Edwin Hubble did not favor the expanding universe hypothesis

   Modern cosmologists and astronomy historians are misguided in attributing the expanding universe hypothesis to the twentieth century astronomer Edwin Hubble.  For, in his writings Hubble consistently doubted the Doppler shift interpretation, always referring to the galaxy redshifts as "apparent velocities."  Hubble, in fact, favored the tired-light interpretation, the proposal that photons lose energy as they travel through interstellar space, finding that it offered a more reasonable interpretation of the observational data.  However, he realized that to adopt this interpretation would require admitting that it was due to "some hitherto unrecognized principle in physics."  Indeed, one interpretation of the tired-light theory, which suggests that the lost energy disappears entirely from the physical universe, directly conflicts with the strict interpretation of the First Law of Thermodynamics.  Although the law of energy conservation has been verified at the macroscopic level, e.g., in the operation of refrigerators and such, it has not been proven to apply to very small effects such as might explain the cosmological redshift (energy losses of the order of 10-18 per second).  Nevertheless there are many physicists and astrophysicists whose feathers would be ruffled at the idea that the Law might not hold true even at such miniscule levels.

Vincent Sauvé presents an excellent historical review of Hubble's writings and his stance against wholesale acceptance of the expanding universe hypothesis.  He also challenges some big bang assertions.

Also, in chapter 13 of his book Genesis of the Cosmos, Paul LaViolette presents an historical overview of the discovery of the galaxy redshifts during the early 20th century and how astronomers misled themselves to follow the Doppler shift interpretation which led to the conclusion of an expanding universe.

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Paul LaViolette is the first to definitively disprove the expanding universe hypothesis by comparing its performance against the tired-light alternative using multiple sets of cosmological test data.

   Like other astrophysicists, Paul LaViolette once took the big bang theory on faith to be an accepted established fact.  However, in 1978 he came to a juncture in which he had to know for sure whether the expanding universe hypothesis was really correct, or not.  During the previous five years, he had been developing a unified field theory called subquantum kinetics whose aim was to explain the formation of material subatomic particles and by 1978 he had made an advance in this theory which indicated that for the theory to be correct photons would necessarily have to lose energy as they traveled through space, with this lost energy actually disappearing in a real sense from being present in the observable material universe.  In effect, his theory predicted the existence of a "tired-light" cosmological redshift.  This launched his investigation into astronomy, whereupon he discovered that long ago, at the time Hubble published his famous 1929 paper on the galaxy redshifts, some astronomers had been proposing precisely this type of energy loss phenomenon as an interpretation of the galaxy redshift phenomenon.  In fact, the German physicist Walther von Nernst had proposed the existence of such an effect over a decade before the expanding universe concept was advanced.  So in 1978 LaViolette set out to establish whether observational data favored the tired-light model.  

   Studying the published literature he discovered that, for the most part, previous studies compared the expanding universe hypothesis and its velocity-redshift interpretation against just one set of cosmological test data.  The resulting discrepancy between the expansion prediction and the observational data trend was routinely eliminated either by adjusting the assumptions of the expansion model (e.g., introducing ad hoc assumptions about the amount of mass density or hidden mass that might be present in the universe) or by introducing "evolutionary corrections" into the model (e.g., ad hoc assumptions about the way galaxy luminosity or galaxy cluster size might evolve with time).  In other words cosmologists routinely forced their theoretical prediction to fit the data.  Most scientists would consider this a despicable practice, but somehow it was allowed in the field of cosmology since the ruling majority considered the big bang theory already to be an established fact.  Usually these studies did not plot the alternative to the big bang cosmology, such as the tired-light model, being already convinced that the expanding universe model was the only reasonable choice.  In a few cases the tired-light model was included for comparison, but this comparison was made on only one cosmological test; i.e., with one set of observational data.  There were no studies that compared the competing cosmologies on a variety of different tests.

   To be sure of his conclusions, LaViolette wanted to test this tired-light prediction utilizing many different kinds of cosmology tests, not just one.  He used four different types of cosmological tests in his comparison.   Indeed, if a cosmology were truly correct, it should be found to fit well to a variety of different cosmology tests without individually tailoring the cosmology to fit each set of test data.  If one should resort to introducing evolutionary corrections or model assumptions into a given cosmology to improve its fit on one cosmological test, then these same model adjustments should be consistently applied to the model to judge its fit on the other cosmological tests as well.  More often than not, evolutionary corrections introduced in the hope of improving the expanding universe cosmology's fit on one test ended up worsening its fit on another.  So his approach was to entirely avoid making evolutionary corrections and instead compare the "no-evolution" version of each competing cosmology against the various data sets.  The cosmology that consistently came closer to the data trends would be the winner.  Such a cosmology testing technique had never been tried before.  In his study, LaViolette found that the stationary universe tired-light model consistently fit the data better than the big bang expanding universe model.

