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Red shift a different theory on Cold Rick

22nd July 2006

The aliens took me again last night. This time they didn't do anything weird to me. We just chatted. My little buddies keep telling me how Earth scientists are still in the dim dark ages of cosmic understanding.

Apparently the Earth scientists lack of understanding of the properties of light makes for a large portion of extraterrestrial jokes - yes they do tell jokes.

It seems that Earth scientists like to take an assumption, call it a fact, use it as a basis for another assumption, and repeat the cycle until the result is totally screwed up.

Scientists assume that the red shift we see in the light from distant galaxies proves that the galaxies are moving away from us at enormous velocity. Even more curiously they see that the further away a galaxy is, the more it's light has red shifted, and so by some extremely simple logic they conclude that the further a galaxy is from the Earth, the faster it must be travelling. Then to explain this, they make up wild theories about "expanding universes". My buddies tell me that the reason humans haven't achieved interstellar travel yet is that our most intelligent people make too many assumptions and theories such as these.

Apparently there is much more to light than meets the eye. On Earth, testing of the properties of light is limited to what we can observe in a very small distance. Tests whereby lasers are bounced off mirrors on the moon are by cosmological standards extremely limited.

Has it not ocurred to any Earth scientist yet that the properties of light change over vast distances? Our entire understanding of cosmological speeds and distances is wrong simply because nobody considered that light has a natural tendency to red shift over distance. Why else would the furthest galaxies appear to be more red shifted? Surely we didn't think that by some coincidence the further a galaxy is from us the faster it would be moving away. Our nearest neighbouring gallaxies are closer, and moving slower than our most brilliant minds can comprehend.

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