Time Moves Backward (Relative to Near-Earth Telescopes) for Receding Galaxies

摘要

In the time r/c that it takes high-z light from a receding galaxy to travel to a near-Earth telescope from a distance ofr, the galaxy will have had billions of years to travel at a relativistic speed to a distance r' much farther from Earth than its distance r " r' when the light was emitted (because gravity is not reducing the rate of cosmic expansion). Once the light has been detected from distance r, and Earth has moved far into the future over r'/c time, the galactic light emitted from that more distant position r' can be detected near Earth and will show the galaxy much farther in the past due to the greater light travel time r'/c " r/c, and not just because recent events are continually being added to the past. A quantified example is given to illustrate the general principle: As a cosmic observer moves into the future by continuing to detect light from receding galaxies, the galaxies are moving increasingly into the past, approaching the initial state of the cosmos z = oo as a limit. This contradicts the fundamental postulate of the big-bang theory that all constituents of the cosmos move together from past to future along the same timeline, and that time reversal can be invoked to imply a dense, collapsed singularity as the initial state. Instead, we find that the initial state ofz = oo where time begins and space ends is approached asymptotically as the speed of receding galaxies asymptotically approaches the vacuum speed c of light.