   LaViolette's study was published in the Astrophysical Journal in 1986 under the title "Is the Universe Really Expanding?"   Getting it published against the countervailing tide of the big bang mindset that gripped the astrophysical community was not an easy task.  It took him eight years.   He first submitted his paper to the ApJ in 1978 while he was a doctoral candidate at Portland State University.  But referees rejected his paper.  During the following six years his paper was rejected by three other journals. Finally, in 1984 he resubmitted to the Astrophysical Journal.  The paper went through at least three review cycles.  Each time it was returned with the objections of the referee, LaViolette successfully countered these objections.  For example, one referee objected that LaViolette had not considered examining the two cosmologies against data on a particular cosmology test.  But when LaViolette checked the suggested cosmology test, the tired-light model again came out the winner.  In the end, the referees could offer no reason to reject the paper.  In fact, one referee, who was obviously the more liberal of the group, quipped that if the big bang cosmology was now disproven, what cosmology does the author suggest that it be replaced with.  This gave LaViolette the opportunity to include at the end of his paper a few paragraphs summarizing the continuous creation cosmology predicted by the subquantum kinetics field theory.  After some delay the paper was finally accepted.  Some credit for the paper's acceptance must go to Helmut Abt, who served as editor of the journal at that time and who was known for his policy of fairness.

There was little media publicity of the big bang theory's defeat following the publication of LaViolette's paper. The August 1986 issue of Astronomy magazine, however, did include a news item about the finding in its "AstroNews" section. Nevertheless, despite the media silence, his Ap. J. article did create quite a stir in the astronomical community since not all astronomers were sold on the big bang theory. LaViolette received letters from many notable astronomers and astrophysicists complimenting him on his landmark achievement. Letters came in from people such as professor Georges de Vaucouleur of the University of Texas at Austin; Jean-Claude Pecker, member of the French National Academy of Sciences and professor at the College of France and from Jean-Pierre Vigier director of research at CNRS and former assistant to Nobel Laureate Louis deBroglie; Prof. Pecker (second letter); Dr. Vigier (second letter); Grote Reber, father of radio astronomy; professor Paul Marmet of the National Research Council of Canada; and professor Dean Turner of the University of Northern Colorado. Even cosmologist Alan Sandage favorably referenced LaViolette's study in the cosmology review article he published in the 1988 edition of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Even today many prominent researchers have taken a stand against the big bang theory. Their names may be seen as signatories of the Open Letter to the Scientific Community published in 2004 in New Scientist magazine. 

    For many years LaViolette's study stood unchallenged, an uncomfortable thorn in the foot of the big bang school of thought.  In an effort to settle this issue, the big bang establishment secured funding for projects that sought evidence of a time dilation effect in extragalactic supernovae (Goldhaber, et al., 2001).  Another study conducted a Tolman surface brightness cosmology test of early cluster galaxies (Lubin and Sandage, 2001).  Although neither group pointed out any flaw of LaViolette's original study, they claimed the findings of the model fit to their single test as a definitive vindication of the expanding universe hypothesis over the tired-light alternative.  They came to their conclusion without considering that their model failed in fits on other tests.  The mass media was quick to accept their conclusions leaving the general public and even some anti-big-bang astronomers to think that hope for the tired-light alternative was dead.  Curiously, both of these studies were published at the same time in September of 2001, leading one to believe that 9-11 was not only a tragedy for the U.S. and world, but for the field of cosmology as well.

    Having previously experienced an eight year long delay to get his previous cosmology study published, and then being particularly short of time due to his work on other projects, LaViolette did not seek to respond immediately by publishing a rebuttal of these studies.  Instead, he wrote up a refutation of the conclusions of these two groups and published it in chapter 7 of the 2003 edition of his book Subquantum Kinetics.  In this chapter, his previous multi-cosmology test study is now expanded to include five tests:  the galaxy cluster angular-size-redshift test, the radio galaxy angular-size-redshift test, the Tolman surface brightness test, the Hubble diagram test, and the galaxy-number-count test.  Again all five tests show that the no-evolution tired-light model consistently came closest to the data trend.  For his Tolman test data, LaViolette uses the very same data that Lubin and Sandage had used only he included a necessary data adjustment for the extragalactic extinction of starlight which they had failed to take into account.  When this is done, the Tolman test data provides an excellent confirmation of the tired-light relation.  

    As for the supernova study, LaViolette explains that bright, long-lasting supernova are not seen in the local neighborhood because of their rare occurrence and that dim, short-lasting supernovae occurring far away are not seen because they are too dim to be detected above light background.  The result is that an unavoidable selection effect is present which gives the false impression that distant supernovae take longer to occur than nearby supernovae.  Goldhaber, et al., did not address this issue at all in their paper and it proves to be fatal to their paper's hasty conclusion.  In the very near future, LaViolette intends to write up and submit a rebuttal paper which hopefully will put to rest the big bang theory once and for all.