Red Shift, Expanding Earth and the Meta Model

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by dholeman</i>
<br />According to the Meta Model, red shift of light from distant stars is due to the transfer of energy from particles in a light carrying medium (elysium) to the particles in a medium responsible for gravity (gravitons). However, Halton Arp says that he doesn't think such a 'tired light' effect is responsible for red shift.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">"Tired light" refers to a well-falsified and rather naive theory in which only the radial component of light propagation loses energy, but nothing happens to the important transverse component. In Meta Model, both components lose energy through graviton friction at the same rate. This is not only in excellent agreement with the data that falsified "tired light", but is in much better agreement with the data than is the Big Bang's predicted behavior.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Instead, he attributes it to an intrinsic phenomenon of the growing mass of electrons (and other particles?) though it is not clear whether he discounts all cosmic red shift to this source or just that associated with light from Seyfert Galaxies and the quasars that they spawn.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Arp's theoretician is Narlikar. I think there are some unresolved problems, both theoretical and observational, with the "variable mass" idea. But I have no interest in critiquing cosmologies other than the Big Bang at this time. They should all be on the table for comparative evaluation.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">my question is ... whether intrinsic red shift is regarded as being mutually exclusive with the Meta Model?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Not at all. In MM, the added mass is in the form of elysium. Elysium atmospheres are not just an atomic scale feature, but apply to galactic scales as well. The greater the mass concentration, the denser the elysium surroundings. Denser elysium means slowed electrons and longer wavelengths for the absorption and emission lines associated with each atom.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Giancarlo Scalera and others hold that the earth is expanding, and at an accelerating rate, and has been doing so at least since a time when all the continents were one and covered the entire planet which they place at being in the triassic period, about 230 million years ago.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I thought favorably of the expanding Earth hypothesis, and said so in <i>Dark Matter...</i>. However, modern observations with satellite laser ranging and VLBI indicate that the Pacific is not widening. To good accuracy, the circumference of the Earth is presently a constant. Every theory must ultimately yield to experimental tests of its predictions. This one fails, and the revised form in which the expansion occurs only in episodes instead of continuously is as ad hoc as the Big Bang.

There was just a report on TV about how bright people and those with good memories don't actually have more memory capacity than others, but instead benefit from algorithms helping to decide what to ignore. Pending new data that changes the picture, "expanding Earth" is now on my "ignore" list. Time will tell if that was a wise choice or not.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Scalera et al. present evidence that continents bordering the Pacific Ocean (and all the continents) fit together neatly on an Earth of radius ~ 55% smaller than present.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">It has been 120 years since Charles Darwin first noticed that the continents across the Atlantic fit together nicely. Since then, continental drift theory was concluded that all the continents were assembled in "Pangea" a few hundred million years ago. No one has previously found a way to close the Pacific with similar results. If you say that Scalera now has, I have to suspect ad hoc fudging. What "evidence" does he offer to overcome my skepticism on this point?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">this would seem to discount the origin of the moon as being from fission from Earth unless a fission event that formed the moon occurred before the Earth's continents themselves formed.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That is another strike against the theory then. The lunar surface rocks are virtually identical in density and overall composition to those in the Pacific basin.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Finally, Arp holds that matter acretes at a rate that is some function of either 2 to the nth power (Bode's Law) or perhaps some function of 1.23 to the nth power based on his own observations.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I have sent Arp my specific comments on why I disagree that the relation holds in the solar system. One of many points I made is that the planets are continually accreting matter, especially after planet explosions, so their masses take on a continuum of different values over eons. So any fractional ratio could not be more than "momentary". -|Tom|-

Tom:
I have been examining geodetic VLBI data in an attempt to discern whether it contains evidence of earth expansion, and I believe you are mistaken in concluding that VLBI shows that the Pacific is not widening.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">I thought favorably of the expanding Earth hypothesis, and said so in Dark Matter.... However, modern observations with satellite laser ranging and VLBI indicate that the Pacific is not widening. To good accuracy, the circumference of the Earth is presently a constant. Every theory must ultimately yield to experimental tests of its predictions. This one fails, and the revised form in which the expansion occurs only in episodes instead of continuously is as ad hoc as the Big Bang.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

