The accelerating expanding universe

There is a contradiction in what you are saying, Cavedriver. You state, and that stands to reason very well, that that there could be no single, privileged position inside the spatial infinity and that what any observer may see from anywhere should be roughly the same as what any other observer will see from anywhere else in the universe. No place is a special place but every place strongly appears to be the centre with everything else receding away from it and accelerating in proportion to its distance from that arbitrary centre.
Now if you remember the essential unity of space and time- after all any space is exactly the time it takes light to travel and any time is the potential space that could be covered by that light in motion, I do not see how do you manage to conclude that this democratic Cosmological principle of relativity is to be applied only spatially while postulating a kind of absolute monarchy in temporal terms.
If any position in space is nothing special, no co-ordinate in time could enjoy any privileges either. Therefore it would follow that though to yourself it might look like there was a point of beginning in time, to an observer existing at that time, at that point that seems to you to be the central point of the universal beginning 13.7 billion years ago, there would appear another time-line of a similar length. Thus the Cosmological principle correctly understood and formulated must hold true not only for any place in the universe but for any time anywhere just as well and for the very same reason.
Spatial democracy and equality must necessarily have a corresponding temporal one. As it is your hypothesis sounds like a curious mix of Einsteinian space with Newtonian absolute time with a single clock rate valid for the whole universe and for all times in it, I am afraid.

Well, my age may be irrelevant to the issue. Otherwise your insinuation takes for granted some linear progress in human understanding. It assumes that the people at the present age possess a better grasp of reality on average and that those so unlucky to have existed in former ages were progressively moronic necessarily and in a direct proportion to the knowledge data accumulated over time by the human kind.
Let us dispense with such absolutist assumptions and replace them with something more relative again. Let's say that every age has its fair share of idiocy and genius whatever is the statistical value of average accumulated knowledge.
Also, Cavediver, let us not appeal to any authority of Friedman, Lemaitre, Robertson, Walker and others .
You brought up Hoyle, not me. Hoyle had his own head to use and I have got mine thus my reasoning is my own reasoning only even if it may have similarities to what Hoyle might have said.
To be clear on that in advance I don't think Hoyle had it right on the whole either.You have to clarify what is it you mean exactly when saying that time has an opposite sign to space? If you mean to say that in this metric the relative curved space has an absolute, flat and linear time as its opposite, then that is just rephrasing of what I stated in my initial post and we agree. I see it as curious Newtonian atavism and you hold it as a sign of a definite and linear progression in scientific understanding of the nature of the universe. Here we have to agree to differ unless you enlighten me as to why should we agree.That is indeed so in that metric. Whether the dialectical opposition of time to space observed in reality corresponds to the metric is another question. You hold that it does and my opinion is that it does not but that both time and space are relative even if their relativity is not exactly of the same kind. They both may curve yet the spatial curvature is obvious and is readily seen in any spherical body while temporal needs to be imagined, understood and modelled. That is what the opposition of signs may mean in real terms, methinks and not any opposition of relative to absolute.
Lemaitre to whose metric you appeal was first of all a catholic priest while Catholicism takes the idea of temporal relations not from Einstein but from Genesis so the idea of absolute and linear time was much closer and natural to his heart. Hence, its presence in the metric. Simple, but note, no linear progression of mankind towards enlightenment you insinuate I am lagging so desperately behind .

