> The idea may be plausible, but it comes with a big problem: it can't be tested.
Doesn't that imply that the accepted model can't be tested? I mean, in the sense of distinguishing it from this one.
Doesn't that imply that the accepted model can't be tested? I mean, in the sense of distinguishing it from this one.
In my opinion the reasonable way to deal with that, is to assume that they are the same model since they describe the same physics and leave the semantics to the philosophers.
This one, though. I mean, the fundamental observation is that red shift increases with distance. The accepted model has red shift caused by motion away from us, and so we conclude that recessional velocity increases with distance. That is, the Universe is expanding.
This new model has blue shift caused by increasing mass. And so we are blue-shifted relative to distant stuff, which we see only in the past. So it looks red-shifted to us. And distance is proportional to time delay, so stuff that's farther away is more red-shifted.
Bu I don't see how the temporal rate of mass increase could be related to -- or rather, another reflection of -- the expansion of the Universe. But then, IANAP, so hey.
It's not "out of favor" just as a matter of fashion: a lot more data was collected, extending much further away and therefore much further into the past.
> a few more new facts just might swing things the other way again.
No, it would take a lot more than that, because our current model of accelerating expansion for the past few billion years (note that before that, the expansion was decelerating) is based on a lot more data than we had 40 or so years ago.
Afaik, we have no direct observations of galaxies moving away from us - over such enormous distances we have not had enough time since the start of observations to actually see a galaxy recede.
The change in wavelength is exactly proportional to the increase in size of the universe during the time of flight, and it is not directly related to speed of recession except in common and inaccurate discussion. The link to relative velocity (if that concept makes sense for objects in widely separated and unrelated reference frames) is model dependent, while the metric expansion measurement is directly measured.