Releasing the Hubble tension
A brief history of dark matter and dark energy.
– The first day: At the beginning there was just gravity, and everything was simple and straightforward: All that goes up, eventually comes back down*
* Unless it has escape velocity!!!
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The second day: Sure enough we cannot possibly imagine that once we kick a ball up in the air, such ball would eventually go higher and higher, roaming free from Earth gravity, and that it would keep accelerating faster away, and yet, that is what was eventually observed happening when looking at faraway galaxies.
Hence the astrophysics community had to add a “dark energy” constant to the spacetime to account for a tiny anti gravitational push, not affecting our Earthbound gravitational behavior significantly, but compounding enough over long distances to account for an overall repulsive force across galaxies.
This “dark energy” solution to reconcile our observations with our mathematical models was only a minor First Principle sin, but since it only implied one tiny empirical constant (the Hubble constant) to fix everything that we observe under the Sun and also all that is far far above it, this parameter was eventually accepted as an established Force of Nature, not to be questioned anymore, especially if you want to have a career as an astrophysicist.
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The third day: As usual, the Devil hides in the details, and a minor first principle adjustment leads to a much greater mess down the road.
First issue is that if galaxies are moving away from Earth, then galaxies must also be moving away from eachother in accordance to Hubble’s law.
But if we follow the line of reasoning to its bitter end, then each galaxy should have one Hubble drift velocity as observed from Earth, and also ANOTHER drift velocity as calculated from another galaxy, then there should be more than just one single velocity for each galaxy?
One clever solution (?) would be that Earth so happens to be at the very center of the Universe, and that everything moves away from it.
At this point the usual suspects in the academia would tell me that placing the Earth at the center of Creation would set us back centuries, with great satisfaction of the Catholic Church that would finally feel avenged for being right all along!
A more accepted scientific stance is that Universe has no center, and what we observe from here would look all the same if we were on another galaxy.
So how do we reconcile this utter breakdown of the most basic euclidean geometries?
Astrophysicists ultimately conjured into existence yet another ad hoc parameter called Dark Matter, capable of fixing the breakdown in speed vector geometries when extending Hubble’s velocities to any possible point in the Universe.
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The fourth day: So thanks to our dark matter term descending from the sky like a Deus ex machina, now the relative velocities are all “fixed up” and galaxies possess ONE and only ONE relative velocity as seen from Earth, and they also possess ONE and only ONE relative velocity different from the Earth one, when seen from another galaxy, and so on and so forth from any possible point of view.
Now if this all feels very confusing, it is because it is.
Imagine we bring back the priest in the cosmological debate, and he was to say: God is One and Trine, and the Trine is One!
I would now double dare you proving this man is wrong or delusional.
Likewise if an astrophysicist was to tell you that the galaxy velocities are ONE and MANY, and MANY velocities are also ONE because of dark matter!
Well good luck trying to convince him this statement makes no sense, you are just too dull to understand complex astrophysics.
Nevertheless our readers can rest assured about the fact that cognitive dissonances required to understand the very concept of dark matter within our cosmological frameworks are so numerous, that to date there is no consensus within the academia about how this thing should work nor there are conclusive experiments capable of proving or disproving any of the many different theories about it.
This is one of the biggest `scientific standstill the academia is at right now, AD 2025.
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The fifth day: Whilst the exact dates of previous events are lost in the ebb of time, for this one there is actually one very specific date pinned down on the calendar!
It was the 14th of May 2009, when we blasted off the Plank space telescope up in Lagrange Point 2.
On that day mankind marveled at its own magnificence as we gave birth to this picture of the early Universe, when it was just a cute little baby.
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The sixth day: Humans plugged the picture from the Plank telescope into the Lambda CDM model of the Universe and they were therefore capable to infer the value of the Hubble constant at 67.4 Km/s/Mpc.
Here the problem is that the Hubble constant measured by later universe methods and plain observations of current galaxies and stars was more in the range of 73.0 Km/s/Mpc.
This 9% variation or “tension” between the two ways to measure this fundamental cosmological parameter points at yet again fundamental flaws in our interpretation of the universe and has the scientists on the hook for endless debates and scratching heads.
Maybe yet again another type of dark matter will come to rescue?
The complexity of this problem appears out of reach even for the wildest data fit simulation…
…and then there was evening, and then there was morning…
– The seventh day: At this point the MAN hisself, God the almighty, decided to come back to the Solar system and see what the earthling were up to.
After all he is The Boss and he can come and check in on his Creation at any time.
As soon as he arrived, he noticed all the clamor surrounding the issue of the Hubble tension and moved by compassion HE decided to restore sanity within the scientific debate and mobilize powerful astrophysical resources at The Foundation itself (?) to help humans make sense of the Universe.
Measuring distance and velocity:
The first step to untangle this scientific mess is to go back to day 2, when we first committed the minor sin of measuring the Hubble constant from existing stars and supernovae that we observe around us:
H 0 = V / D
It means the Hubble constant is the ratio between the drift/expansion velocity V of far away galaxies and their distance D from Earth.