My personal approach to cosmology is indeed purely philosophical in nature. My philosophy as applied to cosmology is very simple and is based on the first principles of necessity only.
Or rather a single principle, if you wish, the corresponding equivalent of which in the physical science is known as the first law of thermodynamics from which all the rest of the principles may be derived necessarily.
Mind you, that is an extended take on that law which in this extended shape may have the following implications:
Energy may not be created or destroyed.
Energy, space, time, mass and motion are one and the same and are but aspects of the same unity and are in a single knot, always relative to each other and may not be created, inflated, expanded or destroyed but only transformed into one another through a relative perspective. No separation of energy from time, time from space or space from motion is possible. For energy is the energy needed to be in motion through space measured in time.
To be is to do and to exist is to be in motion.
Motion in the universe may not be created or destroyed, expanded or inflated.
Thus there is a constant ratio of matter to void and their constant parity necessitated by the constant motion.
The other aspect of this law that is overlooked by the erroneous theories is that the size of the universe may not be created, inflated, expanded or destroyed but only changed in a relative perspective.
Light is the bridge from space to time and its velocity is constant for that reason and also because the Speed of light is the speed of time itself and is the speed of universal motion and causality and thus exceeding that speed is impossible since it may imply jumping ahead of time which is absurd. Time travel is impossible because it is time that is travelling in anything and in every direction but nothing travels in time.
Mind is the thinking light and is the bridge from here to now and that is why now is as constant as the speed of light. No jumping out of here and now is possible for the very same reason the velocity of light may not be possibly exceeded.
Light is the visible time and the causality seen and light is the now watching its moving reflection in the mirror.The universe is all that exists and is one and only for anything else that exists may be included in it necessarily already and it is finite and infinite at once and it has no possible outside of itself and therefore it is bounded by nothing. Thus it may not expand or inflate for to expand is something to expand into is needed necessarily and to expand is to gain in volume while as nothing is all that does not exists and all that does not exist takes no place to exist and what takes no place to exist may have zero volume. Thus to expand into nothing means to be gaining zero volume and gaining zero volume may only mean to retain the same volume and size as ever. Also to expand into nothing may only mean to expand into itself which is rather a synonym of to contract or collapse and that is not what is being observed.
Also being in a relative physical motion subject to all the necessary and unchanging physical laws governing motion may apply to all the relative, finite and bounded bodies in the universe. To expand is not to be at rest therefore it is to be in motion and is a relative bodily motion inside a greater volume a lesser volume is expanding into. Universe is not a finite, relative and bounded body but is the body Absolute, therefore it cannot be in a relative motion and none of the physical laws that govern all the relative motions of all the relative bodies contained therein may apply to the universe. The body Absolute or spacetime may instead be at rest and serve as the rest frame to all the relative bodies in motion contained therein.Now this is the law of Alfred Maddestein and it is derived via the pure deductive reasoning. You may consider that all I say is as arrogant and mad as my name suggest but I'll tell you this: any hypothesis whose premises may violate a single letter of the above, sooner or later may be proved wrong and thrown in the trash bin together with the flat earth idea or any other creationist model of the universe. Any theory conforming to the principles above may explain the natural phenomena well and will be retained.
You ask about something based on concrete observations meaning a formal scientific theory. Well...until quite recently I have not read a mathematical model that would not violate some of the above. All the alternative theories offered would fall short of the mark and I have been remaining sceptical of most of their claims. I have been supporting none.
Now that have changed. A couple of months ago I have indeed found a new cosmological model thought out by an independent researcher which strictly follows the first principles of necessity outlined.
Currently it is ignored and it will be ignored for quite a while yet. Still, since it fits the observational data much, much better than the standard Big Bang model, improves on Einstein greatly instead of clashing with the man, is beautiful in its simplicity and shows a good predictive power, that situation may not continue indefintely. No dark matters or forces are resorted to but everything is explained naturally with all the reasoning and all the explanations stemming directly from the first principle of the invariance of the speed of light only. The logic and mathematics are compelling, the paper have been around for quite a while and no refutation is available as yet and that is a clear sign that to refute it may prove too hard a nut to crack.
Until the hypothesis is formally tested against nature and improved upon or a still better model is derived, I am perfectly happy to support it even as an overwhelming minority view.
If before I would sometimes doubt my own good sense and consider that the conjectures of the standard model may somehow be improved upon and made into something to make sense, that is not the case any more.

