Expanding Space: The Root of Conceptual Problems of the Cosmological Physics

TL;DR

The paper critically examines fundamental conceptual issues in standard cosmological models, highlighting paradoxes related to energy conservation, galaxy recession velocities, and the nature of gravity.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of key paradoxes in the standard cosmological model, questioning the physical basis of space expansion and gravity's geometric description.

Findings

Violation of energy conservation in local volumes

No upper limit on galaxy recession velocities

Linear Hubble law inside inhomogeneous regions

Abstract

The space expansion physics contains several paradoxes which were clearly demonstrated by Edward Harrison (1981, 1995, 2000), who emphasized that the cooling of homogeneous hot gas (including photon gas of CBR) in the standard cosmological model based on the violation of energy conservation by the expanding space. In modern version of SCM the term "space expansion" actually means continuous creation of vacuum, something that leads to conceptual problems. Recent discussion by Francis, Barnes, James, and Lewis (2007) on the physical sense of the increasing distance to a receding galaxy without motion of the galaxy is just a particular consequence of the arising paradoxes. Here we present an analysis of the following conceptual problems of the SCM: the violation of energy conservation for local comoving volumes, the exact Newtonian form of the Friedmann equation, the absence of an upper limit on the receding velocity of galaxies which can be greater than the speed of light, and the presence of the linear Hubble law deeply inside inhomogeneous galaxy distribution. The common cause of these paradoxes is the geometrical description of gravity, where there is no a well defined concept of the energy-momentum tensor for the gravitational field, no energy quanta - gravitons, and no energy-momentum conservation for matter plus gravity because gravity is not a material field.