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 Selected papers
astrophysics, cosmology, general physics

Domingos Soares

Physics Department
Federal University of Minas Gerais
Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil

December 6, 2021
 Dados Internacionais de Catalogação na Publicação (CIP)
(Câmara Brasileira do Livro, SP, Brasil)

Soares, Domingos
Selected papers [livro eletrônico] : astrophysics,
cosmology, general physics / Domingos Soares. --
Belo Horizonte, MG : Ed. do Autor, 2021.
PDF

ISBN 978-65-00-36139-1

1. Artigos - Coletâneas 2. Astrofísica

3. Cosmologia 4. Física I. Título.

21-96047 CDD-500.2
Índices para catálogo sistemático:

1. Ciências físicas 500.2

Eliete Marques da Silva - Bibliotecária - CRB-8/9380

Contents

Preface i

I Arthur Eddington 1
1 Eddington versus Chandrasekhar 3
1.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.2 White dwarfs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.2.1 Degenerate matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Chandrasekhar limit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1.4 Eddington and the horror to the collapse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
1.5 Final comments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

2 Eddington’s eclipse 11
2.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.2 Arthur Eddington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.3 The Eddington eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.4 Similar cases in modern science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
2.5 Final remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3 Father Lemaı̂tre 17
3.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.2 Father Lemaı̂tre and the Royal Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
3.3 Charles Darwin and Hubble’s law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
3.4 The role of al-Khwarizmi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

II Relativistic blunders 23
4 Are black holes real? 25
4.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
4.2 Schwarzschild’s metric and the definition of a black hole . . . . . 26
4.3 Gravity of a homogeneous sphere . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
4.4 The answer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4.5 Additional remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
5 Object of Gravitational Extreme 31
5.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
5.2 Schwarzschild’s singularity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
5.3 Object of Gravitational Extreme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
5.4 Final remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35

6 Science digression 37
6.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
6.2 Pearls of Science Digression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.2.1 Wormholes and time machines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.2.2 Black holes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
6.3 Kip Thorne speaks up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
6.4 Final remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

7 Einsteinian blunders 47
7.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
7.2 The cosmological constant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
7.3 The 1919 solar eclipse . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
7.4 Einstein meets Hubble . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
7.5 Concluding remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51

III Life in the universe 53

8 Extraterrestrial Intelligence 55

9 Death and life in the Moon 61

10 On Rare Earth 63

11 The Aleph Cosmological Principle 65

11.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
11.2 The E-Life world principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
11.3 A hypothetical X-Life world principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
11.4 Aleph and Copernicus principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
11.5 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

12 An anthropic universe? 69

13 Time is life 71
13.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
13.2 Time is life: a principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
13.3 Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
IV Various subjects 75
14 Falls on the Moon 77

15 Tests of the MBR 81

15.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
15.2 The magnetic bottle scenario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
15.3 Observational tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
15.3.1 Non earthly MBR probe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
15.3.2 MBR anisotropy time variation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
15.3.3 Planetary thermal glow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
15.4 Concluding remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85

16 Sandage versus Hubble 87

16.1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
16.2 The Tolman effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
16.3 Sandage and collaborators’ inconsistencies . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
16.4 Concluding remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
16.4.1 The contemporaneity of the doubt . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
16.4.2 Sandage’s style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
16.4.3 Last . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
16.4.4 But not least . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