I know the guy well already, thanks anyway, but no thanks I do not use his suggestions for writing like a genius. His concept is taken from the book by Gladwell and is flawed. You either born one or you are not and if you are that may propell you to dedicate 10.000 hours to perfecting the gift otherwise no amount of time spent is of much use.
I don't use automatic writing he advocates and I do not think that quantity of writing could lead to any quality of it- I think a lot before I write anything down which you don't seem to. If you disagree though with any of my points, say which and say why you think I am wrong.
Appeals to authority of links on dark energy do not impress me any either. I have some idea of what it is supposed to be already.
Tell me what you think it is in your own words and I'll say what I think about all that you reckon.
Catch my drift?

Vive Pope? Not yet, but I'll check him out. Tell me in a nutshell what is his idea. I love clever crackpots. I may recommend to you another.
Luis Savain is the name. He is mad, arrogant and really smart and his logic is iron.
Try to argue against him without resorting to any appeals to authority and name-calling and he'll wrap your brain around his little finger in no time.

You prevaricate and insinuate again your superior to mine knowledge and do not back it up with anything but more condescension. That's a game two can play.
The thing is you may pull the wool over the fools' eyes only as much as you can. You can't fool all the people all the time. Einstein did not like your theory. He was finding it absurd. He made no blunder you slander on him. He understood that coming from a Jesuit, the cosmic egg was just a reshuffle of the creation myth cloaked in the modern maths.
He just could not beat it with anything real at the time and he was confused himself with all the redshift, entropy and Olbers paradox and stuff. He had no good rational explanation to beat any of that so was made to swallow the nonsense that seemed the least implausible at the time, that is all.
Still, his opinion of Lemaitre's physics was very low. His acquiescing to the inevitable pressure of current opinion does not change the fact that he called it appalling.
Otherwise, whatever you insinuate, if time is relative per Einstein, before and after do make but relative sense. In some frames of reference the purported Big Bang is yet to occur while in other frames, the mythical Big Crunch or Rip or whatever the version of the scenario is already long past. The universe is long dead since and it is yet to be born. It's just the news of it are long in coming to your particular lab.

Well, if you really want the equations you can find them in the On the Geometry of Time in Physics and Cosmology by Alexander Franklin Mayer. You can find at Jay Pritzker fellowship for theoretical physics. 17 chapters out of 30 are free to download. That is the model I support currently and may continue to do so until and unless it is both tested against nature, found to be wrong, not fitting the observational data and refuted with sound maths and logic.
I would be very glad to get such a refutation from those of you who are clever with numbers. Sound logic propping the maths in the refutation is more than welcome and is a must too.
Otherwise, your claim that only numbers are convincing is not convincing itself. How then you can explain that the millions of people who can read no maths are being so convinced of the validity of the Big Bang paradigm? Can they all check for themselves whether FLRW metric clashes with the spirit of Einstein or not? It seems they could not care less and it seems that none of them ever gave it a thought. Well, if any numbers play any part in forming such a conviction that is rather called arithmetic. That conviction is in direct proportion to the number of times they have heard the theory to be declared to be correct. That's all the maths there is to it.Edited by Alfred Maddenstein, : Grammar corrections

No, I am not confusing the Special and General relativity. I reckon that is a flaw if there a contradiction and inconsistency between the two. That should be corrected while as it is the inconsistency is prayed upon. As a result the model you suggest has as its premises patent physical impossibilities. The universe inflating by billions of light years in a fraction of a second belongs to magic, not relativistic thinking. Speed of light is the natural speed limit and it is exceeded manifold by the space rushing in all directions in your head only.

Also if I quote Einstein's view on Lemaitre that is only because he confirms my own opinion on that fellow. And if my opinion of Lemaitre is low and I am very biased against him, I can tell you why exactly it is so very low and why I am so prejudiced against him not needing Einstein's or any body else's help.

