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Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

I became extremely fascinated by null cosmology, which explains red shift as the result of light losing energy to [background] radiation as it travels. That [background] radiation becomes essential in the cosmological cycle involving the endless birth and death of galaxies via black holes.

While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I've not found anything to fully discredit it.

http://www.nullphysics.com/pages_cosmology.php

Update: I'm writing from my iPhone and haven't looked into this in a while. When I said radiation I was referring to low energy cosmic microwave background, which is easily scattered. Read the FAQ if you have questions. I do not claim to fully represent the theory in the above paragraph.

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> light losing energy to radiation as it travels

> I've not found anything to fully discredit it

Well, for starters, there's the minor problem of light never having actually been observed to lose energy as it travels. If light loses energy to radiation as it travels, then this radiation should be detectable. Where is it?

Then there's the slightly less minor problem of having to rewrite all the known laws of physics from scratch, starting with electromagnetism and quantum mechanics. (I presume that you're not going to toss out conservation of energy because the whole point of the exercise it to account for the cosmological red shift, yes?)

But other than that, I can't think of anything that would discredit it either.

At the very least you should probably look at the theory before claiming to discredit it. The "radiation" is lower energy microwaves which are quickly scattered.

As for your other questions, these are addressed in the theory. How about reading that first.

> At the very least you should probably look at the theory before claiming to discredit it.

I didn't claim to discredit it. All I did was point out that there's no evidence for the theory, and that it would require rewriting most of the known laws of physics. Other than that I specifically said I saw no problem with it.

> The "radiation" is lower energy microwaves which are quickly scattered.

Scattered by what? The behavior of light is well understood. It doesn't just scatter randomly, whether or not it's "lower energy microwaves" (whatever that could possibly mean). And why would the fact that the microwaves are scattered matter? Microwaves would still be detectable even if they are "scattered". Look at the sky: that blue color you see is visible light scattered by the atoms in earth's atmosphere. Why would scattered microwaves be any less detectable than scattered visible light?

(Feel free to treat those as rhetorical questions, by the way.)

> As for your other questions, these are addressed in the theory. How about reading that first.

Life is too short to spend time doing a detailed debunking of every crackpot idea that comes along.

[...] light losing energy to radiation [...]

Light is radiation. So we are are talking about radiating radiation...

> red shift as the result of light losing energy to radiation as it travels

Yet another incarnation of the old so-called "tired light" idea. Just google it. Or start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light

You run very quickly into all sorts of problems once you assume light gets "tired" as it travels.

> While the theory seems to be collecting dust, I've not found anything to fully discredit it.

Start here:

http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html

> I've not found anything

Odd, since a simple google search for "null physics" returns several strong rebuttals on literally the first page. Maybe you haven't actually looked?

EDIT: Oh boy, this "null physics" thing shows all the signs of crackpot "science". The author working on it "for decades". Studies physics, but becomes "disenchanted" and switches to engineering. Is a "visiting scientist" at a "university" nobody has heard about. His theory is not published in journals because journals "help the establishment". Compares himself with Ben Franklin, Bill Gates, and Faraday. The only thing he's published is this book; no articles, no nothing. On and on and on. There are literally hundreds of woo peddlers out there like this guy, and all of them are made in the exact same image.

http://www.ourundiscovereduniverse.com/pages_author.php

That page lit up the pseudo-science detector, firing up another alarm at each and every sentence. The only thing amazing about this guy is how well he fits the stereotype. It's surreal.

Brilliant quote from a link I posted above:

Much crackpot literature gives the impression of an old grudge being played out: "I learned quantum mechanics from some book that made me feel dumb; thinking up Quantum Aethro-Gyromechanics on my own made me feel smart." The sad thing is, this illustrates a sort of can-do spirit that's admirable in fields other than science. Stubbornly defying a swimming coach ("You'll never be an Olympian, kid") or editor ("Your manuscript 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' does not meet our needs at this time") or venture capitalist ("Forget it, Mr. Fred Smith, there is no market for nationwide express delivery"), turns out to actually work sometimes; the people who pull this off are praised as heros. But science isn't like that. Whereas coaches, editors, and entrepreneurs have to rely on (fallible, human) gut instinct for many of their evaluations, science relies on explicit, rigorous go/no-go tests. I think that the dissonance between the value of stick-to-it-iveness in entrepreneurship, versus the value of mathematical rigor in science, is the root cause of a lot of physics crackpottery.

Honest question: how you do you prevent your pseudo-science detector from succumbing to confirmation bias? I'm willing to wager that if you gathered up every single so-called crackpot on the planet and looked at their ideas in 50 years, there's at least a single person that will have turned out to be right.

Love the quote, by the way.

I agree it seems like pseudoscience.

Actually I did look for information to discredit the theory about a year ago. There appears to be more out there now. At that time I did lose interest after reading about problems with tired light.

Regardless, it's an interesting theory from a philosophical perspective, even if it has major problems.

That UCSB review is extremely amusing as is the other one linked.

Thank you for those.

http://hep.ucsb.edu/people/bmonreal/Null_Physics_Review.html

http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~fiski/ouu_review.html

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