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Re: Cosmology



Earlier I tried, with less skill than one might have hoped, to explain that
it is possible to imagine a 100% Newtonian expanding universe.

If you say it carefully, it's true. It suffices to imagine a universe
where things adhere strictly to the Hubble law: velocity proportional to
distance.

I think this is important for pedagogical reasons, to de-mystify the basic
expansion idea.

At 03:04 PM 2/12/01 -0500, David Bowman quite correctly pointed out that in
our non-imaginary universe we have additional observations; among other
things, we can observe deviations from the Hubble law.

He also pointed out that a nonzero value of the Cosmological Constant is
non-Newtonian.

Questions for David: What value of the CC do you think is right? How well
established is this value? With what confidence can values with the
opposite sign be excluded? (The last time I knew, if you asked 3
astronomers you would get 5 different CC values, and you could get several
more if you asked them again a year later.)