Bibliography 97
Preface

This selection contains articles that I wrote during the first two decades of
the 21st century. Its subjects are astrophysics, cosmology and general physics,
distributed in four parts. Part I is my Eddington trilogy on astrophysics and
cosmology. Part II discusses the inconsistencies I see in Einstein’s realm of
relativity and physics. The third part is about the general issue of life in the
universe. I conclude, in part IV, with three articles on various subjects, namely,
general physics, speculative cosmology and the still very current question about
the reality of the expanding universe.
There are materials for all tastes and levels of education, but they are in-
tended primarily for readers in the physical sciences.
Most of the articles were written when I lectured relativistic cosmology at
the undergraduate physics course of the Physics Department at the Federal
University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil, during the period of
2001 to 2010. I would like to thank my students of all semesters, during the
10 years I dedicated to the course, for their enthusiastic participation in every
activities and for the encouragement they gave me, which led to the compilation
of this selecttion of papers.
I am also grateful to Prof. Reynier Peletier of the Kapteyn Astronomical
Institute, University of Groningen, The Netherlands, for allowing me to use the
Kapteyn Institute computer, which was very helpful, especially in the prepara-
tion of several figures and diagrams that appear in some of the articles.
The cover is a painting by my wife Lu Soares entitled “Pôr-do-sol acima do
mar” (“Sunset over the sea”), for which I am very grateful. This and her other
paintings can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6l9TBeEzIKY.
All chapters of this selection appear on my personal electronic page at the
Physics Department (http://www.fisica.ufmg.br/dsoares/index-e.html)
in the sections “Topics in relativistic cosmology” and “Texts & News”.
Versions in Portuguese of some of the papers are available at http://lilith.
fisica.ufmg.br/~dsoares/cosmos/21/cosmos16.htm.

Domingos Soares

Belo Horizonte, MG, December 2021

i
ii PREFACE
 Part I

Arthur Eddington

1
Chapter 1

Eddington versus
Chandrasekhar on the
stellar fate1

1.1 Introduction
The facts that motivated the story that I am about to tell occurred in 1935,
in the United Kingdom, more specifically in England. The protagonist is the
English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944) and the “victim” of his
protagonism is the, then young, Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chan-
drasekhar (1910-1995). Eddington at that point was the most prestigious astro-
physicist of the time, having been one of the greatest responsible for the creation
of a new science, namely, the application of physical laws to the study of the
structure and evolution of stars.
Chandrasekhar, a 25 years old young man, is initiating himself in the un-
known meanders of stellar evolution. His discoveries of that year are in the core
of the Nobel Prize in physics that he would earn in 1983, together with the
American nuclear physicist William Fowler (1911-1995). But Chandrasekhar’s
path was not easy, because he, already in the beginning, stumbled upon Ed-
dington’s scientific prejudices, who was the herald of what could or could not
be true in scientific developments in his field of research. Some authors even
state that his castrating actions with respect to Chandrasekhar and the appli-
cations that he undertook of the new scientific ideas of the period — Quantum
Mechanics (QM) and the Special Relativity Theory (SRT) — may have delayed
the development of the studies in stellar evolution for more than 20 years.
Let us know then some details of this interesting and exciting story. In
section 1.2, I present the object responsible for Eddington’s almost personal
reaction, that is, the white dwarf star. I discuss also in this section the cu-
1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334973879

3
4 CHAPTER 1. EDDINGTON VERSUS CHANDRASEKHAR

rious concept of “degenerate matter”. Section 1.3 is dedicated to the famous

“Chandrasekhar limit”, that so much repulsiveness caused to the Englishman.
The scene is ready for the presentation of yet another manifestation of scien-
tific autocracy by Arthur Eddington, which is done in section 1.4. I show some
additional comments in section 1.5.

