On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 10:19 AM, H Veeder <[email protected]> wrote:
>From the article: The idea [of increasing mass] may be plausible, but it comes with a big > problem: it can't be tested. Mass is what’s known as a dimensional > quantity, and can be measured only relative to something else. What I don't quite understand is why astrophysicists are comfortable placing confidence in the expanding universe hypothesis when it is epistemologically indistinguishable from this one (I take the article's word for it). It seems like when two explanations are both indistinguishable and sensible, neither should be given preference. Perhaps they were simply unaware of the possibility. I'm excluding explanations along the lines of invisible pink unicorns, which aren't really plausible. A third possible explanation for the redshift, I suspect, is that the mass of things is staying the same but the speed of light is changing over time. Another one might be that time is slowing down or speeding up (I'm not sure if this could account for the redshift). I suppose you could have all four happening simultaneously -- expansion, change in mass, change in the rate at which time progresses and change in the speed of light. Eric