The modern expanding Earth hypothesis expects most of the crustal lengthening due to radial expansion to occur at “mid-ocean” spreading ridges. Unlike the Atlantic, Indian, and Southern oceans, where the spreading ridges are roughly central and extend for the entirety of the respective ocean basins, the major spreading ridge in the Pacific is the East Pacific Rise, which extends only from about 55 S latitude to about 20 N latitude at about 110 W longitude. Further north the East Pacific Rise enters the Gulf of California and “disappears” under western North America. Portions of the East Pacific Rise in the southern hemisphere do exhibit the fastest spreading and highest sub-oceanic heat flow detected anywhere on Earth. As can easily be seen from on a map of ocean floor crustal age (for example, www.ngdc.noaa.gov/mgg/image/crustageposter.jpg ), north of about 30 N latitude, there is essentially no Pacific ocean floor younger than ten million years (just a small region of the Juan de Fuca plate off the coast of British Columbia).

Therefore, the proper way to assess Pacific widening using geodetic VLBI data is to examine the lengths of those baselines which cross the East Pacific Rise at a large angle. Baselines which cross the North Pacific, or which have one end in North America, should be expected to exhibit little, or no, widening. There are very few geodetic VLBI stations in the southern hemisphere, hence few appropriate baselines — the best available baselines include Hobart, Tasmania or Kauai, Hawaii to the west of the East Pacific Rise, and Fortaleza, Brazil, Santiago, Chile, or O’Higgins (on the Antarctic peninsula) to the east. The lengths and rates of change in length of these baselines (all positive) are shown below. These specific results are from the NASA Goddard geodetic VLBI solution for 3rd quarter, 2003, which I happen to have on my computer, but any recent geodetic VLBI solution will be quite similar:

<font face="Andale Mono">Hobart - Fortaleza   11699km +26.42mm/yr
Hobart - O’Higgins    7509km +52.82mm/yr
Hobart -- Santiago    9522km +44.81mm/yr
Kauai -- Fortaleza   11063km +23.89mm/yr
Kauai -- O’Higgins   10730km +40.37mm/yr
Kauai --- Santiago    9834km +56.55mm/yr</font id="Andale Mono">

There may be additional evidence of earth expansion buried in the geodetic VLBI data. It is important to remember that the actual VLBI observable is the time delay (accurate to about 30 picoseconds) between the arrival of the same signal from the distant quasar at the radio telescope antennae at opposite ends of each baseline. Baseline lengths are calculated from these time delays, after correction for differential ionospheric delays, solid Earth tides, and relativistic effects, as well as partial correction for ocean tidal loading, atmospheric loading, and differential tropospheric delays. The geodetic VLBI “solution” is a fitting procedure, which treats the quasar positions as known and solves for the station positions. The geodetic VLBI solutions in the early 1990s were compatible with 2-4cm/yr of Earth expansion, but were inconclusive, both because of insufficient duration of measurements and much lower measurement accuracy for baselines measured prior to 1981. Unfortunately, in 1993, Robaudo & Harrison published an analysis of VLBI data through 1990 (which includes the less-precise measurements prior to 1981) and satellite laser ranging data from 1976 through 1991 in a solution that allowed each station to have independent motion velocities in all three axes. This solution showed an RMS increase of Earth radius by 18mm/yr, which they argued was excessive, because the “only” process that produced a net upward motion (as far as they were concerned) was post-glacial rebound, which was known, using other techniques, to be much less than 10mm/yr. They recommended that station vertical motion in VLBI solutions be "restricted to zero, because this is closer to the true situation than an average motion of 18 mm/yr.” Since the mid-1990s, this constraint has been applied, precluding any possibility that official geodetic VLBI solutions will provide any direct evidence for Earth expansion.

As a background activity, I am attempting to reanalyze station positions and velocities using measured baselines from the post-1980 VLBI data, but without the constraint against vertical station motion. Although the VLBI technique is more sensitive to horizontal offsets than vertical, with 25 years of high-accuracy data from some stations, and 12-15 years of data from many additional stations, it is reasonable to hope that, if expansion is occurring, the 2-4cm/year of radius increase can be detected in this reanalysis.


When you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
<i>originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
It has been 120 years since Charles Darwin first noticed that the continents across the Atlantic fit together nicely. Since then, continental drift theory was concluded that all the continents were assembled in "Pangea" a few hundred million years ago. No one has previously found a way to close the Pacific with similar results. If you say that Scalera now has, I have to suspect ad hoc fudging. What "evidence" does he offer to overcome my skepticism on this point?
<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
In fact, there is far more ad hoc fudging in the various plate tectonic reassemblies of continental paleo-positions than in those which attempt to enclose completely a paleo-earth with a diameter about 55% of the present diameter with the current amount of continental crust, and creating all of the ocean basins in the course of expansion.

