[Ichneumon]

The supposed expansion of the universe. Once people latched on to the concept of stellar red shift as an indication of recessional velocity, everything else was redefined (or ignored as anomalous) to fit.

Nice try, but the article itself points out that your "alternative" explanation just doesn't match the evidence:

SIDEBAR February 21, 2005
Misconceptions about the Big Bang: A Wearying Hypothesis
By Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis

	Image: P. CHALLIS Center for Astrophysics/STScI/NASA
	SUPERNOVAE,  such as this one (indicated by arrow) in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, serve as tracers of cosmic expansion. Their observed properties rule out alternative theories of cosmology in which space does not expand.

Every time Scientific American publishes an article on cosmology, a number of readers write in to argue that galaxies are not really receding from us--that the expansion of space is an illusion. They suggest that galactic redshifts are instead caused by light getting "tired" on its long journey. Perhaps some novel process causes light to lose energy spontaneously, and thereby redden, as it propagates through space.

Scientists first proposed this hypothesis some 75 years ago, and like any good model, it makes predictions that can be tested. But like any bad model, its predictions do not fit the observations. For example, when a star explodes as a supernova, it brightens and then dims--a process that takes about two weeks for the type of supernova that astronomers have been using to map out space. During these two weeks, the supernova emits a train of photons. The tired-light hypothesis predicts that these photons lose energy as they propagate but that the observer always sees a train that lasts two weeks.

In expanding space, however, not only do individual photons get stretched (thereby losing energy) but the entire train of photons also gets stretched. Thus, it takes longer than two weeks for all the photons to arrive on Earth. Recent observations confirm this effect. A supernova in a galaxy of redshift 0.5 appears to last three weeks; one in a galaxy of redshift 1, four weeks.

The tired-light hypothesis also conflicts with observations of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation and of the surface brightness of distant galaxies.

So the expanding universe cause for the redshift has been verified in serveral ways, and the "attenuated light" cause has been falsified -- it doesn't match the observations.

Will you now drop your adherence to your falsified model, or is your belief in it based on personal bias and dogma, rather than evidence?

[furball4paws]

FOG Index.

There are two generally recognized FOG indices.

FOG1 is defined as the number of syllables divided by the number of words. Because of the large number of Anglo-Saxon monosyllables in English, a FOG1 index greater than 2 is thick. Scientists have high FOG1 indices, since the scientific style is designed to stuff as much crap into as few words as possible and there is a penchant for all those Latinized (and Greekized) words.

FOG2 is defined as the number of words divided by the number of significant thoughts in the verbage. Scientists have very low FOG2 indices because of the aforementioned scientific style. However, Deans and University Presidents have very high FOG2 indices. The FOG2 indices of politicians is undefined since dividing by zero is not allowed.

:^))