Pursuant to my previous post, I'd like to answer Phil's question about
the "underlying theory" in more detail (moderator allowing):

On Sat, 13 Sep 14 Phillip Helbig wrote:
writes:
This is because if there is a migrating universal constant which
operated on the space-time manifold, then redshift would be
half time dilation and half spatial lengthening.

Why? Unless you have an underlying theory, I don't see how you arrive
at this.

Here I said "that *was* the underlying theory", but to elaborate,
since you asked, Phil:

As a gedankenexperiment, let's look at two mathematical spheres, one
larger than the other. The larger sphere has a lower SA-to-V ratio
than the other. This is an intrinsic difference. Now place each
sphere into its own empty universe. The spheres haven't changed, one
still has a different intrinsic nature to the other, but we have no
metric to distinguish them. So I suggest we need a universal
parameter of "scale" to account for this -- which would be a
characteristic or dimension of the space-time manifold.

"Scale" is just a reference point and so it isn't needed in our
physical law model -- sort of Machian in that way. But if it migrates
through the epochs, then it serves as a separator between past and
future and means that our telescopes are viewing a past where the
rules are different from today-- specifically, both length (xyz-axes)
and the rate of timeflow are seen to change with time. So arriving
photons would hail from a time which both looks bigger and is seen to
run slower. The xy axes that we see with our telescopes are remapped
perforce by Riemannian geometry, but the z-axis (the direction of
arrival) is not remapped. The arriving photon shows a stretch in
length and a slower runtime in equal measure, because of the migration
of "scale".

The benefit of this is that e.g., objects at z=1 are remapped to
where, for us to equate them to physical law today, we need to shrink
them and slow them by sqrt(2). The redshift would show that dilation
already, and by spatially shrinking them, the amount of lensing that
we see comes out right! Poof, dark matter! And the Riemannian
remapping would make dark energy go poof because objects would be
expected to be seen smaller and fainter.

Mind you, my calculations are ballpark only. It needs professional
work to see if the fit is exact. If the fit is exact, it's a twofer!
And that's the underlying theory, Phil, wet concrete and all.

Apologies to the moderator,
Eric