In 1933, O. C. Hilgenberg published an expanding Earth model, and constructed a paleo-globe showing how the current amount of continental crust could completely cover its surface. Several other whole-earth reconstructions with all of the ocean basins closed were developed prior to Scalera's recent publication. These reconstructions include ones by S. W. Carey in 1958, L. Brosske in 1962, C. Barrnett in 1962, K. Creer in 1965, R. Groves in 1976, K. Vogel in 1977, and J. Maxlow in 2001. Scalera is just the most recent advocate of this flavor of Earth expansion, and is able to update his hypothesis with some of the latest geophysical data.

The reason that early advocates of continental drift, including Alfred Wegener, Alexander du Toit, and Reginald Daly closed the Atlantic while enlarging the paleo-Pacific was that they started from an attempt to explain the obvious match of the South Atlantic coastlines, as well as fossil and recent species distributions, Permian glaciations, etc. The anomalous data they were attempting to reconcile did not include direct evidence of earth expansion, and they (implicitly) assumed that the diameter of the Earth was constant.

The first "convert" from Wegenerian drift to Earth expansion was Australian geologist S. W. Carey. He had been a supporter of Wegner's continental drift theory from his days as a student in the 1930s until 1956. While attempting to produce a cartographically precise reassembly of Pangea (something that Wegener never did), Carey realized that it was impossible to reassemble Pangea on a sphere the size of modern Earth. Carey spent the rest of his career developing a very comprehensive global tectonic model based on Earth expansion. Carey refined his theory several times, with major publications in 1976, 1981, 1988, and 1996. A good place to start when looking for "evidence" of Earth expansion is Carey's 1988 book <i>Theories of the Earth and Universe</i>, ISBN 0-8047-1364-2.

I have not yet read Scalera's latest book, but several of his earlier papers cite Carey's work.

BTW -- does anyone reading this know the ISBN or publisher's order number for Scalera's <i>Why Expanding Earth?</i> I have been been unsuccessful in my attempts to obtain a copy.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by mafischer</i>
<br />I believe you are mistaken in concluding that VLBI shows that the Pacific is not widening. ... Baselines which cross the North Pacific, or which have one end in North America, should be expected to exhibit little, or no, widening.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That is an ad hoc conclusion based on the observed absence of widening. In fact, those baselines are the only ones I would trust to indicate whether the Earth’s circumference is increasing or not.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">the best available baselines include Hobart, Tasmania or Kauai, Hawaii to the west of the East Pacific Rise, and Fortaleza, Brazil, Santiago, Chile, or O’Higgins (on the Antarctic peninsula) to the east.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Those baselines connect to <i>islands</i> (Hawaii, Australia) which can have peculiar motion relative to the rest of the planet. A reliable test of circumference change must connect North/South America to Asia (and not just Japan, another island). So far, those “reliable” (by my definition) chords are showing no expansion. QED.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">They recommended that station vertical motion in VLBI solutions be "restricted to zero, because this is closer to the true situation than an average motion of 18 mm/yr.”<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I don’t trust radial expansion measurements either. The signal is too small compared with the known sources of systematic errors. A circumference measure is the only way to go for now.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">While attempting to produce a cartographically precise reassembly of Pangea (something that Wegener never did), Carey realized that it was impossible to reassemble Pangea on a sphere the size of modern Earth.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">How can something that standard plate tectonic theory has done be classified as “impossible to do"? -|Tom|-

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by mafischer

I believe you are mistaken in concluding that VLBI shows that the Pacific is not widening. ... Baselines which cross the North Pacific, or which have one end in North America, should be expected to exhibit little, or no, widening.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Original reply by tvanflandern

That is an ad hoc conclusion based on the observed absence of widening. In fact, those baselines are the only ones I would trust to indicate whether the Earth’s circumference is increasing or not.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
The geodetic VLBI data <b>does not demonstrate</b> that the width of the North Pacific is remaining unchanged. What the geodetic VLBI data <b>does</b> show is that:

a) The east coast of the Asian mainland is moving east-southeast, toward the central Pacific, at an average of 33mm/year.

b) Tectonically stable portions of North America are moving slightly north of west, toward the north Pacific, at an average of 17mm/year.

c) The lengths of baselines between the east coast of the Asian mainland and the tectonically stable portions of North America are remaining essentially unchanged (mean length change of -0.6mm/year with a standard deviation of 3.0).

