recently by a CERN scientist (it might have been Rocky Kolb) pointed out that the gravitational mass equivalence of matter and antimatter has never been demonstrated, because before now, only charged antiparticles have been available, and tiny EM effects swamp gravitational effects.

In the public domain, there are hundreds of papers reporting observations of distant objects, in a great many wavelength bands. We're all familiar with reports of the optical and NIR spectra (and redshifts) of even quite high z objects; in how many of these same objects have 'radio lines' (inc microwave, e.g. masers), X-ray lines, and gamma lines been observed? What frequency-dependent redshifts have been noted? When you examine the published data, do you find any hint of such?

Over the past decade or three, there have been many papers on the constancy (or not) of the fine structure constant. These studies have involved accurate wavelength determinations of lines in the spectra of high redshift objects. While the wavelength range is relatively small, the precision is high ... what does this compilation of high quality data have to say about the frequency-dependent redshift relationship?

As soon as I determined that the model could produce time-dilated SN curves, I started looking for frequency-dependent observational proof in the literature. I didn't find any, and within a couple of days returned to mining Citebase and Arxiv for papers more relevant to quasar redshift, vacuum fields, etc. Do you have suggestions as to where I might find time-indexed observations of very distant SN in multiple frequencies?

Unfortunately, I expect that we will not be able to detect the frequency-dependent time smearing of arrival times in more nearby objects for which there is a lot of data available, like local pulsars, etc. The light-path will not be long enough to make the effect detectable. Has there ever been a distant SN detected in anomalous radio or IR flux prior to the optical outburst? That would be the ideal proof.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Unfortunately, I expect that we will not be able to detect the frequency-dependent time smearing of arrival times in more nearby objects for which there is a lot of data available, like local pulsars, etc.

Look up the "dispersion measure".

 

[turbo]

If I may add that your theory will also need to explain why particles and their corresponding anti-particles have different mass.
In quantum field theory the notion that they have the same mass arises directly from the fact that their \psi-operators contain the same creation and annihilation operators.
This is crucial as the equations from which this is derived also predict the existence of vacuum field (which your theory is based upon).

One cannot challenge a fundamental part of a theory and then use another part of it to base a new theory upon.

You are absolutely correct in this regard. In my model, the inertial mass equivalence of the particles and antiparticles is assumed, but the gravitational infall rate (and thus the inferred gravitational mass) may differ due to an innate attraction of antimatter to local concentrations of matter. This is not a trivial concern. One crucial experiment of CERN's Athena project aims to test the gravitational mass equivalence of neutral antihydrogen against that of hydrogen. I don't know what the experimenters expect to find - they may regard the comparison as important simply because this mass equivalence has never before been demonstrated, but I eagerly await the results.

 

[Locrian]

I submit that the detection or non-detection of particles mediating mass and gravity in the standard model have a critical bearing on whether the curved space-time concept of GR gravity is accurate.

You are wrong.

Those things may have some bearing on whether it is complete, but mean nothing to whether it is accurate. Only testing predictions it makes determines wether or not it is accurate. In short the following statement:

May I remind you that many of the critical tests of GR have failed to support GR? So far, no graviton, no Higgs boson (the expected energy level keeps getting pushed up, leading to more powerful accelerators), no dark matter detection, no dark energy...

Is absurd and shows a complete failure to understand general relativity, since not even one of them is a prediciton or a test of the theory.

This thread really did pick up for a minute, but shortly became the same-old-same-old, where someone throws stones at an idea they have no understanding of.

 

[turbo]

Look up the "dispersion measure".

Thank you for that tip, ST. I guess with the contamination of of the time-smearing of pulsar EM arrival times due to magnetic fields, they will not be very good candidates for measuring frequency-dependent effects in the IGM, unless the effect could be shown to be compressed by traveling across lots of IGM (not that we could see get good multi-frequency observations of pulsars in very distant galaxies, anyway).

