Hurry RC...

I'm of the yin and yang school, although I call it a convective cycle, with collapsing mass and expanding energy and black holes as the eye of the storm and CMBR as dew point.

I've recently been having this discussion over at Bad Astronomy. Here is a synopsis;

My argument has been that while we can take a god's eye view of another galaxy and say it's however many light-years across, if we were to actually shine a light across it, it would fall in the gravity well and we would relativistically say it has infinite radius. We don't have a god's eye view of the space in between galaxies and can only measure the light crossing it, which tells us that the space is expanding. The theory arising from this evidence is that the entire universe is expanding in absolute volume from an initial event, yet it's called relativistic expansion. Gravity relativistically contracts space and curves the path of light crossing it, so if this expansion is relativistic, it would seem the space not affected by gravity would be expanding due to lensing effects similar to gravity, although it wouldn't be curving light toward or away from any particular point. The result would cause the light waves crossing it to expand, creating the impression of a receding source. The more space it crosses, the greater the effect and the faster the source appears to be receding, so that eventually the source appears to be receding at the speed of light and this creates a horizon line. Because the expansion is integral to the relativistic effects of crossing expanding space, not an initial event, it declines at a rate requiring a cosmological constant to explain and thus, dark energy. It also causes light from all directions to be evenly red-shifted, creating the impression we are at the center of this expansion.

The question is what could cause this relativistic expansion of space? Obviously any material lensing would cause distortion that we do not detect.

Gravity causes mass to collapse until density ignites it and the energy radiates back out. As red-shift is a function of the light waves, could the interference from all the other light, of all other frequencies, crossing every point in space, be causing some wave interference, without directly interfering with the light particles. To the extent they would slow, it would an aftereffect of the wave action. Gravity collapses, radiation expands. Could the effect on space be similar.

I realize I'm in way over my head and I'll leave it at that, but it would seem a simple enough model to make further exploration of the optical effects possible in intergalactic space worth exploring.

This has been a point I've been using to point out some of the problems with BBT;

If the volume of space is increasing in absolute terms, from whatever point in the past, to whatever point in the future, does the speed of light increase proportionally, so that the speed of light is the same for all points in time?
Since current models don't hold that it does, then it would seem that the speed of light is measuring a relatively stable dimension of space. As it is the redshift of the light spectrum that is evidence for the expansion and the Doppler effect is based on increasing distance in a stable dimension of space, it would seem the expansion must be in space, rather then of space.
Yet the BBT rejected an expansion in space, for one of space, because measurements did not support a standard geometric expansion.

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