"Stryger1" wrote in
message

Pardon the top posting but my comments
are pretty general here.

Then you don't need to quote anyone, but if you
do then top posting makes it difficult to answer
your questions related to the quote. So I just
comment on your general comments.

My point/question is does thermodynamics
really have a role here or is it a tool for
analysis? It is my understanding that the
CURRENT belief is that the Universe is
expanding and it will continue to expand.
But as my high school chemistry instructor
put it, "Everything we know about chemistry
is wrong, but it works so we use it." The
same seems true for physics.

You are right here. I've been analyzing this
thing with "expanding universe" almost 20 years
ago, when I was learning general relativity and
it turned out that the universe is really not
expanding, but one can use a MODEL in which
it is expanding and almost all the observations
will be the same as if it were expanding. I'm
saying "almost" since there are a few of them
that are different for expanding and "stationary"
models.

The most important differences are conservation
of energy and "acceleration of expansion".
Neither can be accommodated by the expanding
model, and both fit naturally the stationary one.
However since it was not known that the expansion
really looks as if it were accelerating, and no
one cares whether the energy is conserved on
global scale then the expending model was
as good as a stationary one and much simpler
to explain to astronomers who are not very
good in math of which some knowledge is
needed to understand why a stationary universe
looks as if it were expanding, and why its
apparent acceleration looked accelerating.

So for the use of astronomers and astrophysicists
the universe "is expanding". But not for the use
of physicists who know enough math to do well
with a stationary model and therefore with energy
conserved on the global scale.

So basically the universe expands only because
astronomers don't understand the mechanism
of the illusion of expansion. That's also why they
never discovered it while the simple Newtonian
approximation of gravity is sufficient for that
purpose.

If you are interested in details, I described them
for those astronomers (and so without math) who
wonder why the expansion looks accelerating
while the theory of expanding universe requires
deceleration. It is in "Einsteinian Gravity for Poets
and Science Teachers" in
http://www.geocities.com/wlodekj/sci/gravity.htm
I'd appreciate your comments if you ever read it.

Since observations have become more precise
there may be more and more differences between
observations and the idea of expanding universe
and so it would be good if astronomers were aware
that "expansion" is only a rather primitive model of
the real situation in which the universe is stationary
but to understand why it looks expanding one
needs to learn at least high school calculus. Not
a very popular thing among astronomers as I can
see from the discussions on internet.

We continue to make observations and refine
our theories. We believe certain things until
new observations prove us wrong. Does the
expansion of the Universe actually have to have
it's causes rooted in the Newtonian and Einsteinian
physics we currently understand? Sometimes we
have to forget what we know, then we are free to
discover something new.

That's exactly true. But as I said above the Einsteinian
and Newtonian (which is actually only an approximation
of Einsteinian) physics explain much more than only
those things that contemporary astronomers can
comprehend. Luckily for theorists, so they don't need to
look for any other theory yet to explain why the
expansion is "accelerating" or why Pioneers 10 and 11
have "anomalous" accelerations, all of those observations
were already predicted by Einstein's theory (for a
stationary universe though, the one the astronomers
find difficult to understand).

If you are interested in numerical results: the Hubble's
constant predicted for a stationary model (the ratio of
redshift to distance) is c/R, where R is so called
"Einstein's radius" or c/sqrt(4 pi G rho) where G is
Newtonian gravitational constant, and rho is density
of the universe. The acceleration of the apparent
expansion is (c/R)^2/2, and "anomalous" acceleration
of space probe is predicted as c^2/R (all of those
things are observed too, with high accuracy too). So
as you can see the results are rather simple but
require some knowledge of high school calculus to
understand them and it is most likely why astronomers
still didn't discovered them (I can't think about any other
rational explanation). If you happen to know the high
school calculus (and have time too) you may check my
results yourself. They are in
http://www.geocities.com/wlodekj/sci/3263.htm
under the title "The General Time Dilation" which is a
phenomenon, not discovered yet by astronomers (due
to their lack of mathematical skills I presume) and which
follows directly from the conservation of energy, and so
from simple thermodynamics. Which, as you can see,
still has a role in explaining the nature.

-- Jim