Ultimately again all that boils down to a massive trust in the others better judgement and being impressed by the numerous repetitions of confidence in that judgement expressed by those others while suspending any own scrutiny.
I'll tell you a little story. I once knew this old Russian lady. I was in love with her niece and the two of them were living together at the time. Now the lady had no previous knowledge about the state of the modern cosmology. All she was aware of was that the universe was awfully big. That was all the science back in Soviet times had told her as the idea of the Big Bang was not particularly favoured by the Soviets. Also the lady was not religious due to the Soviet atheistic upbringing.
Once I was waiting for my lover to come home in the company of that old dear and I was in a humorous mood so to pass the time I told the lady a bit more about how huge the universe was supposed to be and I told her that lately the science had discovered that all those trillions of galaxies with quadrillions of stars separated by all those humongous distances had an origin in time, originated from a single point and at that point of origin were all contained inside a point trillions of times smaller than anything she could possibly see even with her glasses on. And I told her that this tiny point containing the future universe was at that instant enveloped into nothing to be later blown up to all these immense proportions.
When the lady heard me telling all that with a serious face, she became visibly confused. She could not decide whether I was raving or was simply pulling her leg. I kept reassuring her that neither was the case but that it all was the latest scientific knowledge and I told her that if she'd ask her niece her niece would confirm every word I'd said.
That was what she did when the niece finally arrived. The niece reassured the lady that I was neither raving nor taking the piss and she confirmed that all this was exactly the latest scientific theory and that all that was exactly what the majority of astronomers believed. I could witness the conception of her growing trust at its very point of origin.
I was after all a stranger to her and she knew me as a joker, as somebody highly antisocial and full of suspicious habits but the niece was something different, the niece was somebody close and reliable who was studying at the university and so on. I saw that her initial strong doubts based on her simple common sense started dissipating. Once the idea was confirmed to have originated from a trusted authority of science and not from such a wild and irresponsible type like myself, it lost most of its immediate absurdity for the ladyEdited by Alfred Maddenstein, : Grammar

Oli, your reasoning shows that so far your mind only glanced past the concepts in the book. Nowhere the author claims that anything is four-dimensional as it sounds per your misrepresentation. His idea is different. It is based on the understanding that since there are three spatial dimensions and the motion in any of them is measured by and is convertible into time, the time dimension is orthogonal to each three of them and not to all the three at once and that the true geometry of time should be derived from such understanding necessarily and that such understanding stems from the original Minkowski.
You need to invest a bit more effort in following both the logic and mathematics in the book discarding preconceptions at the door.
Could you elaborate on the cosmological fluid, fundamental observers, sliced hyperspheres and the rest as those notions sound to me rather vague and are straining my poor logic greatly.

So far, Cavedriver, you have failed to demonstrate how is that fellow Mayer is a crank compared to yourself. His theory is based only on what is strictly observed while yours needs to resort to dark forces, black matters and holes and the rest of physical impossibilities like the inflation belonging to banking and not the natural science. And even with all the help of magic in your premises, your hypothesis does not fit the observations and the data found in all the satellite databases while his does fit everything very nicely and the links to all the databases that are provided in the book for everyone to check and compare show that clearly. So who is the crank here is moot indeed.

Yes, Oli, I understand all that- what I do not get is by what trick of mathematics from that notion of fundamental observers which per your description sounds like something perfectly arbitrary, relative, hypothetical and imaginary, the contention that there is a single time-line possessing a definite point of beginning called the Big Bang with a strict calendar of sequential events that is valid for the whole infinite process called the universe is derived? How anything that is supposed to possess a physical reality is extrapolated from those universal fluids and fundamental observers?
Also even if the author still uses the traditional notion of four dimensions just like Minkowski did before him, the intention is to show that such use is very approximate, poor, potentially misleading with that misleading potential fully realised in the whole corpus of modern cosmology and physics.
One could use six dimensions just as well. Three spatial and three temporal. That would be better yet still not good enough so what the author really means is rather than dimensions, time vectors or directions should be used and since there are an infinity of possible directions in space with a corresponding directions in time which are strictly orthogonal to any of the spatial ones, time is possessing the same infinity of directions necessarily. From that its true curvature is derived with a precise gradient of its dilation that is ubiquitous, rotating time-lines and so on.
So far his logic is compelling until anybody has shown me otherwise using still better logic.