1.2 White dwarfs

The evolution of a star is marked by the counterpoint between two enormous
forces. One, gravitational, resulting from the star own weigh, that impels it to
collapse. Another, caused by the pressure existing in the stellar interior, that
opposes itself to the gravitational collapse. The star is stable when there is
equilibrium between these two forces. When it is broken, the star fate may be
characterized by a violent implosion or by a gradual and non violent change in
the stellar structure.
According to the Chinese American educator and astrophysicist Frank Shu,
the possible final stages of the evolution (of the “life”) of a star are [1, p. 125]:
1. Nothing. The star explodes — implodes — and, if the final explosion
is energetic enough, nothing is left from the original object. The stellar
material spreads to the interstellar medium enriching it with new chemical
elements synthesized during the final explosion.
2. A dwarf star of degenerate matter, which is the central core of a very
old star, whose initial mass is less than ≈ 10 M (solar mass). Most of
the stellar mass is expelled during the pre-dwarf stages. The dwarf star
is very bright and because of that is called a white dwarf. As time
passes by, and the consequent loss of energy, the white dwarf eventually
cools and becomes dark. The stability of the white dwarf comes from the
quantum behavior of the electrons that exist in its interior. A typical white
dwarf has mass slightly less than the mass of the Sun and diameter
comparable to Earth’s diameter (≈ 10,000 km). That is, extremely dense
material.
3. A neutron star, also of degenerate matter, that is left from the implosion
of a star of very large mass, between 10 and 30 M . The stability of the
neutron star comes in part from the quantum behavior of the neutrons that
exist in its interior. A typical neutron star has mass slightly greater
than the mass of the Sun and diameter of the order of 10 km, that
is, a size comparable to the distance of a 2-hour brisk walk. The neutron
star material is about 1 billion times denser than the dwarf star material.
4. A black hole. In fact, if the stellar mass is greater than ≈ 30 M , the
fate of the star is not yet fully understood, because for that one needs a
quantum gravity theory, which does not exist. The unknown object
is called “black hole”, in the orthodox scientific literature, as Shu does, and
much educated speculation is done around it. General Relativity Theory is
1.2. WHITE DWARFS 5

able to describe such an object to a well-defined limit diameter, which is 3

km for a final object of 1 M . The mean density inside a sphere with that
diameter and with that mass is about 50 times greater than the density
of neutron star with the same mass (further details in [2, 3]).

1.2.1 Degenerate matter

A WD star is extremely compact because the compression due to its auto-
gravitation is enormous. Since the beginning it was realized that the pressure
of a normal gas is completely inadequate to support the pressure exerted by the
WD gravity. Even adding the electromagnetic radiation pressure of the stellar
interior, it is impossible to get a star in equilibrium. Quantitatively, this is very
easy to show (see [4, p. 583]) and, consequently, the very existence of the WDs
constituted a real mystery.
The answer to this problem would be in the then recent theory of quantum
mechanics and was discovered in 1926 by the British physicist R. H. Fowler
(1889-1944). He applied the new idea of the Pauli exclusion principle to the
electrons in the interior of a WD, which form a gas soaked in a sea of heavy ions.
He discovered the new quantum phenomenon of the “degenerate electron
pressure” [4, p. 584] [5, p. 141]. Fowler discovered, in reality, a new inhabitant
of the material world, the “degenerate matter”.
In the advanced stages of its evolution, the star runs out of its nuclear fuel
and starts to lose mass from its external part and collapses until reaching very
high densities, when then the matter that is important for the star equilibrium
is now degenerate. To understand what degenerate matter is, we need to talk
a bit about the fundamental particles in nature. They can be separated in two
classes, bosons and fermions, according to their spins, which are quantum
properties related to the intrinsic rotations of the particles.
Boson spins are given by whole numbers — the photon is a boson — and
fermion spins by semi-integers, 1/2, 3/2, etc. Quarks, electrons, protons, neu-
trons are examples of fermions. We ourselves and almost everything around us
are made of fermions. Bosons and fermions have very distinct quantum behav-
iors, especially in their mutual interactions. The roots of this difference are in
quantum statistics, a new form of statistics that describes the behavior of
particles at the microscopic level (see [1, p. 50]). For example, the great differ-
ence between bosons and fermions that concern us appears in the application of
the Pauli exclusion principle, that states: “Two identical fermions cannot
occupy the same quantum state”.
Degenerate matter is formed by a very high-density fermion gas,
in which the interaction between its constituent particles is predom-
inantly the quantum repulsion originated in the impossibility of the
particles to occupy the same quantum state. The fermions — electrons in
WDs and neutrons in neutron stars — are so compressed that they exert a very
high pressure, opposed to the gravitational collapse. The interaction between
the degenerate electrons is totally due to the Pauli exclusion principle whilst
the interaction between the neutrons is partially due to the exclusion principle
6 CHAPTER 1. EDDINGTON VERSUS CHANDRASEKHAR

