The first model of cosmology that I was exposed to, when I was around 6 years of age, was the Static universe model, because that's all my father knew. According to this model, the universe is infinite in all directions, it is eternal, and it is not going anywhere. Of course I accepted it, because that is what kids do: accept everything presented to them as a fact.
When I was around 10 years of age, I heard of the Big Bang and the expansion of the universe; this new model of cosmology made me feel a bit uncomfortable, but again I accepted it, because a) that's what the scientists said, and b) I could go to my father and tell him that he was wrong.
Later, during my mid-teens, I heard of the red-shift of galaxies, as simply the Doppler effect applied to light, and it sounded reasonable, but then I heard of red-shift as the stretching of photon wavelengths due to expansion of space itself, which sounded very exotic to me. I was again willing to accept it, because scientists had said so, but I was now beginning to feel uncomfortable, because I am not into pretending to understand things that I do not truly understand. (Furthermore, my father had no concept of such things, so I could not even start a discussion with him with the goal of showing him that he is wrong.)
Then I started hearing of truly bizarre observations, such as the fact that all galaxies seem to be moving away from us; when I want to graphically express my bewilderment at this, I raise my arms, smell my armpits, and say "why, what's wrong with us?"
I heard that according to red-shift observations, the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us, and that not only the galaxies are moving away from each other, but the rate at which they are moving is increasing, meaning that galaxies are accelerating away from each other. Again I accepted all that because scientists had said so, but by that time it was already clear to me that I was accepting these things only because I had no other option. I could sense a little something in my subconscious that was finding all this uncomfortable to the point of being disturbing.
Then, during my senior high-school years I started hearing of dark matter and dark energy; popular media portrayed them as new discoveries, but a closer examination of what was actually being said by the scientists revealed that they were nothing but fictitious notions that scientists had dreamt up in order to explain the observations, otherwise the numbers did not add up. In other words, the scientists had given names to their ignorance. And it was not just some small discrepancies that these novelties were called to correct for; Dark matter and dark energy were supposed to account for almost 95% of the universe. On the surface I was okay with this, because again, scientists had said so, but that little something in my subconscious was starting to find all this quite preposterous and had started becoming genuinely disturbed.
Stop for a moment and think how arrogant this is on our behalf: we are saying "here are our observations of the universe," and "here are our theories to explain those observations," and "by the way, our theories only explain 5% of the universe, the remaining 95% is inexplicable." And then, instead of admitting that our theories are worthless, we take it for granted that they are correct, and we assume that there must be some as of yet completely unknown and completely unobserved mechanisms at play that account for the missing 95%, so that our theories will, nonetheless, end up being correct. To top it all off, we come up with a couple of cool names for those mechanisms, to make the public think that we actually have a clue as to what we are talking about.
This was so disturbing to me, that in order to retain my sanity I was forced to invest some thinking into it, despite the hopelessness of the endeavor, given that I have no formal background in physics, let alone astrophysics; my field is software engineering.
My thinking was, necessarily, simple: there is no doubt that relative movement of galaxies in space is at least partially responsible for the observed red-shift, just as it is responsible for the few cases of observed blue-shift. (For example the Andromeda galaxy is blue-shifted, because it is on a collision course with the milky way.) However, this does not mean that relative movement is necessarily responsible for all of the observed red-shift. Can we find some additional means of explaining red-shift so that we might account for the weird manifestations of red-shift?
I quickly realized that there is: if light happens to have an as of yet unknown property that causes its frequency to ever so slightly decrease as it travels through the vast expanses of intergalactic space, the result would appear as red-shift. This would beautifully explain various observations:
- Light reaching us from any galaxy has to travel a long distance, therefore all galaxies should appear red-shifted, as they indeed do, even though they might be stationary with respect to us. This is a much nicer explanation than to say that all galaxies are running away from us as if we have smelly armpits.
- Light reaching us from distant galaxies has to travel a longer distance than from nearby galaxies, therefore more distant galaxies should appear more red-shifted, as they indeed do. This is a much nicer explanation than to say that galaxies are not only moving away from us, but actually accelerating away from us.
I knew that my idea had at least some merit due to Occam's razor: sure, I was postulating some as of yet unknown property of light that causes its frequency to decrease as it travels through space, but this is not a terribly implausible thing to suppose, and it certainly seems to be a far less implausible than proposing an expanding universe, an expanding fabric of space-time, plus dark matter and dark energy to make the numbers add up. If two hypotheses have equal explaining power, the simpler one wins.
I had this idea in my late teens, and not knowing what to do with it, I stored it in the back of my mind and went on with my life.
When I was at California State University, San Bernardino I had a cool professor who came to the classroom one day with an inflatable balloon that had galaxies printed on it. By inflating the balloon, the professor showed how the expansion of the fabric of space can explain the observation that all galaxies are seemingly moving away from us, as well as from each other; I could accept this, but it only took care of the smelly armpits problem; the highly exotic notion of an expanding fabric of space was still necessary for this to work, the troublesome acceleration of the expansion was still there, and the preposterous notions of dark matter and dark energy were still there. So, I felt that my hypothesis had lost virtually none of its explanatory merit.
During the mid 2000s, in the golden era of internet blogs and forums, and before facebook destroyed everything, I happened to have access to an audience of a few thousand people with higher-than-average education. A sizable portion of them were necessarily scientists, and a few of them were bound to be astrophysicists. So, I described my idea in public and asked if anyone had heard of anything similar to it. Sure enough, a few folks stepped up to inform me that my idea had already been considered by scientists, and it even had a name: The Tired Light Hypothesis. That was an elating moment for me. They told me that although not completely devoid of scientific merit, it was regarded as false, and that it had been pretty much proven wrong by experimental observations. I took their word for it, and at the same time I felt pretty content: I was thinking that for a lay-person like me to have independently arrived at a hypothesis which had also been considered by scientists, was a substantial accomplishment even if the hypothesis did not turn out to be correct.
I am weary of the phenomenon of fringe theories, where certain ideas seem to exert an irresistible appeal to non-scientists, causing misinformation to spread. I also happen to be somewhat impartial to another fringe theory, which is the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis. I am fully aware of the fact that these are fringe theories, so I am not insisting, I am just expressing my appreciation of how beautiful these hypotheses are.
Also, somewhere in the back of my mind I keep note of the fact that Continental Drift was once also regarded as nothing but a fringe theory by the mainstream scientific community.
See Wikipedia: Static Universe
See Wikipedia: Big Bang
See Wikipedia: Expansion of the universe
See Wikipedia: Tired Light
See Wikipedia: Fringe Theory
Cover image: "Tired Light" by michael.gr; incorporating starry background and photon sphere by ChatGPT; stretching sine wave created using Desmos.com.
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