[mikeash]

"It wouldn't be easy."

Nonsense. The mass of galaxies is reasonably well known. Put the numbers in and see how well they match reality. The numbers are uncertain? Then put on appropriate error bars and see if reality falls within them.

[fargolime]

We know the mass of each of millions of galaxies? I doubt the galaxies involved have even been counted. But never mind, because ideas aren't proven invalid when they aren't applied in some way you desired.

[mikeash]

No, but when a quantitative theory isn't compared with reality then there is absolutely no reason to pay attention to it until it is.

[fargolime]

Special relativity should've been tossed in the bin, then.

[mikeash]

No, because special relativity had plenty of quantitative corroborating evidence for it, gathered both before and after the theory was actually proposed.

Seriously, this is insane. You have a theory that makes quantitative predictions but when I ask whether those predictions line up with reality you protest that it's just too hard to actually come up with any numbers. You loved equations and graphs before, but now, perish the thought of actually looking at quantities, let's just wave hands and pretend that this theory is definitely right even though we can't be bothered to check.

You have a few blog posts with no quantitative reasoning whatsoever even though all of the math is present and straightforward, no actual papers, no evidence, no nothing, and you're sure that this is proof that academia is suppressing new ideas, not, say, proof that the author is a complete crackpot.

Sure.

[fargolime]

Special relativity as published included no experimental confirmation. None of its quantitative predictions in the original publication were "lined up with reality" by Einstein. What came after the theory was published, experiments done by others, is obviously irrelevant to the point you're making.

The blog proves that general relativity predicts that sufficiently high-redshift supernovae accelerate away from us, the 1998 observation of which is currently a mystery. The blog offers the same level of corroborating evidence as special relativity did when it was published, both offering solutions to observational mysteries. Neither Einstein nor the blog author lined up anything with reality numerically in their original publications.

Yet you insist (at a minimum) the blog author add up the masses of all the millions (trillions?) of galaxies within a sphere centered on the Earth and whose radius extends to those supernovae, billions of light years from the Earth, to make a numerical prediction of the rate those supernovae are accelerating away from us. You suggest that not doing such a calculation means the blog is hand-waving. Well I say again that's unscientific as hell. Yes by your standard, special relativity as published would be junk and Einstein would be a crackpot.

(I probably won't say anything more because I get tired of this type of discussion. You seem to be done with scientific attempts to discredit the blog.)

[mikeash]

It doesn't look that way to me: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tests_of_special_relativity

In particular, the Lorentz transformation at the heart of relativity was derived from experiments years before.