and partially due to repulsion of the nuclear force that exists between them
(the nuclear force becomes repulsive at the distances that occur in the core of
neutron stars).
Electrons are the fermions of interest here. They are mixed with positive ions
and form a very dense fluid in WD stars, i.e., a degenerate “gas”. Such a gas does
not obey the classical laws according to which its pressure is proportional to the
temperature and density. The equation of state of a normal gas, non-degenerate,
is given by pV = nRT or p = ρ(R/M)T, where p is the gas pressure, V its
volume, M its molecular mass and ρ its density. Now, the equation of state of
a degenerate gas is given by p ∝ ργ , where γ = 5/3 for a non-relativistic gas
and γ = 4/3 for a relativistic gas. The degenerate electronic gas is relativistic
when the gravitational compression is very high (much greater than the non-
relativistic case), causing the electrons to have relativistic speeds, i.e., near the
speed of light. As we shall see, this will occur for WDs with extreme masses.
One consequence of the equation of state of degenerate matter is a peculiar
behavior, namely, the gas volume is inversely proportional to the mass,
that is, MAB × VAB = constant [4, p. 589] [1, p. 127]. This is illustrated in
figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1: Astrophysicist Frank Shu’s chocolate cake has a volume twice as
large when its mass is doubled. Whereas the WD behaves itself in a totally
different manner, because its volume is reduced to half when its mass is doubled.
This is so because the degenerate gas repulsion must increase in order to support
the larger mass, which only occurs if the degenerate electrons get closer (figure
from [1, p. 127]).

To understand this we have to remember that the outward pressure, by

the degenerate electrons, is described by two quantum principles. First, the
Pauli exclusion principle, that guarantees the individuality of the electrons
1.3. CHANDRASEKHAR LIMIT 7

during the compression of the WD. Secondly, the Heisenberg uncertainty

principle, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously the
position and the linear momentum of any particle with infinity pre-
cision. Quantitatively, it is expressed as ∆px × ∆ x > h, where ∆px is the
uncertainty in the knowledge of the linear momentum of the particle — ulti-
mately of its velocity —, ∆x is the uncertainty in its position and h is the
Planck constant. The WD with the larger mass collapses and makes ∆x to
decrease tremendously, because the electrons are forced to very small regions
and then ∆px increases enormously — consequently, the electron speeds —,
giving rise to the enormous pressures that oppose the gravitational compression
of the WD (cf. [1, p. 126]). Therefore, the star with the larger mass, shown
in figure 1.1, has to have a smaller volume to support the larger compression
of gravitational origin. A final note: the relation MAB × VAB = constant is
valid for a non-relativistic degenerate gas; for the relativistic gas, the volume
decreases more than the predicted by this relation [4, p. 589].
We shall see now how the above considerations led Chandrasekhar to discover
that the WDs could only exist if their masses were lower than a given maximum
value.

