Why would distance from earth influence the speed of expansion of a distant galaxy?
Does that suggest that our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment?
Does that suggest that our awareness of the galactic bodies itself is somehow influencing them, as in the double-slit experiment?
In the double slit experiment, the awareness is not influencing the outcome. The act of measuring is. Pretty sure the act of measuring the galactic bodies has no impact on them in any meaningful way.
As I understand the double slit experiment, this is a fundamental property of light as a photon exhibits wave-particle duality. If so, retrocausality in this case would just mean the fundamental wave function can be collapsed into actuality without time or space being involved.
Am I far off base?
There is no way to verify that. Big parts of quantum physics is more or less pseudoscience.
[citation needed]
So they could capture the light and attempt to capture the "same" light again later to try to verify or change the result they received.
I did some more reading about it after posting, and the original experiment was intended to test if light "chooses" to be a wave OR a particle in a way they could affect, and that it could only be one or the other at a time. The truth seems to be more that it acts as both at the same time and whatever sensor equipment you use to pick it up is what it acts like.
The issue is that not all galaxies are moving away from us. The ones that are closer to us have a lot of peculiar velocity [1]. This means they can be moving toward us or moving tangentially to us or any other direction. If we want to characterize the expansion of the universe as a whole, we need to account for this in our models. It turns out to be a lot more complicated than we previously thought.
The crisis in cosmology (aka the Hubble tension [2]) is that our two means of characterizing the expansion of the universe, models of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and measurements on the cosmic distance ladder using standard candles (Cepheid variables [3] for up-close measurements, Type Ia supernovae [4] for more distant measurements) disagree with one another, and that disagreement is getting worse, not converging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peculiar_velocity#Cosmology
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law#Hubble_tension
"Awareness" is not a thing, not even in the double slit experiment. The term 'measurement' refers to a specific kind of interaction that bridges quantum systems with classical systems, although I believe a good case could be made that these waveforms never actually fully collapse.
Likewise, if there is anything special about Earth's position in the greater cosmos, it would be a trick of perspective or perception - unless there are any completely disruptive new discoveries about the nature of reality. However, my money would be on the fact that the universe is simply not as uniform as we thought.
As an analogy, consider the 2 dimensional surface on the surface of a balloon. As you inflate the balloon, the distance between any 2 points increases, and it increases more the farther away the points are from each other.
It wouldn't - but it may influence how we measure distance. If we're using the wrong distance measurements then we're calculating the speed of expansion incorrectly.
My intuition of 'things far away moving away faster' causes me to conclude that things far away are therefore accelerating, because the more they move away the faster they move away, but my intuition is probably wrong as it doesn't line up with the raisin bread analogy.
This place isn't debate club and nobody's getting a prize for winning an Internet argument.