 

[turbo]

Oh, please don't compare yourself to Einstein. Einstein was not a mathematician (neither am I, for that matter), but he was certainly competent in algebra and could show how his theories behaved in different regimes. I've read his thought experiments and they all gave very rigorous arguments for why certain behaviors should be true in certain circumstances. Your hand-wavy arguments don't even approach that kind of logical rigor.

It was not my intent to compare myself or my model with Einstein or his pivotal work. My intent was simply to point out that he (and others, by the way) would typically start out with a thought experiment, establish a level of logical consistency, then provide the math. I have gotten no farther than step two, and may run into a wall pretty quickly anyway because of my lack of math skills.

I have postulated that the gravitational potential of the vacuum fields AND the CC are dynamically balanced because they arise as effects of the same field. This can explain why the huge energy of the quantum vacuum hasn't crushed the universe to about the size of our planet, and also why the observed CC isn't 120 OOM too big, and caused the universe to disintegrate long ago. If this is true (gravity arises from the interaction of matter with vacuum fields AND the gravitational force of the vacuum is balanced by the pressure exerted by the virtual pairs in accordance with the Pauli Exclusion Principle), it would eliminate a couple of nasty fine-tuning problems in the standard model. Is there absolutely no value in this concept? Are you so convinced that I am an idiot that you will not consider it at face value?

 

[SpaceTiger]

Is there absolutely no value in this concept? Are you so convinced that I am an idiot that you will not consider it at face value?

I have no problem with you posing such experiments, nor do I think you're an idiot. I simply don't like the idea that your theory, which you admit is in an extremely primitive state and conflicts with a lot of accepted physics, gets so much attention in posts on this forum. Visitors with less experience could easily mistake your ideas for a well-tested and seriously considered astrophysical theory. Until you can provide me with calculations of some kind, I'm not willing to grant it that status.

The first thing I suggest you do is pose your thought experiment on the quantum physics board and discuss it with experts in that field. I can only argue with you from the astrophysics side because I am not trained in QFT (though I expect to be by the end of next year), but those folks can likely say more about your theories regarding vacuum polarization, the exclusion principle, and a variable speed of light. Maybe their input will also help you find a starting point for potential mathematical calculations.

 

[Chronos]

I'm pretty confident that inertial and gravitational mass will prove to be identical, within experimental error limits. I think we would otherwise see some pretty weird results from particle collisions. If particle - anti-particle inertial and gravitational masses were not identical. there should be a zoo of unexpected critters to account for the missing energy [note I did not say mass]. At any rate, it would be a shocking result. It would certainly turn the particle physics world upon its head.

I think thought experiments are a useful way to conceptualize the mathematical foundations behind an idea. They are otherwise unfounded, IMO.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Wow, I just realized that I misspelled "interpretation" in the subject of this post.

I must have been really out of it. Can a mod change that for me?

 

[Spin_Network]

May I remind you that many of the critical tests of GR have failed to support GR? So far, no graviton, no Higgs boson (the expected energy level keeps getting pushed up, leading to more powerful accelerators), no dark matter detection, no dark energy...yet the believers still believe, and will not allow the falsification of the standard model under any circumstances. I do not have a monopoly on illogical beliefs.

You started this thread and threw out some challenges. I responded. You called me a crackpot and now you're telling me to shut up. Are you incapable of considering the possible validity of a concept without having it quantitatively nailed-down? If so, just wait for Athena. If I'm right, you'll be swimming in equations in mere weeks after the results are made public.

And now a challenge for you: As I mentioned above, the gravitational energy of the quantum vacuum and the pressure of the vacuum (CC) are exquisitely fine-tuned. This is possible only if both arise from the same vacuum field, as in my model. This fine-tuning is compelling evidence that both gravitation and the repulsive force of the CC (NOT Einstein's biggest mistake in my book!) arise from the vacuum field.

Can you come up with an explanation for this fine-tuning using the rules of the standard model - apart from the impossible cosmic coincidence that these forces arise from unrelated fields and yet have somehow conspired to stay in perfect balance for 13.7Gy?