1.3 Chandrasekhar limit

Fowler’s article treating the subject of degenerate matter, entitled On Dense
Matter , was published on the December 10, 1926 edition of the British scientific
journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. It was in this article
that Chandrasekhar became aware of Eddington’s book The Internal Constitu-
tion of the Stars, where there was a detailed description of the above-mentioned
WD mystery (cf. [5, p. 141]).
Chandrasekhar understood that the solution of the mystery was in Fowler’s
new ideas. The stellar internal pressures could not, in these extreme cases, be
described by the pressure originated from the gas thermal energy, but by the new
quantum phenomenon of the degenerate electron motions [5, p. 145]. But
he went beyond and here Chandrasekhar’s fundamental contribution appears.
He realized that the electrons could reach speeds larger than the speed of light
for a sufficiently massive WD. What would be impossible, as prescribed by SRT.
Then, by including this relativistic effect in the description of the degenerate
electrons, he concluded that there ought to exist a mass limit for a WD, in such
a way as to avoid the speeds larger than the speed of light. Therefore, for masses
larger than this limit, the relativistic degenerate electron gas could not support
the gravitational collapse of the star. Figure 1.2 illustrates Chandrasekhar’s
discovery. As seen above, the equations of state of degenerate electrons are:
• non-relativistic electrons: p ∝ ρ5/3
• relativistic electrons: p ∝ ρ4/3
These equations can be expressed in another form, namely, the pressure ver-
sus the external circumference of the star, being the latter related to its
8 CHAPTER 1. EDDINGTON VERSUS CHANDRASEKHAR

density. This is the way the equations of state of the degenerate electrons appear
in figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Figure presented by Kip Thorne ([5, p. 156]) to explain the origin of
the Chandrasekhar limit. The intersections of the dashed lines with the solid
curves of the equations of state show the WDs equilibrium points. For masses
above approximately 1.4 M there is no point of intersection and gravity will
always win the degenerate electron pressure, leading to the final collapse of the
star. Notice that the rate of increase of gravity (dashed lines) is analogous to
the rate of increase of resistance to compression with exponent 4/3.

Chandrasekhar limit is 1.43 M . The white dwarfs and the degenerate

and non-degenerate gases are presented in detail in chapter 15 of ref. [4], entitled
The Degenerate Remnants of Stars.

1.4 Eddington and the horror to the collapse

As soon as he became aware of the ideas of the young Chandrasekhar, Eddington
expressed horror to what could happen to a star whose mass exceeded the limit
found by the Indian astrophysicist. From the beginning he denied the existence
of a limit, because he believed that nature would find its way to avoid the final
collapse.
Indeed, for stars with mass larger than 1.43 M , but smaller than about 30
M , nature solved the problem. The collapse is avoided by the forces of the
Pauli exclusion principle of the neutron degenerate gas and by the nuclear force
between neutrons. And for stars with initial mass larger than 30 M ? Here it
seems that Eddington was right, nature must find a way. but we certainly
still don’t know what it is. Unless we wish to follow Professor Frank Shu
1.5. FINAL COMMENTS 9

— beginning of section 1.2 — and adopt the science digression object that goes
by the name of black hole (cf. [6]).
Eddington had his own digression ant presented it not only to Chandrasekhar
but publicly in a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society on January 11,
1935. In this meeting, first Chandrasekhar talked about his derivation of the
mass limit and thereafter Eddington presented a talk under the title “Relativistic
Degeneracy” [5, p. 156], in which he stated that the union between QM and SRT
made by Chandrasekhar was not licit, in his own words, “I do not regard the
offspring of such a union as born in lawful wedlock”. And more, “I feel
satisfied myself that if the meshing is made correctly, the relativity
corrections are compensated, so that we come back to the ‘ordinary’
formula”, that is, the formula of the equation of state with the exponent
5/3 for all densities, thereby avoiding the establishment of a mass limit. And
consequently avoiding the unknown physical problem for masses larger than the
limit [5, p. 160]. The situation corresponds, in figure 1.2, to eliminating the
curve with exponent 4/3 and considering the curve with 5/3 extrapolated to the
region of high density (correspondent to small circumference).
The pressure against Chandrasekhar’s ideas was tangible, because Edding-
ton was, at the time, the greatest British astronomical personality. Then, if
Eddington thought that the Chandrasekhar ideas were wrong, the widespread
thinking was that clearly they should be wrong.
Chandrasekhar, in his despair, tried to get the opinion of the Danish physicist
Niels Bohr (1885-1962), one of the fathers of QM. Through an intermediary, he
got to hear what he wished: Bohr believed that Eddington was wrong and that
he should go on with his work (cf. [5, p. 162]). And by the end of the 1930s, even
with Eddington’s persistence, the majority of the astronomers were convinced
of the correctness of Chandrasekhar’s analysis in the problem of the WDs, in
spite of not speaking out publicly their believes.

