Can Space Be Faster Than Light?

Is space faster than light? The question may sound weird, like comparing apples and red herrings. Yet, it is being asked by serious cosmologists.

Here is Sean Carrol, a famous professional cosmologist from Caltech in his essay: “The Universe Never Expands Faster Than the Speed of Light”: That is intriguing, because it was alleged, long ago that so-called Cosmic Inflation, precisely, allowed the Universe to “expand faster than light”. Carrol:

…”here to get a little nitpick off my chest: the claim that during inflation, the universe “expanded faster than the speed of light.” It’s extraordinarily common, if utterly and hopelessly incorrect. (I just noticed it in this otherwise generally excellent post by Fraser Cain.) A Google search for “inflation superluminal expansion” reveals over 100,000 hits, although happily a few of the first ones are brave attempts to squelch the misconception. I can recommend this nice article by Tamara Davis and Charlie Lineweaver, which tries to address this and several other cosmological misconceptions.”

Notice How Big Bang Expansion Accelerates, Slows Down, Then Re-Accelerate. Twist & Turn?

Well. The varying speed of light model was proposed by Jean-Pierre Petit in 1988 (and copied by John Moffat in 1992, Albrecht and João Magueijo in 1999). Instead of superluminal expansion of space, the speed of light was proposed to be 60 orders of magnitude faster than its current value solving the horizon and homogeneity problems in the early universe…

Even for those who are not interested by cosmological physics and relativity, this is fascinating, because it means that most cosmologists had no idea of what they are talking about, or what other cosmologists are talking about…. Over the last few decades, that their collective cosmological wisdom got sold in tenths of millions of books on the subject.

This means that the making of “science” is considerably less obvious and appealing than the making of sausage. It also means that we have no idea what space, time, and even light, mean.

The reason many of these physicists do not understand, what they are talking about, is that they did not use the more advanced mathematics I will introduce later in an essay.

In “Expanding Confusion: common misconceptions of cosmological horizons and the superluminal expansion of the Universe”, Tamara and Charlie claim that:

“We use standard general relativity to illustrate and clarify several common misconceptions about the expansion of the Universe. To show the abundance of these misconceptions we cite numerous misleading, or easily misinterpreted, statements in the literature. In the context of the new standard Lambda-CDM cosmology we point out confusions regarding the particle horizon, the event horizon, the “observable universe” and the Hubble sphere (distance at which recession velocity = c). We show that we can observe galaxies that have, and always have had, recession velocities greater than the speed of light. We explain why this does not violate special relativity and we link these concepts to observational tests. Attempts to restrict recession velocities to less than the speed of light require a special relativistic interpretation of cosmological redshifts. We analyze apparent magnitudes of supernovae and observationally rule out the special relativistic Doppler interpretation of cosmological redshifts at a confidence level of 23 sigma.”

Before I expose my more advanced mathematics, let me point out this: the Big Bang created this problem, Cosmological Inflation. Cosmological Inflation, if admitted is a huge problem: why did it start? Why did it stop? (Guth himself views the lack of even a glimpse of an explanation here as a problem.) Why is it all over the place? (Physicists such as Linde, an ex-Russian at Stanford, believe in “chaotic inflation”, with inflation all over the place: completely silly? Well maybe not: I have a re-interpretation with Quantum Entanglement!)

A solution to solve the Cosmic Inflation problem is to decapitate the Big Bang. That’s what I do with my proposal of Eternal Dark Energy, the “100 billion years old universe”.

On the face of it, it’s obvious: why to imagine one which makes no sense, when we already have one, for sure, which makes no sense either?

Some things are obvious. Some car makers claimed that their “hybrid” cars went one hundred kilometers on 1.2 liters. A French magazine went out, and measured. It was found hybrid car fuel usage was three times higher than officially announced.

Surprising? No.

Obvious.

Why would a hybrid car going in a straight line at uniform speed use less fuel? Witchcraft? In uniform motion, only the gasoline engine works. The electric engine(s) get dragged along. In truth, the hybrid machinery is heavy and, if anything, the car should use more fuel, no less. As found.

Simple: basic logic is a killer, if no obvious evidence to the contrary.

Patrice Ayme’