Cosmic redshift but no expansion of receding objects: one further piece of evidence for TGD cosmology

"Universe is Not Expanding After All, Controversial Study Suggests" was the title of very interesting Science News article telling about study which forces to challenge Big Bang cosmology. The title of course involve the typical popular exaggeration.

The idea behind the study was simple. If Universe expands, one expects that also astrophysical objects - such as stars and galaxies - should participate the expansion, and should increase in size. The observation was that this does not happen! One however observes the cosmic redshift so that it is quite too early to start to bury Big Bang cosmology. The finding is however a strong objection against the strongest version of expanding Universe. That objects like stars do not participate the expansion was actually already known when I started to develop TGD inspired cosmology for quarter century ago, and the question is whether GRT based cosmology can model this fact naturally or not.

The finding supports TGD cosmology based on many-sheeted space-time. Individual space-time sheets do not expand continuously. They can however expand in jerk-wise manner via quantum phase transitions increasing the p-adic prime characterizing space-time sheet of object by say factor two of increasing the value of h_eff=n× h for it. This phase transition could change the properties of the object dramatically. If the object and suddenly expanded variant of it are not regarded as states of the same object, one would conclude that astrophysical objects do not expand but only comove. The sudden expansions should be however observable and happen also for Earth. I have proposed a TGD variant of Expanding Earth hypothesis along these lines (see this ).

When one approximates the many-sheeted space-time of TGD with GRT space-time, one compresses the sheets to single region of slightly curved piece of M⁴ and gauge potentials and the deviation of induced metric from M⁴ metric are replaced with their sums over the sheets to get standard model. This operation leads to a loss of information about many-sheetedness. Many-sheetedness demonstrates its presence only through anomalies such as different value of Hubble constant in scales of order large void and cosmological scales (see this ), arrival of neutrinos and gamma rays from supernova SN1987A as separate bursts (see this ), and the above observation.

One can of course argue that cosmic redshift is a strong counter argument against TGD. Conservation of energy and momentum implied by Poincare invariance at the level of imbedding space M⁴× CP₂ does not seem to allow cosmic redshift. This is not the case. Photons arrive from the source without losing their energy. The point is that the properties of the imagined observer change as its distance from the source increases! The local gravitational field defined by the induced metric induces Lorentz boost of the M⁴ projection of the tangent space of the space-time surface so that the tangent spaces at source and receiver are boosted with respect to other: this causes the gravitational redshift as analog of Doppler effect in special relativity. This is also a strong piece of evidence for the identification of space-time as 4-surface in M⁴× CP₂.

For details see the chapter More about TGD inspired cosmology of "Physics in Many-sheeted Space-time" or the article Some astrophysical and cosmological findings from TGD point of view.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.