Thank you, for your very reasonable exposition of General Relativity. Unfortunately I do not see how from anything either Einstein or yourself stated may follow anything that would require violating the necessity of the Copernican mediocrity principle being applied temporally. As it is the principle is spatially honoured by the contemporary cosmological model. Given the unity of space and time this situation strikes me as a contradiction.
All that you said about the free falling bodies constituting the inertial frames is correct. The universal flat calendar hardly follows from any of that.
What it may imply philosophically in terms of motion is only that the speed of light is the speed of time itself. This is the speed of universal motion but in the same breath it is the measure of the universal rest. That is why the velocity of light is as constant as the now is unchanging while serving as the rest frame to the changes moving past it.
Mass, energy, gravity and acceleration are all acting as the brakes on that speed. The differential of masses creates the all differential of relative velocities below that universal speed of time as well as the very opposition of motion to rest. In that sense motion is different bodies settling their mass differential. The differential is never settled once and for all so the motion is endless.
That does not imply though any single linear direction of that motion while the very word expansion suggests an outward uniformity of it.
Nor the possibility of space itself moving independently at super-superluminal velocities follows from the strict unity of space, time and light being all but aspects of one and the same. What relativity suggests is that space, on the contrary, may not possibly overtake the light in that fashion. If it is understood that the speed of light is the speed of time at rest, it becomes abundantly clear that the space rushing ahead of light would imply the space going faster than time and that it must be forming loops around itself which is absurd and is not what is being observed.

Thank you very much, Cravedriver for more of your smug condescension. I must advise you in advance that no alleged superiority and name-calling may impress me any. I am not so easily swayed and intimidated by such manner of conducting debate.
You have to come up with something better than simply calling anything I say confused and meaningless. When you and the rest of the people replying to me claim that anything I say is nonsense you'd need to demonstrate blow by blow how and why is that so according to your brightest lights.
The best way to show up a foolish statement is to place your own wisdom next to that foolishness letting the conclusions be drawn of themselves and by other people. That way all the independent observers may compare the nonsense to the contrasting wisdom and decide for themselves. Anything else is mere unsubstantiated boasting.
I may not be swayed and intimidated by any appeals to the prevailing majority either. I was born in Soviet Russia and seeing people lick arse of anything held to be true by the authorities in their shivering millions is no great surprise to me. I've seen the same millions drop their professed beliefs like hot potatoes picking new ones overnight. That is nothing fresh.
Also the alleged unity of opinion in cosmology is another empty claim of yours. That is your wishful thinking talking. Such does not exist but scepticism towards the standard model is growing steadily.
Otherwise, yes, contrary to the opinion expressed recently by Hawking I hold that the science has not grown out of the necessity of good and clear thinking. I reckon that if a scientific hypothesis is in conflict with anything said by Eddington that may be but a passing fever yet when it disregards Aristotle in a cavalier manner that is a good sign that it is found itself in a very, very deep shit indeed and will be presently put in the trash bin together with all the premature declarations of the sort. The man said A=A and that is better be heeded in advance when building any hypothesis.
Your bring up Hoyle again. As I told you I do not think that Hoyle had a viable and a much better explanation necessarily as the Steady State theory made the same error when it bought into the erroneous assumption of an expanding universe which I hold to be a physical impossibility.
The theory I support belongs to a different astrophysicist. The name is Alexander Franklin Mayer. That theory has no physical impossibilities in its premises and it makes good predictions that are to be tested against nature. I suggested you refuted that hypothesis in a quiet, detached and logical manner without prior prejudice, name-calling and appeals to the mainstream authorities but like a true scientist and seeker of truth for its own sake that you pretend to be. Anything less may not impress me any and I may continue to reserve my full support to his hypothesis and not yours. No squeak has been heard from you in that direction so far.