Redshifting Cosmic Photons in a Non-Expanding Universe

Cosmologists present clear observational evidences that stellar objects like stars and galaxies do carry out pronounced proper motions, and the question may be raising how these peculiar motions might evolve in time. In this article we study these peculiar motions of single objects, independent whether of microscopic or macroscopic nature, embedded in a globally homogeneous, static, massive universe with inherent gravity. Aims: We show that these objects at their motions, even in a homogeneous universe around them, are permanently subject to net gravitational forces due to the fact that in a post-Newtonian relativistic treatment the sources of cosmic masses are seen under retarded positions, retarded by the time it takes to communicate via gravitons the positions of these masses to the moving object. Methods: This “aberrational” recognition of massive source points on the one hand leads to a braking power permanently decelerating the peculiar motion of any cosmic object, on the other hand it also effects the wave lengths of all photons freely propagating through cosmic space under the action of cosmic gravity. Photons, even in a static homogeneous universe, undergo a permanent red-shifting, since working permanently against a net gravitational force from the direction opposite to the photon’s propagation direction. Results: We do show that the observationally confirmed redshifts of photons from distant galaxies under the new auspices appear as a pure measure of the distance which the photons passed from its galactic emitter to us. In this view redshifts have nothing to do with the Hubble dynamics of the universe and its emitters. Since, however, the existence of Hubble-induced redshifts cannot be excluded, we also look into a combination of both, gravitationally induced redshifts zg and Hubble-induced redshifts zH. We show that gravitationally induced redshifts zg of course also appear in an expanding universe, and it can be demonstrated that for instance in a “coasting universe” with a constant expansion rate R˙ and with R α t both these redshifts zg and zH would lead to similar results.

‘A Petty World of Myself’: Intimacy and Erotic Distance in Endymion

Chapter 3 analyses Lyly’s Endymion, whose eponymous hero forges an erotic connection with the moon across the vast expanse of the night sky. Endymion’s investment in Cynthia’s strangest and most distant incarnation grants him access to a form of intimacy that emerges from erotic distance. To theorize the attachment one can form with a majestic, vast, present-but-distant love object such as Cynthia, this chapter turns to Gaston Bachelard’s work on “intimate immensity,” a special mode of daydreaming in which the dreamer forms a powerful bond with an immense, mysterious, often cosmic, object of contemplation. Although such a relation requires a vast distance between the dreamer and the immense phenomenon he contemplates, Endymion’s metaphors of permeability activate a shared, mutual, and profoundly intimate erotic relation with Cynthia.