Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe

Scientific Paper
Title	Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Grote Reber, Paul Marmet
Keywords	universe, matter, density, Redshift, Tired Light, intergalactic plasma
Published	1989
Volume	17
Number	2
No. of pages	10

Read the full paper here

Abstract

Updated paper from: IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, Vol. 17, No: 2 April 1989. An increasingly large number of observations consistently reveal the existence of a much larger amount of intergalactic matter than presently accepted. Radio signals coming from directions between galaxies is discussed. An average density of matter in space of about 0.01 atom/cm3 is derived. It is known that the density of matter is compatible with many reliable observations. These results lead to a nonexpanding cosmological universe.

Overview

This is a joint paper by two well-known dissidents: Paul Marmet, a spectroscopist at the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, and Grote Reber, the amateur who built the first parabolic radio telescope and effectively founded radio astronomy. The two halves of the paper are complementary. Marmet supplies a non-Doppler redshift mechanism — slightly inelastic, non-dispersive scattering of photons off atoms and molecules in space — and Reber supplies the observational hook: a 144-metre-wavelength survey of the southern sky made with a 192-dipole array 1.07 km across, in which the sky appears inverted, galaxies showing as dark shadows against a bright intergalactic background.

The joint conclusion is that intergalactic space contains far more matter than the standard model allows — about 0.01 atom/cm³, mostly in the form of undetectable molecular hydrogen — that this gas produces the observed Hubble redshift by collisional energy loss, and that the universe is therefore neither expanding nor in need of exotic dark matter. The paper is explicitly a case for keeping alternatives on the table: "It is not possible to achieve a rational choice between alternative models when only one alternative (the big bang) is considered."

The argument

Dismantling the three pillars

Marmet and Reber take the big bang case to rest on three legs and attack each.

• Velocity redshifts. They quote Hubble's own reservation from The Observational Approach to Cosmology (1937) — that reading redshifts as velocity shifts "very seriously restricts not only the time scale... but the spatial dimensions as well", whereas the non-velocity reading "avoids both difficulties" — plus Shelton's report that "Dr. Hubble never committed himself to the theory of the expanding universe", and a 1953 letter from Millikan calling tired light "more simple and less irrational". They cite Arp's Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies and Reboul's catalogue of 780 references, "Untrivial Redshifts: A Bibliographical Catalogue".
• Light-element abundances. They lean on Lerner's argument that adding the helium-4 produced in massive stars to the big-bang yield gives nearly twice the helium actually observed, and quote his conclusion that "either the blackbody spectrum or the light element predictions of the big bang are clearly wrong."
• The 3 K background. Marmet's position is that the 3 K radiation "must exist anyway, even if the big bang never happened", since any dark matter at 3 K must by Planck's law emit that spectrum.

Non-dispersive photon-atom interaction

The core of the redshift mechanism is an argument that photons interact with matter enormously more often than Rayleigh scattering rates suggest, but almost always in the forward direction. The argument runs from the refractive index of air. With n = 1.0003, light crossing 100 m of air is retarded relative to vacuum by 100(n − 1) = 3 cm. Since air is not a continuum but a collection of atoms, that delay must be the accumulation of individual encounters; and since 3 cm is "about 1 billion times the size of the Bohr radius", Marmet infers that "roughly 1 billion collisions" occurred. Because the image seen through 100 m of calm air is not fuzzy, essentially all of those interactions must have been non-dispersive. He puts the ratio of non-dispersive to Rayleigh interactions at more than 10⁹. Scaled to space, where the density is "lower by more than 20 orders of magnitude", he estimates "about one interaction (with no molecular dispersion) per week".

Why the interactions are inelastic

The next step argues that these forward interactions cannot be perfectly elastic. The delay implies the photon is briefly absorbed and re-emitted. During that interval the passing wave polarises the atom, displacing the electron; the photon's momentum is transferred to the electron, which is thereby accelerated; and an accelerated electron radiates bremsstrahlung by Maxwell's equations. That radiated energy is lost from the photon. Quantitatively (referring to his 1988 Physics Essays paper), the fractional energy loss per collision "in ordinary conditions" is about 10⁻¹³, which gives Δλ/λ = constant — the same form as the Doppler law, and hence indistinguishable from it. The secondary photon carrying away the lost energy has a wavelength of "a few thousand km", far beyond any radio observation (the longest observed being Reber's 144 m) and in any case untransmittable through interstellar plasma. Marmet claims independent confirmation of the mechanism in the solar limb redshift observed for eighty years, in binary stars, and in the K-term. A density of about 0.01 atom/cm³ is stated to yield the observed Hubble constant.

Reber's 144-metre sky

Reber's array — 192 dipoles in a ring 3520 ft across covering 223 acres — mapped the southern sky at 144 m during the mid-1960s solar minimum. The finding is that "the appearance of the sky is the inverse of that at shorter wavelengths": galaxies are dark, the intergalactic background bright. The measured brightness corresponds to a plasma temperature of 3.4 × 10⁶ K, which, if produced by hot intergalactic plasma, requires an average density of 0.01 atom/cm³ — the same figure Marmet's redshift calculation gives. The authors note the alternative that the emission comes from many unresolved remote galaxies, and call for more data.

Where the missing matter hides

The remainder surveys the detection problem. Schneider's HI cloud unassociated with any galaxy (10³ atoms/cm³, 10⁹ solar masses, 100 × 200 kpc) shows such objects exist but is far too small to supply the required mass. Emission and absorption spectroscopy is selective; the 21 cm line sees atomic hydrogen only. Molecular hydrogen, having no permanent dipole moment, is effectively invisible: the first rotational transition is practically non-existent in space, the second takes about 1000 years, and one must reach the sixth state before the transition time falls to a year. H₂ is therefore proposed as the bulk of the invisible matter. The Faraday rotation method α = VHL is discussed and rejected as impractical, since it requires simultaneous knowledge of six unknowns including the Verdet constant (quoted as 4 × 10⁻⁷ for helium and 62 × 10⁻⁷ for H₂).

