Expanding Mass

Factual Questions
1

Is there any flaw in this theory?

2

I didn’t listen to the end, but about 30 years ago, I was at a talk by Fred Hoyle who was trying to save his continuous creation of mass theory. So he theorized that the “big bang” (a term he invented incidentally–intended as a term of derision) was actually a time of 0 gravity and that the graviational constant G has been growing through time. He claimed it would explain the red shift just as well and, in fact, that it was mathematically equivalent to the big bang theory. My thought was that if it was mathematically equivalent, then what difference could it make. A later objectin might be that it is incompatible with Guth’s inflation theory; I wouldn’t know about that.

3

Dunno - I thought I noticed a couple of logical fallacies in there, but that might only be in his explanation method, rather than the substance of what he’s trying to say.

The most obvious one was 'things don’t appear to be expanding, but they don’t appear to be moving either, and we know they are, therefore they could really be expanding. - I think this could be a false analogy.

I don’t understand why he starts off by saying it doesn’t make any difference whether spacetime is warping or mass is expanding, then spends the rest of the video insisting that it makes a lot of difference.

4

Also, if gravity is caused by expanding mass, then doesn’t that mass have to be not only expanding, but doing so ever more rapidly? If so, then it must be the case that there is no limit on the rate at which mass can expand (or we’d have reached it by now, surely).

5

First, some specific points.

  1. At 2:01- 2:11. “Gravity is actually not a force at all, but a simple geometric relationship between simultaneously expanding masses.” (Potato, potahto.) “This geometric effect is instantaneous over any distance, just as Newton believed.” Uh, where’s your proof? There is as yet no accepted consensus on an experimentally-validated speed of gravity, but General Relativity says it travels at the speed of light.

  2. At 2:44-2:53. “And since force equals mass times acceleration, if the rate of expansive particle acceleration is constant, then the only factor dictating force is mass.”
    Not sure what he means here. Acceleration and mass both dictate force whether the acceleration is constant or not.

  3. At 3:04-3:17. “Independently, expanding particles appear to repel one another. But as they inflate, the space between them rapidly closes, and they begin bumping into one another, self-organizing into larger structures, held together by the force of their expansive pressure.”
    This is nonsense. If they’re all expanding and repelling, they disperse into a gas. You need something like the electromagnetic force and the strong nuclear force to hold particles together. He does not, by the way, explain how any of the four forces result from his expanding mass hypothesis.

  4. At 3:26-3:34. “Quarks, which combine to make up protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, are nothing more than extremely stable clusters of an enormously large but specific number of expanding leptons.”
    Quarks are made up of leptons? I don’t think so, unless this guy knows more about particle physics than the scientists running CERN and Fermilab.

  5. At 3:42-4:07. “Stray expanding leptons, such as electrons, ricochet off the cobblestone surface of these superstructures, which in turn begin to rotate from the hailstorm of countless impacts. But as the rotational speed of such a superstructure increases, something amazing happens. The bumpy spinning surface rotationally accelerates the pounding leptons, which begin glancing off in the direction of spin, and eventually start missing the nucleus altogether.”
    Here he completely abandons conservation of angular momentum. If the stray leptons spin the superstructure faster by imparting angular momentum (which isn’t likely, since entropy dictates the superstructure would likely receive as many clockwise kicks as counterclockwise and remain unspinning), then the stray leptons cannot then reach stable orbits by getting more angular momentum out than they put in.

Now, to the main point. At 1:07: “In his famous theory of General Relativity, Einstein claimed that gravity results from the fabric of spacetime warping inward in the presence of mass. That’s one way of looking at it. Another is that mass expands outward in the presence of space and time. There’s fundamentally no difference, save for the choice of perspective.”
Well, he’s wrong. Mathematically there may be no difference, but there is an important physical consideration. Spacetime can exist without mass, but mass cannot exist without spacetime. In other words, a suitably advanced civilization could set up a network of laser beam sensors across a vast void of empty space and measure the geometry there, then bring in a mass and do it again - according to General Relativity, they would observe that the geometry changes. One cannot remove mass from spacetime to see if it suddenly stops expanding, for there is nowhere else for it to go.

In short, Einstein’s interpretation is testable, and this one isn’t.

6

If gravity is caused by the acceleration of expanding mass, that must mean that the moon isn’t expanding at the same rate as the Earth, whereas Jupiter is expanding a whole lot faster. I think we’d notice that if it was happening.

7

I just realized: how does expanding mass explain orbits?

8

The main flaw is that there is no theory. He just said a bunch of words. (True, many of those words could appear in a scientific theory, if one were to come upon one. But the use of such words alone doth not a theory make.)