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>Dennis Menard wrote to Mark Bloss about Time and Again
 DM> February 27, 1998
 DM> WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Scientists are scratching their heads over a
 DM> finding that indicates the universe, rather than slowing down, is being
 DM> expanded by a mysterious force at an accelerating rate.
 A mysterious force is NOT needed to explain the acceleration, or 
 deceleration, of the expansion of the universe.  Einstein thought
 the universe was static - neither expanding nor contracting - and
 thought there must be a fifth cosmological constant for the universe
 to remain static.  When Hubble discovered the red-shift in 1917, and
 Einstein confirmed it - he had to admit there was no need for a 5th
 force.  That remains true - and whether or not the universe is slowing
 down or speeding up in its expansion - still does not need a 5th force
 to explain its expansion - whether or not it is slowing down or 
 speeding up.  
 DM> If true, says one astronomer, in billions of years many of the stars
 DM> will be gone from the night sky.
 
 This will not be true at all.  Totally fabricated and completely 
 ridiculous.  Here's why:  As the Universe expands, light from distant
 stars which have not yet arrived here, will then be arriving - offsetting
 any loss of light from stars moving away with fewer and fewer photons
 reaching Earth.  This offset process will keep the sky looking pretty
 much the same, effectively, forever.
 DM> "The universe will be a very lonely place to look at," says Robert
 DM> Kirshner of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
 
 If his speculation is right - which it isn't.
 DM> And if the finding is correct, it also supports a concept first
 DM> proposed by Albert Einstein, who later dismissed it as his biggest
 DM> blunder. 
 
 It does no such thing at all.
 DM> "It is such a strange result we are still wondering if there is some
 DM> other sneaky little effect climbing in there," says Adam Riess, an
 DM> astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley.
 
 That sneaky little effect, I say to Mr. Riess, is called pseudo-science.
 Because all that's needed is "momentum" and it is a process of mechanics
 already known and explainable.  There is no need to create a force to 
 explain something that can already be explained by a force we already
 know about.  When something explodes, matter is thrust forth at a 
 tremendous velocity, _increasing_ its velocity for a period of time, 
 before _decreasing_ its velocity; and when it has reached the point 
 where it will expand no further, it begins to come back down again.  
 But in the grand universe full of mostly a vacuum, this process is 
 delayed, obviously, since there is so little effect from gravity for 
 such a very very long time.  In a vacuum, which nature hates, there 
 is very much less friction. 
 
 And then, since we are looking at an observable universe which is
 most likely only a thimble compared to the actual universe, it might
 indeed be gravity itself which is _pulling_ our observable slice of
 it toward something altogether different than what could be imagined.
 There is no reason to think that the matter of our observable 
 universe has more power than the matter in the part of the universe
 we cannot see.  If the universe we observe was a BB (a little tiny brass 
 ball), in a bowl full of bb's, and someone tips the bowl over and starts
 pouring bb's everywhere - our observable universe would be speeding up and 
 expanding rapidly - right out onto the floor where all the other bb's
 are falling hither and thither.  But there is no hidden 5th force -
 only gravity _dragging_ us out, rather than pulling us in.
 
 DM> Riess said he, Kirshner and others in the 15-member international team
 DM> that made the discovery "have looked hard for errors" but found none.
 DM> The findings were discussed at a meeting of scientists in Los Angeles
 DM> last month and reported in the journal Science.
 DM> Tracking the debris of exploded stars
 DM> Using the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in
 DM> Hawaii, Australia and Chile, the astronomers tracked and repeatedly
 DM> measured the debris of 14 supernovae, or exploded stars, 7 billion to
 DM> 10 billion light-years from Earth.
 DM> A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year -- about 6
 DM> trillion miles.
 DM> Team members measured the speed at which these distant supernovae are
 DM> moving away. The rate was then compared with the motion of supernovae
 DM> much closer to Earth .
 DM> "How far away a supernova is, and how fast it's moving away from us,
 DM> tells us how fast the universe is expanding," Riess says.
 
 Right - it tells us how fast the universe is/was expanding - NOT whether or
 not it is expanding _faster_ in the future than it is now.
 DM> They expected to find that the expansion of the universe was slowing
 DM> from the effect of gravity.  
 
 And it could very well be speeding up, because of the effect of gravity
 also.  Regardless, what they are seeing, is what _was_ happening billions 
 of years ago in these billions of light-year-away galaxies - they are not 
 looking at what is happening "now".  This is why their basic conclusions 
 are not acceptable in their current form - and it is why the writer of 
 this article is speculating.
 DM> "People thought ... the universe was just coasting" from the force of
 DM> the Big Bang, Kirshner said. "Instead, we found it is actually speeding
 DM> up." 
 
 And if it is speeding up - it is going to coast, and slow down, from the
 loss of momentum.  There is no hidden force involved - none is needed to
 explain a non-static universe, which is what we are seeing.
 DM> According to the Big Bang theory, the universe exploded from a tiny
 DM> point of matter about 12 billion years ago and is still expanding, but
 DM> at a slower and slower rate.
 
 This is a misrepresentation of the Big Bang theory.  The Big Bang theory
 does accord a universe exploding from a singularity about 12 to 400
 billion years ago, and is still expanding - but it never assumed a 
 slower and slower rate of expansion.  Since there were some that
 assumed a slower and slower rate, they assumed also that there must be
 a tremendous amount of so-called "dark" matter - more than we would
 normally predict.  Obviously, it is the "dark" matter theory that is
 suffering.  
 DM> But Riess and the others found that it is actually expanding faster
 DM> than it was 5 to 7 billion years ago.
 
 And this may, OR MAY NOT, be true.  These preliminaries will have to
 abide peer review, and there will be quite a lot of disagreement there,
 since with the same data from the Hubble, and the ground-based telescopes,
 have been used to demonstrate precisely the opposite, also; and recently
 on a special called "The Mysteries of Deep Space: to the edge of the
 universe" televised this month on PBS.
 DM> Parallel study confirms finding
 DM> Rocky Kolb, a University of Chicago astronomer, said in Science that
 DM> the finding is so startling, "I think everyone should reserve
 DM> judgment." 
 
 That's nice.  Rocky Kolb said everyone should reserve judgement.  He's
 right about that, at least.  But the finding is only startling to some
 of us, others of us are amused.
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