"Another pint please!"The universe gets bigger, you get bigger. The universe gets smaller, you get smaller. You are the universe. Look at the sky. Light from far away is redder. Astronomers explain this by assuming that light changes exactly as Schrödinger proved but they ignore the change in atoms. This is wrong. Both atoms and light change. Both of them. When this is understood, the meaning of redder light flips to say that our universe is collapsing. This comes from comparing old light emitted by old atoms against new light emitted by new atoms. Redshift now spectacularly matches what astronomers see. Nothing more than 80 year old physics is needed. No modifications. No nothing. The universe is more than 2000 billion years old. This means that there are zillions of very old stars you can't see anymore, probably enough to explain the matter that we can't see but know is there. "Another pint, please! Make it two. Join me!" "Let's toast old physicists and their old theories." "Einstein! Friedmann! Schrödinger! You done good!" Ah, yes, you all done good. Niels Bohr wanted George Gamow to go to England to show his calculations how a nuclear potential barrier explained Sir Ernest Rutherford's splitting light elements with fast alpha particles. Bohr advised Gamow that he must be very careful in presenting the quantum theory of nuclear transformation to him, since the old man did not like any innovations and used to say that any theory is good only if it is simple enough to be understood by a barmaid. Gamow, G. 1970, My World Line (New York: Viking Press) page 66 A later Russian translation of this anecdote based on Gamow's book used the Russian word for "cook" rather than Gamow's original "barmaid". This was a classical Russian political "mistranslation" rather than a correction of a sexual stereotype. Bill Sumner 12/14/2014 |