The dark-matter section argues that flat galactic rotation curves require density falling as 1/r², that this law shows no sign of breaking "as far out as one can detect", and that there is therefore no reason to expect a discontinuity beyond the luminous radius — so the same gas should continue right out to the next galaxy, making the average intergalactic density they propose entirely natural. Neutrinos are dismissed as the dark component because their cross-section is too small to provide the interaction needed to stabilise co-rotating orbits.

Assessment

The paper's strongest and most durable contribution is Reber's low-frequency data. The inverted 144 m sky is a real and striking observation, and the paper is right that the intergalactic medium is far better probed at long wavelengths than by optical spectroscopy. The point about H₂ is also well made and physically correct: a homonuclear diatomic has no permanent dipole moment, its rotational transitions are quadrupole and extremely slow, and large masses of cold molecular hydrogen genuinely are hard to see except through tracers. Several small calculations check out exactly — the 3 cm delay from n = 1.0003 over 100 m, the ratio of that delay to the Bohr radius (5.7 × 10⁸, "about 1 billion"), and the secondary-photon wavelength: a fractional loss of 10⁻¹³ from a 2.5 eV visible photon gives 2.5 × 10⁻¹³ eV, or 4,960 km. "A few thousand km" is correct.

The difficulties begin with the inference from the delay. Dividing a 3 cm retardation by the Bohr radius does not count collisions; it assumes, without argument, that each interaction contributes a delay equal to one Bohr radius of path. The refractive index in fact arises from coherent forward scattering by every molecule within the Fresnel zone, and that number is calculable: over 100 m at 550 nm the first Fresnel zone has radius √(λL) ≈ 7.4 mm, enclosing about 4 × 10²³ molecules — fourteen orders of magnitude more than Marmet's billion. The whole scaling to intergalactic conditions rests on this step.

More seriously, the paper's own numbers do not reproduce the Hubble constant. Taking 10⁻¹³ fractional loss per interaction and "one interaction per week", the redshift accumulates at 10⁻¹³ per 1.8 × 10¹⁴ m, which corresponds to H₀ ≈ 5 km/s/Mpc — some fourteen times too small. To get H₀ ≈ 70 the interaction rate must be about one every twelve hours, and at 0.01 atom/cm³ that requires a cross section of 7.7 × 10⁻¹⁸ m², roughly 900 times the geometric cross-section πa₀² of a hydrogen atom. Even the slower "one per week" rate needs 60 times the geometric size. A cross-section that far above the physical size of the target is a serious demand, and the paper does not address it.

Third, the proposed density is not cosmologically neutral. 0.01 atom/cm³ is 10⁴ atoms per cubic metre, about 1,800 times the critical density for H₀ = 70. Put back into the paper's own Newtonian framework, a static uniform medium of that density has a gravitational free-fall time of √(3π/32Gρ) ≈ 5 × 10⁸ years. A universe filled uniformly with this much matter and not expanding collapses in half a billion years. The paper never asks what holds its non-expanding universe up, and its own density answers the question the wrong way.

Fourth, the 3 K argument does not work as stated. It is true that matter at 3 K radiates a Planck spectrum, but only an optically thick medium radiates a blackbody spectrum; a tenuous gas radiates in lines and continua at low emissivity, and the COBE FIRAS measurement showed the microwave background to be a blackbody to better than one part in 10⁴ — the closest thermal spectrum ever measured. Intergalactic gas at 0.01 atom/cm³ falls enormously short of the optical depth needed to thermalise radiation to that precision. The near-perfect isotropy at the 10⁻⁵ level, later mapped by WMAP and Planck, is a further problem for a source distributed like intergalactic matter.

Fifth, and decisively for the non-expanding conclusion, is a measurement that postdates the paper and that no static model has accommodated: the light curves of distant Type Ia supernovae are observed to be stretched in time by exactly the factor (1 + z), and their spectra to age at the same slowed rate. A tired-light mechanism dims and reddens photons but cannot slow a clock; a static universe predicts no stretching at all. This is the sharpest single discriminator, and it goes against the paper.

There is also the classical objection to any scattering redshift, which Zwicky raised in 1929 and which the paper meets only by assertion. An interaction that removes energy from a photon must transfer momentum, and momentum transfer implies angular deflection; the claim that essentially all such events are strictly forward is asserted from the sharpness of terrestrial images, but terrestrial images sample optical depths utterly unlike a 10²⁶ m path. Distant quasars and high-redshift galaxies are observed as sharp point and structured sources, and any blurring or wavelength-dependent smearing at the level required would have shown up. Finally, several of the paper's supports are dated: the 1989 statement that "there is no evidence for substantial amounts of additional (dark) matter" from Faraday rotation has been overtaken by gravitational lensing mass maps and by the acoustic-peak structure of the CMB, and the light-element case now turns on deuterium, whose primordial abundance is measured in quasar absorption systems and agrees with the baryon density independently derived from the CMB.

The paper is best read as a careful statement of the observational case for a much denser intergalactic medium — where it has aged well, since the "missing baryons" problem was real and much of the answer did turn out to be diffuse intergalactic gas — married to a redshift mechanism that its own arithmetic does not sustain.

See also

• Paul Marmet
• Grote Reber
• Tired Light
• Redshift
• Hubble Constant
• Expanding Universe
• Steady State Theory
• Cosmic Microwave Background
• Dark Matter
• Halton Arp
• Hannes Alfvén
• Plasma