There are enough problems with Interstellar Polarization PA (polarized angle), infact there have been a number of papers inquiring into this, here is a recent print: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505568

I do also contend that there may be problems with how data is analyzed and therefore, we may be on the verge of uncovering some major Cosmilogical new directions, that being said ST, is providing an overview of 'current' understandings.

The early Universe in respect with a bonafide 'reversed', timeline does not allow us the privilage of Line_of_Site confirmation of actual processes that are/have occured. The question of QSO giving meaning interpretations to early workings, based on the Big-Bang, has to be questioned?..I am talking with respect to QSO that are at the farthest edge of our Observational Limits.

1)EXPANSION

If Expansion is the Tail-End (last remnant) process of a preceeding Inflation (as is regulary implied by slow-roll models) then there should be observational evidence that the far extremities of the 'hubble-deep-field', the same area captured by Hubble for instance, should show a vast difference in Galaxies Motions, when compared to the Local Galactic Flow rate.

The major problem of having a 'single' Hubble telescope? filter's light over long periods, with nothing to calibrate or compare images to? It would have been amazing if whilst building the Hubble someone decided to have a carbon copy Hubble telescope, if these were then calibrated at a large distance apart, I am sure the deep-field images would have an enormous amount of data, that would have been less confusing, observationally?

 

[SpaceTiger]

Thank you for that tip, ST. I guess with the contamination of of the time-smearing of pulsar EM arrival times due to magnetic fields

The time-smearing comes from the differing indeces of refraction for the different frequencies -- an effect that shows up as chromatic aberration in classical optics. In fact, this seems to be exactly the same effect you're predicting should occur in the polarized vacuum. Wouldn't your theory then predict that gravitational lensing should be frequency-dependent?

 

[turbo]

I'm pretty confident that inertial and gravitational mass will prove to be identical, within experimental error limits. I think we would otherwise see some pretty weird results from particle collisions.

Apparently the folks at CERN are not so sure of this. AFAIK, they don't expect to see "weird results" in particle collisions because the collisions depend on the speed and inertial masses of the colliding objects. Gravitational attraction is vanishingly small in comparison.

If particle - anti-particle inertial and gravitational masses were not identical. there should be a zoo of unexpected critters to account for the missing energy [note I did not say mass]. At any rate, it would be a shocking result. It would certainly turn the particle physics world upon its head.

We would not need a zoo of new particles. If the gravitational infall rate of antimatter is shown to be higher than that of matter, it will not be due to a higher rest mass of antimatter, but die to an innate attraction of antimatter toward the dominant mass of matter in its domain.

I think thought experiments are a useful way to conceptualize the mathematical foundations behind an idea. They are otherwise unfounded, IMO.

Sometimes you have to examine seemingly intractible problems in creative ways (including questioning commonly-held "givens") to see if the problem can be posed another way, or if we have perhaps not been asking the right questions. Coming up with a gravitational mechanism that can coexist with quantum theory seems to be a problem that is crying out for just such an approach. If brute-force number crunching in QFT could produce a theory of gravitation comparable to that of GR, you would think M-theory or LQG would be producing some clear progress by now. In watching lectures on M-theory, I am flabbergasted by how many extra invisible dimensions are required, and how many as-yet unseen SUSY particles. The incredible complexity may be a sign that all is not going well. Intuitively, GUT should entail a trend toward simplicity and fundamentals.

 

[ohwilleke]

Taking a step back, let's look at why non-cosmological redshift is such an item of speculation.

The current mainstream model proposed a universe that is accellerating in its expansion, composed of 70% dark energy, and was home in the very, very early universe to a huge number of stunningly large quasars. These predictions date back about thirty years, before which neither dark matter nor dark energy were predicted, the universe was known to be expanding but not accellerating in its expansion, and quasars where little known. Also, the accepted value of Hubble's constant has been revised beyond the error bars assigned to it several times since Hubble first identified the phenomena.

