Don,

You apparently posted this in response to my request to move the discussion away from my blog entry on dark energy.

So that means I probably owe you at least one comment. By posting here, you open your theory up to challenges, which I hope you will take in the spirit of scientific inquiry.

I will repeat my last comment and then follow with further questions. Frankly, I don't think you addressed most of my questions at all, and the one you did address raises more questions. I'm afraid you need to go beyond your "Mind of Man" book and respond directly to these questions in order for your theory to be at all credible.

Here goes:

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You seem to be saying that the universe has a boundary which has the property of attracting everything inside of it. That attraction causes the accelerating rate of expansion.

This assumption leads to two major questions and some lesser ones.

First, there is the question of a privileged frame of reference. If the boundary is finite, it has a definite center. That creates a privileged frame of reference in violation of one of the cardinal principles of relativity. Furthermore, if the boundary is not spherical, then it also leads to a privileged direction in space, namely its longest axis.

No astronomical or physical measurements have ever shown that such a center exists. It would, for instance, show up as an anisotropy in the red shift between galaxies on our side of the center of the universe and galaxies on the opposite side.

So the first challenge to your theory is to propose a way to find the center of the finite universe and its principal axis if it is non-spherical. All measurements to date support the idea that the universe has no center and no axis. At this point, all the evidence supports the conventional relativistic view.

An aspect of your proposal that you have not discussed are boundary effects. What happens when a particle or quantum of energy reaches that boundary?

We already know by red-shift measurements that the most distant galaxies are moving away from us at large fractions of the speed of light. Do they simply disappear when they reach the edge? If so, what happens to the law of conservation of mass/energy?

Even if the boundary is too far away for us to detect it directly, the boundary conditions would surely produce some effects inside the universe. What observations do you suggest so that we can detect those boundary effects?

Another point that needs to be addressed--it's really a consequence of both the apparent absence of both a center and boundary effects: the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. That is plenty of time for the outer edge to have accumulated a lot of mass while the region nearest the center to have been depopulated. Yet as far as we can tell, the distribution of mass in the universe appears to be quite uniform. (The same kinds of galactic sheets with the same densities everywhere.)

Finally, there is the question of the mathematical nature of the boundary force you describe. It can't follow an inverse square law in a static universe, as an anonymous poster pointed out. So let's flesh out your theory with some details. What force do we feel from the boundary here on Earth, and how will it change as we accelerate closer to the edge? What observable effects will that produce, and why haven't we observed them?

That's quite enough questions for you to address.

I suggest you start with the issue of the center and the boundary effects in a new posting in your own blog.

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The only point your latest excerpt from your book touches on is what happens to the matter when it reaches the edge, and it is very confusing:

All the matter and energy that strike the boundary are absorbed. At the same time new massless matter is created to replace the absorbed matter. The energy that was absorbed at the boundary becomes the mass/gravity/energy of the matter as it accelerates toward the boundary.

So besides a point-by-point answer to my original questions, I am looking for answers to the following as well:

Q1:
Where does that "new massless matter" appear, and how can it appear immediately when the absorption event took place tens of billions of light years away? And if the new matter is massless, it must be traveling at the speed of light, right? And what does "mass/gravity/energy of the matter" mean for massless matter?

Q2:
Have you considered the enormous amount of energy you are talking about here? A galaxy accelerates toward the outer edge steadily for tens of billions of years, which means it probably attains a speed so close to the speed of light beyond anything we can achieve for subatomic particles in the world's greatest particle accelerator. Then it is absorbed by the boundary. Poof! All that energy is gone only to reappear in some unspecified location as massless matter. Can you see why this idea doesn't seem credible?

Q3:
Newton's third law tells us that forces exist in pairs. If the boundary is attracting the galaxies outward, they must be pulling the boundary inward with an equal force. What is the boundary made of that it can exert a "Super Force," and how can it withstand the Super Force that the accelerating galaxies exert on it? Again, the idea of Super Force makes little sense when viewed from this perspective. If the boundary has no physical substance, then the whole theory you are citing violates Newton's third law.

Q4:
This is actually a repeat of one of my previous questions, but it also relates to Q3. We need to understand the character of Super Force. All the other forces other than gravity--electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces--are mediated by an exchange of gauge bosons. Gravity may also be mediated by gravitons. Each force interacts with a certain property of the fundamental particles (quarks and leptons). Gravity interacts with mass, electromagnetism with electric charge and spin, strong force with the "color" and flavor" of quarks, and the weak force with leptons. What property of matter is involved with this Super Force.

As you can see, I don't think you have proposed anything credible here. It seems to violate Newton's Laws as well as the fundamental notion of relativity that there is no privileged inertial frame of reference.

Furthermore, you have offered no evidence to support your theory, while relativity is supported by an enormous body of experiments and observations. Relativity even offers a straightforward explanation of the apparent acceleration of the expansion of the universe, namely the Cosmological Constant.

I can't take any more time with this, but perhaps others will pick up on it if you respond to this critique.

Note that a lack of further response is more likely due to a continued lack of credibility of the theory rather than a concurrence with it.

Fred Bortz -- Science and technology books for young readers (www.fredbortz.com) and Science book reviews (www.scienceshelf.com)