These measurements appear to indicate that the North Pacific <b>is widening by about 19mm/yr</b>, because otherwise the measured site motions would cause these baselines shorten by almost 20mm/year. Unfortunately, the source data for the North Pacific is far from ideal in terms of length and spatial diversity. There are only 3 well-measured baselines that traverse the North Pacific between tectonically stable endpoints in East Asia and North America, and the oldest measurements only date back to 1991. Therefore, what can be concluded with confidence today is that the data fail to demonstrate an absence of widening, and that additional measurements and/or improved analysis of the existing data (something that I am attempting to achieve) is necessary to yield unambiguous evidence concerning North Pacific widening and earth expansion in general.

(In case anyone cares, the specific numbers cited above are from the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's VLBI solution 2003cn, August, 2003. However, because the geodetic VLBI data set is cumulative, the numbers in any recent VLBI solution ought to be quite similar.)

When you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Originally posted by mafischer:
While attempting to produce a cartographically precise reassembly of Pangea (something that Wegener never did), Carey realized that it was impossible to reassemble Pangea on a sphere the size of modern Earth.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Original reply by tvandlandern:

How can something that standard plate tectonic theory has done be classified as “impossible to do"?-|Tom|-<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Sorry, what I should have written was "impossible to reassemble in a manner that simultaneously met geological constraints, geophysical constraints, and was falsifiable." However, Tom, for somebody who argues so strongly against the standard model of cosmology, you seem far too willing to accept the (seriously flawed) standard model of geology. Standard plate tectonics has "already done" a practical reassembly of Pangea in an analogous manner to how standard cosmology has "explained" galaxy rotation by scattering dark matter around in just the right places.

The next level of detail about the reassembly of Pangea is as follows:
Conventional reconstructions of Pangea begin by reuniting South America with Africa, and then fit other land masses on to the north and east. When this process is complete, there is a gap between the India-Australia-Antarctica group and central/east Asia that widens to the east from the central Mediterranean to reach a width of 50 degrees of latitude between New Guinea and southeast Asia. This is geologically untenable, because in the early paleozoic, well before the breakup of Pangea, the fossil record shows close relationship between the faunas of eastern Asia and Australia. (BTW, if the reassembly is attempted, starting at east Asia and working toward the west, a similar, 50-degree gap ends up separating North and South America, which has even worse geological implications.) Plate tectonics was formulated primarily by marine geologists and geophysicists, with minimal knowledge of, or concern about, Himalayan geology. They had no problem inferring the existence of a 2500km-wide "Paleotethys ocean" separating paleo-India from paleo-central Asia. To explain how this ocean could vanish without leaving a trace, they invoked plate tectonics' counterpart to the black hole -- by stating that the Paleotethys was completely subducted prior to the collision between the Indian and Eurasian plates.

Geological correlations between continents are primarily based on fossils. When a Tethys seaway, extending from Mexico, via the current location of the Alps, to the current location of the Himalayas, was originally proposed (by Seuss in 1893), the known fossil associations related western India to southeast Africa/Madagascar and eastern India to western Australia, with little that connected India with central Asia. However, during the second half of the 20th century, significant fossil and strategraphic evidence was found that requires northern India to be in close proximity with many parts of central Asia throughout the paleozoic and early mesozoic, and to never have been separated by oceanic expanses throughout the phanerozoic. (There is also the related issue that many field geologists who worked extensively in the Himalayas have written that those mountains resulted from vertical uplfit, and exhibit normal faulting, not the thrust faulting that would have occurred if the mountains were uplifed due to a collision of India with southern Asia.)

So, what is "impossible" on an earth of the current radius is to define a paleoposition for India that achieves the necessary proximity to all of southeast Africa, western Australia, Iran, and south central Asia. On a smaller earth, with the Indian ocean closed and a long, narrow "Tethys geosyncline" collecting sediment at the current location of the Himalayas, the necessary spatial relationships are easily achieved.

When you find yourself on the side of the majority it is time to reform. -- Mark Twain