So far it looks simple, measuring the distance of galaxies is somewhat of a straightforward exercise and we can get the that part with relatively high accuracy.
The big issue is how do we measure the expansion speed of the galaxy we observe?
Main issue is that we do not have an easy and direct way to measure the speed, but what we can measure is the red shift of the light (or better say the red shift of the hydrogen adsorption bands) coming from that galaxy:
H 0 = ( Y ob / Y or – 1 ) / D
Where “Y observed” is the red shift of light as measured on Earth, “Y originated” is the red shift of light emitted by the galaxy.
By comparing the observed light red shift VS the sun baseline hydrogen adsorption lines we can infer the approaching or recession speed of a galaxy.
Main point is: We do not measure the galaxy recession speed directly, we infer it by means of red shift measurement of the light and then apply the doppler effect formula.
What most astrophysicists have not yet suspected is that the photon emitted by a galaxy might not be the same after it travels through intergalactic distances, and that it might have undergone processes that could have changed its energy content thus inducing a blue or red shift AFTER it was emitted and before reaching Earth.
Mainstream academia: ANATEMA!
Changing photons without destroying them
A photon is a very delicate thing, and changing it somehow it means you have to “destroy it”, you get it to interact with an electron or maybe an atom, and then that photon is gone forever.
There are however a number of situations out there where a photon can be influenced and changed without getting destroyed:
- Slits, mirrors, lenses, etc changes the electron momentum/direction!
- Wave plates, polarizers, magnetic fields can change a photon polarization!
- Optical interferometers or phase modulators can change a photon phase!
- Changing the energy of a photon is not an easy task.
Other than the doppler effect discussed above to rig baseline frequency and energy content, we can only split photons into twos, thus halving the original photon energy (Parametric Down-Conversion ) or else merge two photons into one thus doubling their energy (Second Harmonic Generation).
A lesser known method to change the photon energy is the ISO red and blue shift of photons as they travel through gaseous media.
In this process a photon can shed some of its energy to nearby atoms or else gain some energy from said atoms if the gas temperature is high enough.
The only 2 cases when a photon doesn’t shed (red shift) or gain energy (blue shift) during its mad run is when in absolute vacuum condition (interstellar space is NOT full vacuum!), and when he is travelling through a media that is at the exact pressure/density and temperature conditions where the IRS and IBS drifts are perfectly balanced.
Experimental evidence of said processes is reaching a level that is not even funny for us to discuss this anymore, but we invite the interested reader to investigate this independently, maybe starting from this paper and to make his or her own opinion on the subject.
The Hubble constant and in flight red shifting
If it is indeed possible to change a photon energy content (example, red shifting it as it travels through cold intergalactic rarefied gasses), and there is very little to no doppler effect involved from the observed galaxy, then it might be possible to re-interpret 100 and plus years of debates surrounding the universe expansion or lack of thereof.
Details of this re-interpretation of the Hubble constant and discordant red shift observations are available in this paper, but we also present an eye catching summary below:
Few interesting things to note about the theory of iso red shifting of light compared to dark matter conjectures.
First thing, it can be re-verified with very simple, inexpensive experiments, whilst dark matter has proven so far elusive to both model and detect, even with very expensive experimental setups.
It does not require the rigging of Einstein original gravitational equations with the empirical dark energy expansion factor of the universe.
The Lambda-CDM cosmological model (heavily invested in dark matter and dark energy empirical constants) will be dead in the water along with associated papers and funding thus resulting in mass hysteria among astrophysicists, fire and brimstone from the skies, snap elections, rising of the dead, 100 years of darkness, cats and dogs sleeping together…
A possible re-interpretation of our Universe is presented in this post, but most astrophysicists will have to go in rehab and be clean from dark matter and dark energy postulations for at least few months before they can start getting their bearings over this alternative history of time.
About being humble
Finally I would like to apologize about the hubris and “very subtle criticism” toward current theories displayed in this post, it is indeed bad karma when people act or pretend or flaunt as if they know better than the rest.
This should not dissuade us from being curious or open to new ideas, after all who knows, the Earth could be flat!
Yet a very important thing to note, there are no better equations available to reliably put objects into orbit other than spherical type equations.
If flat earthers would like to propose new equations and use these to send a spacecraft to other planets out there that are not spherical type equations then be my guest.
Likewise before the Copernican revolution, the Earth was at the center of the universe and the orbits of other planets in the solar system made no sense at all.
Then at some point we placed the Sun in the center and all of a sudden, things got very easy to calculate indeed.
Who knows, maybe Earth is still at the center of it all, but for all practical purpose we must assume it is not.
Bottom line, human mind is lazy, it abhors unnecessary complications or theories that too are hard to understand or make little sense.
Therefore if a new theory is easier to understand and is verifiable, then the competing older theories are sooner or later bound to go extinct along with professors of the old guard whilst newer generations of scientists are exposed to novelties and these minds eventually fall through the path of least intellectual resistance.
