(The New) Quantum Touching
A Cinematic Model of
Instantaneous Action-at-a-Distance

April 2003


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Implications for Cosmology:

The Cosmological Redshift

The fact that motions of recession produce redshifts does not logically entail that to observe a redshift is to observe a motion of recession, any more than the fact that all gnats are insects entails that all insects are gnats.

Any notion that observing galactic redshifts is tantamount to observing an 'expanding universe' is therefore no more than a dogma, This dogma is allied to the similar one which interprets c as the 'constant velocity of light relative to the vacuum'. (The fact that all velocities are distances divided by time does not entail that all distances divided by time are velocities. If it did, then the length of a brick divided by its age would be a velocity)

If light travelled at a constant speed in the vacuum, as Einstein presumed, then with all nodes of the wave travelling at the same speed there could be no acceleration or deceleration of any one of those nodes relative to another. If that were truly the case, then the only stretching of the wavelength that could possibly occur would be a Doppler effect due to motion of the source relative to the observer. In that case, the 'expanding universe' interpretation of the Hubble redshift would be unavoidable.

However, interpreting c in the more economical, non-velocity way (See Special Relativity: the Cinematic Deduction), as no more than a dimensional constant interrelating the conventional units of distance and time, makes interpreting the redshift a whole new ball-game. Discussions within a recently formed group called POAMS (the acronym for the Pope-Osborne Angular Momentum Synthesis, see website: www.poams.org ) have elicited the logical possibility of an explanation of the redshift based purely on overall-conserved angular momentum*. In a normal angular momentum situation involving free-orbiting bodies (there are no vacuous 'gravitation forces' in POAMS) the speeds and therefore the kinetic energies of the bodies increase as they approach the greatest concentration of mass. In our solar system, that greatest concentration of mass is centred on the sun - or, at least, on a centre which lies somewhere inside the sun's surface. On a cosmological scale, however, and on the assumption that the universe is an indefinitely extended, normal, steady-state distribution of matter, the greatest accumulation of mass is always at the greatest (omnidirectional) distance. If it is true, therefore, that bodies speed-up as they approach the greatest accumulation of mass, then it logically follows that the further away from one another those bodies are, the faster (relatively to one another) they go. Given that these relative speeds are accompanied by relativistic time-dilations, it is to be expected that there should be increasing time-dilations for bodies at great distances. Calculations of these time-dilations, based on the best-provided estimates of the matter-density of the cosmos provide a logical explanation of the redshift as due to an increase in the random (as opposed to the assumed uniformly radial) motions of the galaxies with regard to one another. This does at least provide a logical alternative to the current dogma which is based on the logically unsupportable assumption that the redshift is a Doppler effect due to a uniform motion of recession. If this assumption were true, then it would imply that the whole universe of space, time and matter was once incarcerated inside something the size of a grape. If that is not a reductio ad absurdum of the 'Big Bang' hypothesis, then we don't know what is!


* This explanation supersedes an earlier published on the website. Based on geodesic stretching, this earlier attempt was decided, after further discussion, to have been erroneous.