[jbri]

Reading your link, it appears that the author just flatly assumes that space is not expanding, and everything else stems from that assumption.

The author provides another article to attempt to support that assumption, but their argument for that is incomplete, and while their alternative appears to offer explanations for some observations, it ignores other things (like cosmological redshift). Add in the fact that that the article appears targeted towards laypeople and there's no scientific paper to be found suggests that it's more psuedoscience and thought experiments than actual scientific investigation.

It seems unreasonable to claim that academia would reject the idea out of hand when no-one's even written a paper to attempt to submit to a peer-reviewed journal. I suspect the reason academia ignores the supposition is not commercial interest like you claim.

[fargolime]

I've been a student of that blog. It doesn't ignore cosmological redshift. Rather, the dark energy solution notes that space measurably expands, but in a relative (it depends on the observer) way as opposed to the absolute (observed by all observers) way that is generally accepted today. When space measurably expands (whether relative or absolute) you have cosmological redshift.

Space itself not expanding is the absence of an assumption. Today it's generally accepted that space itself expands, an assumption.

> Add in the fact that that the article appears targeted towards laypeople and there's no scientific paper to be found suggests that it's more psuedoscience and thought experiments than actual scientific investigation.

Thought experiments are scientific investigation. Nothing in the rest of your point actually suggests pseudoscience.

[jbri]

It seems unreasonable to claim that academia would reject the idea out of hand when no-one's even written a paper to attempt to submit to a peer-reviewed journal.

If you showed me scientific papers that had been rejected by peer reviewers, then you might have a point. But if it's entirely articles targeted at laypeople and no scientific papers, it's pseudoscience.

[fargolime]

It's not pseudoscience for that reason alone. You're using the definition incorrectly, even if yours is the definition commonly improperly used. For example Einstein's Relativity of Simultaneity thought experiment is targeted at laypeople and is both scientific and a logical proof. Had he put the idea into a blog and nothing more it still would've been an advance of physics, regardless whether anyone else paid it mind.

(I probably won't say anything more because I get tired of this type of discussion.)

[mikeash]

You're right, of course. It's not pseudoscience because it's a blog targeted at a non-scientific audience. It's pseudoscience because it's complete nonsense.

[fargolime]

I've seen many people say that, but none who proved it scientifically. After all, it simply uses generally accepted equations to make its point. As the author suggests, I've plugged the equations into Excel to get the same charts.

My favorite part is this:

- The Relativistic Rocket site reports that a rocket accelerating / decelerating at 1 Earth gravity can travel from Earth to the Andromeda galaxy, 2 million light years away and arriving at low speed, in 28 years on the crew’s clock. Then the rocket’s crew would observe a beacon floating at the midpoint between the galaxies recede 1 million light years in the 14 years after they pass it.

That's an unassailable conclusion, and it follows that the beacon would accelerate away from the crew as they observe, since the beacon moved away from them at an average rate greater than that the rate at which they passed it. That's the explanation for dark energy in a nutshell.

[mikeash]

Since 1 million light years in 14 years is way faster than the speed of light, and relativity doesn't allow you to exceed the speed of light by acceleration, clearly this is something other than regular old F=ma "acceleration".

Additionally, the fact that we don't see things 14 light years away accelerating to a million light years away very quickly, despite being under a constant 1 gee acceleration, would seem to indicate that this is not what actually happens.

Putting numbers into equations and getting other numbers out doesn't mean anything by itself. I can use the standard d = 1/2at^2 equation to "demonstrate" that combining one apple and three tangerines produces 4.5 dandelions, and you would get the same result putting those numbers into the equation, but it doesn't mean the exercise makes any sense.

I will be honest: I don't understand enough about physics to point out exactly what is wrong with the proposed theory. But I understand enough to realize that it is very wrong, and point out some obvious flaws.

Finally, since the equations are well understood, if this really does explain "dark energy" then it should be possible to put in real-world numbers for things like the gravitational field of the Earth and get numbers out for the accelerating expansion of the universe which match real-world observations? Has the author actually done this and compared the results with observations? I can see no indication of this, even though it should be an easy exercise. This is another major indication that this is all nonsense, if it is in fact the case that this analysis has not been done.