A less than an order of magnitude change in the Hubble constant from 70 +/- to about 50 would bring the estimated amount of dark matter in the universe from 70% of all matter-energy to zero. Similarly, slight tweaks in very high z redshifts would eliminate the current mainstream prediction that the expansion of the universe is accellerating and would have an immense effect on the predicted size of quasars. The data that give us these values are primarily redshift data.

High redshifts, by definition, involve scales well outside the range of ordinary experience, even within astronomy. Andromeda, for example, is far closer than high z objects, yet we are still making major new discoveries about Andromeda.

I also have to agree with turbo-1, that the physics community itself, by widely considering ideas like M-theory, SUSY, branes, and CNS with only a weak phenomenologial basis, has lowered the bar to consideration of new physics as a possibility. When 11 dimensions, dozens of new undiscovered particles, and countless worlds with different laws of physics are on the table, it is hard to consider new physics that would slightly tweak very large scale redshift data all that remarkable.

This doesn't mean that alternative theories are right. But, I don't think that the concern that many people are throwing stones, while few people have complete alternative solutions is a fair criticism. The default position in science is "we don't know." The person who discovers Brownian motion or the photoelectric effect need not be the same as the person who invents quantum mechanics to replace it. The claim that dark energy makes up 70% of the matter-energy in the universe is an extraordinary and recent claim that calls for extraordinary proof. The proof supports this claim within the existing model, but general relativity is less well validated at a cosmological scale than it is in other situations, and the FRW equations which are central to this prediction may have assumptions that are sufficiently wrong to make a difference as well. The developments in cosmology in the past thirty years have produced claims sufficiently extraordinary that casting about for alternative models is in order.

 

[wolram]

Dark matter is a hot topic, about 423,000 papers listed in google scholar.

 

[SpaceTiger]

A less than an order of magnitude change in the Hubble constant from 70 +/- to about 50 would bring the estimated amount of dark matter in the universe from 70% of all matter-energy to zero. Similarly, slight tweaks in very high z redshifts would eliminate the current mainstream prediction that the expansion of the universe is accellerating and would have an immense effect on the predicted size of quasars. The data that give us these values are primarily redshift data.

I'm not sure whether to call this really deceptive or just plain wrong. The standard model is not based solely upon direct measurements of Hubble's parameter and its higher moments. In order to explain a Hubble parameter that low, you would have to invoke systematic errors in multiple sets of observations (including WMAP, mass-to-light surveys, and supernovae)...and all in the same direction!

NOTE: I'm assuming you meant dark energy in the above paragraph, not dark matter.

The developments in cosmology in the past thirty years have produced claims sufficiently extraordinary that casting about for alternative models is in order.

How does this lead to the conclusion that we should cast doubt on the cosmological view of redshift.? I certainly agree that dark energy is fishy and mysterious, but that's like saying that neutrino oscillations should lead to us to cast doubt on the existence of the neutrino.

 

[wolram]

If Space tiger wants to answer, why should "dark energy", in all its manifestations
be given any credence? which of these do you predict is correct?
The multitude of theories on "dark matter", verge on the crackpot, give us one
reason why we should give credence to these theories, and which do you
predict is correct?
Other than redshift data prove that space is expanding.

 

[SpaceTiger]

If Space tiger wants to answer, why should "dark energy", in all its manifestations
be given any credence? which of these do you predict is correct?
The multitude of theories on "dark matter", verge on the crackpot, give us one
reason why we should give credence to these theories, and which do you
predict is correct?
Other than redshift data prove that space is expanding.

I'll eventually cover all of these things in my "Review of Standard Cosmology" thread. As it is, I only have so much time to work with, so it may be slow going.

