[dmill1220]

Hi Peter,

I like your analogy, if I understand you correctly the Surface tension of the water, (Space/Time), and all objects in our universe that lay on that meniscus are floating around but underlying currents are responsible for the expansion?

Isn't that somewhat similar to a stretching Brane theory? so far I think we only have bits and pieces of the complete riddle of the Universe, we just keep picking away at problems only to find new questions.

I'm almost sure that someday in the future we will have to re think some of our fundamentals, I'm also not too comfortable about having to invent Dark energy to explain the expansion, or your water surface analogy, but only because I suspect the energy levels of the photon are being effected at long distances by some unknown particle, as Zwicky proposed, and since we can't detect it, we dont know its throwing off our interpretations of the Doppler shift at very vast distances.

I still think the Doppler effect is usable and somewhat accurate, but only at relatively short intergalactic distances, as the photon hits these theoretical unkown particles through extremely vast distances its possible they may be losing energy.

If we are right and most of the matter in the universe is invisible and, it is responsible for changing orbital speeds of stars in a galaxies outer disk, as in Dr Vera Rubin's findings, and it can bend light (gravitational lensing) via a dark matter halos,
I have to wonder how else could it be effecting the photon energy? Compton ray scattering has been confirmed with normal particles, but in the almost complete emptiness of Space there is a too low a density of baryonic matter, that can cause sufficient Compton Ray scattering to skew the Doppler measurements, or so the counter argument goes, but since the universe is made up of much more than we can see or detect, what about this exotic stuff?

This to me is just too much of leap without understanding just what makes up most of the matter in the universe. Our calculations seem to show that there is more unknown non-,baryonic matter than normal baryonic matter.

I sometimes find myself wanting to believe in the steady state theory but only because this unexpected increased expansion rate in the past does not make sense to me, what caused it?

What in the world could be causing the polarization of the cosmic microwave background?

I hope that the Large Hadron collider that is nearing completion will shed some light on other exotic unkown particles.

This is where I have a problem;
How can we jump to conclusions that this form of non-baryonic matter does not effect the photon when we know nothing about its composition and effects? it can alter Newtons laws and seems to effect mass, Dr Rubin's Findings are to me an irrefutable wake up call.

Dennis