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There is much more evidence for the expansion of the universe than just the cosmological redshift. Where do you get the idea that it "makes the calculations work out"? You got it backwards. The calculations showed that the universe must expand. Georges Lemaitre found that out. People were skeptical at first and said the calculations don't apply, but when the cosmic microwave background was discovered in the sixties, all but the most stubborn hardliners were convinced that the universe must expand and that there must have been a big bang, i.e. a singularity in the finite past. The microwave background is basically a picture of the universe when it was a baby. There were no galaxies, only hot gas that just cooled down enough to turn from plasma to neutral gas which later clumped into galaxy clusters, galaxies and so forth. Because the speed of light is finite, we can literally see how the universe looked liked billions of years ago. And it looked hot, because it was compressed, and it looked young, because structures hadn't had the time to form yet. The gas composition also shows only light elements, because heavy elements need to be forged in supernovae. Young stars have lots of heavy elements, far away, old stars only consist of hydrogen and a bit of helium. The tiny, tiny irregularities that we see in the cosmic microwave background match beautifully what we know about thermodynamics, statistical physics, quantum mechanics, general relativity and electrodynamics to a very high degree. It's marvelous, really. > the very idea that the universe is expanding makes about as much sense as dark matter The universe does not care about what makes sense to us. It just is. And the expansion is an observational fact. On a side note, I find it a bit presumptuous to assume that a layperson knows better than legions of professional cosmologists. These are very smart people who work full time for the better parts of their lives on these problems while you clearly haven't put in the time to understand the fundamentals. They wouldn't come to the conclusions they come to if they didn't think they had merit. You can be curious about it, you can have questions about it (please do!), you don't have to understand it, but please trust experts on their opinion and show some humility and some respect. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate a physicist who tried to tell you how to design your programs either. (We're known to write horrible software, just look at ROOT.) Imagine some amateur telling you "for-loops don't make sense to me, why don't you use GOTO". No offense, and sorry to say it like this, but it really bugs me a bit. |