 

[Chronos]

A good place to start on observational evidence favoring dark matter:
Observational evidence for self-interacting cold dark matter
Authors: David N. Spergel, Paul J. Steinhardt
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9909386
Non-Baryonic Dark Matter - Observational Evidence and Detection Methods
Author: L. Bergstrom
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0002126

 

[ohwilleke]

A good place to start on observational evidence favoring dark matter:
Observational evidence for self-interacting cold dark matter
Authors: David N. Spergel, Paul J. Steinhardt
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9909386
Non-Baryonic Dark Matter - Observational Evidence and Detection Methods
Author: L. Bergstrom
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0002126

FWIW, the title of Spergel and Steinhardt's paper is somewhat deceptive. In fact, it basically points out that a CDM model with WIMPs does not work because simulations fail to reproduce the structures seen at galactic levels. For example, contrary to theory one does not see dark matter concentrated in galactic cores. It also notes, in passing, that warm dark matter models do not work.

Spergel and Steinhardt then go on to propose that rather than WIMPs, what is required is a CDM model with self-interacting particles of a particular density. The presentation is bit coy with lots of suggestive implications which are not spelled out in the paper itself.

 

[turbo]

Observational evidence for self-interacting cold dark matter
Authors: David N. Spergel, Paul J. Steinhardt
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9909386

Thank you very much for that link Chronos. "Strongly self-interacting" indeed - I can learn something about gravitational and cluster dynamics from this paper that is not generally available from papers positing weakly interacting dark matter. One thing that has always bothered me is that if the DM is weakly interacting, how can it be persuaded to assume the densities and distributions that is inferred from observation...

(4) the halos of dwarf galaxies and galaxy halos
in clusters will have radii smaller than the gravitational
tidal radius (due to collisional stripping). Intriguingly,
current observations appear to be consistent with all of
these predictions.

I'd have to agree with the perceived effect, but would posit that in a vacuum polarization model the halos (and perhaps filaments or extensions between near neighbors) would be smaller in extent because at some radius from the smaller bodies, the polarizing effects of the larger neighbors would begin to dominate. If the DM is self-attracting and self-polarizing, large bodies will be able to establish fields much larger (in relation to less massive bodies) than you might infer from mass ratios alone, since they will inhibit extended self-polarization in the neighborhoods of their near (and much smaller) neighbors.

Thanks again, Chronos. That is one HEAVILY cited paper.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Wouldn't your theory then predict that gravitational lensing should be frequency-dependent?

I never got an answer to this question, turbo. Since you're claiming different travel times for different frequencies, I think the above conclusion is hard to avoid. I can assure you that such a thing is not observed.

 

[turbo]

I never got an answer to this question, turbo. Since you're claiming different travel times for different frequencies, I think the above conclusion is hard to avoid. I can assure you that such a thing is not observed.

I'm sorry not to have replied ST. Things have been busy - here and at work. No, the frequency-dependent travel-time effect (due to friction with the vacuum field) is a very small effect that is more sensitive to column depth and density than to small variations in field density over thin domains. Optical lensing in polarized vacuum fields will result in frequency-dependent effects like chromatic aberration, but I don't think we will be able to detect arrival time smearing from such interactions. The arrival times of various frequencies will be essentially simultaneous (within our ability to detect them) but the light of shorter wavelengths will be deflected more readily than the longer wavelengths, like in classical optics.

 

[SpaceTiger]

Optical lensing in polarized vacuum fields will result in frequency-dependent effects like chromatic aberration, but I don't think we will be able to detect arrival time smearing from such interactions.

The frequency-dependent effects don't just result in arrival time smearing, they also result in smearing with respect to color. In other words, the location and magnification of lensing arcs should be dependent upon the color you're observing them. This is not observed.

 

[hellfire]

The frequency-dependent effects don't just result in arrival time smearing, they also result in smearing with respect to color. In other words, the location and magnification of lensing arcs should be dependent upon the color you're observing them. This is not observed.

Doesn’t general relativity predict different travel paths (and therefore times) for different frequencies in case of gravitational lensing? Orbits of massless particles in a Schwarzschild spacetime are dependent of the particles’ energies (if I recall correctly).