Heinz Heinzmann

Cosmology


The metric-dynamic view of the universe leads to a cosmology that differs significantly from the standard cosmology. It will be outlined in this chapter.

What currently is told about the history of the universe and presented as secure knowledge, is well known. So I can spare to go into it. Instead I want to ask you something:

Imagine, you measure the length of your dining table today. It is one meter. Tomorrow you measure again, and indeed with the same scale. This time the length is two meter.

What do you conclude? Either that the size of your dining table has doubled since yesterday, or that your scale has shrunk to half (– or that the size of both has changed, but we will ignore this variant).

Obviously, the two results alone do not permit any conclusion about which of these alternatives is correct. The decision is only possible if further information is available.

However exactly the same applies to the measured distance-dependent redshift:

Suppose we measure the wavelengths of two light rays that have been emitted from a certain element, say: H, from two different cosmic distances – i.e. at two different points in time. The measurement is performed through a comparison with the wave-length by which the length unit is defined. Evidently, there are two possibilities to interpret the distance-dependent redshift:

1. The universe expands.

2. The universe does not expand – instead our yardsticks shrink, which means: all wave-lengths, which may serve to define the unit of length, decrease with time. (This applies of course also to the waves emitted by H; however from the date of emission, they remain unchanged.)

Also here applies that it cannot be deduced directly from the measurement, whether 1 or 2 is true. For that, additional information is needed. The "rest of the circumstances" will motivate us to opt for one of the two variants.

This openness of the interpretation of the redshift is so obvious that the question arises whence the certainty comes with which has been assumed – indeed from the very beginning – that the universe expands, and why the alternative has never been seriously considered – all the more, as the assumption that the size of the universe is changeless and the redshift a consequence of the time-dependent decrease of the wavelengths that relate to material phenomena, would simply have made the absurd postulate of the so-called big bang superfluous.

It attracts attention that, in the historical development, there has never been any kind of doubt. The decision was clear from the outset, simply because the alternative did not lie within the horizon of the thinkable. This means that here deep unconscious prejudices are in effect – such ones, which exist prior to any act of thought and which represent therefore presuppositions of thinking.

It is also immediately clear which prejudice the view to the alternative option obscures: the notion of substantial, unchanging existence, which in physics survives in the form of the assumption of elementary particles and natural constants.

In order to avoid nonsensical concept formations and to get to a consistent local and objective interpretation, it has already proven necessary – in the explanation of the theory of relativity as well as in that of quantum theory – to replace the idea – no: the prejudice of substantial existence by the idea of change.

Now, in the question of the history of the universe, the same applies. Again it is necessary to reject the idea, which originates from the depths of a priori prejudices, that there is something given as non-contingent unchanging existent. Exactly this idea is the source of the presently prevailing conviction that there were an absolute scale, with which even the size of the universe in total could be measured, and from whose existence would have to be concluded that the universe expands.

 

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