1.5 Final comments

In order to appreciate the importance of the theoretical discoveries of Chan-
drasekhar, in the mid-1930s, it is necessary to reaffirm the extraordinary sci-
entific influence of the other character in this story. Arthur Eddington was
the most important astrophysicist in the beginning of the 20th century. His
influence was felt in several aspects of theoretical physics, especially in the re-
cent General Relativity Theory of Albert Einstein (1879-1955) and in the, also
young, science of cosmology (see [7] for a discussion of his influence in the first
case and [8] for the latter).
In stellar astrophysics, Eddington was the first astronomer to put forward
detailed theoretical models to study the internal structure of stars, which were
able to reproduce their observed properties, such as temperature and physical
dimensions (mass, radius, etc.). In 1926, he published one of his most famous
books, The Internal Constitution of the Stars, that would become the most im-
portant reference source for the researchers of stellar structure. And that was
10 CHAPTER 1. EDDINGTON VERSUS CHANDRASEKHAR

what attracted the young Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.

Of such a magnitude was the influence of Eddington in the astronomical com-
munity of the time, that in 1939 Chandrasekhar gave up working with the WDs
and turned his attention to other subjects. He would return to the WDs only
25 years later.
The American physicist Kip Thorne is a passionate champion and active the-
orist of the concept of black hole. In his book, mentioned previously [5], he tells
the Eddington-Chandrasekhar tragedy in a very vivid and informative manner.
His aim is to suggest that Eddington abhorred the possibility of the ultimate
gravitational collapse and the consequent formation of an extreme object like
the one represented by the black hole. One problem with such an interpretation
is that, in the mid-1930s, the concept of black hole was not solid yet. Another
contribution of the same suit: in 2005, a competent British scholar in history
and philosophy of science treated at great length the dispute between the two
astronomers [9]. The title of his book could not be more revealing, namely,
“Empire of the Stars: Obsession, Friendship, and Betrayal in the Quest for
Black Holes”. The correct view, however, seems to be the one totally opposite
to that of both scholars, that is, that the question of the black hole had not any
role in the scientific dispute between Eddington and Chandrasekhar. The real
dispute was between the novel scientific thinking, that tried to impose itself,
and the retrograde scientific approach, that struggled to preserve itself, even at
the cost of using authority, which is unacceptable in the context of the truthful
science.
The end of the story is known: Chandrasekhar was right and the Nobel prize
in physics that he would earn in 1983 was justified precisely by his original work
about the fate of the WDs. The citation for his prize was “for his theoretical
studies of the physical processes of importance to the structure and
evolution of the stars”.
Chapter 2

The 1919 Eddington

eclipse1

2.1 Introduction

Since ancient times authority has been a leading driving force in the predom-
inance of scientific ideas. Aristotelian thinking dominated western science for
centuries, most of the period based solely on the authority of the master, a
behavior summarized in the dictum “Magister dixit” or “The master has said
it”, neglecting further discussion on the matter. Things haven’t changed, but
now with additional flavors.
Modern science is both authority-driven and — a novelty — money-driving.
The prototype of the authority-driven type is the 1919 astronomical missions to
observe a solar eclipse and designed to “prove” that General Relativity Theory
(GRT) was right in a particular prediction, namely, the amount of light deflec-
tion by a massive body. The final aim was to prove the supremacy of Einstein’s
over Newton’s theory of gravity. Its main character is the Englishman Arthur
Stanley Eddington (1882-1944), who is presented in more detail in section 2.2.
Eddington’s behavior resonates in a variety of ways over time and still in modern
days.
Although not costly as modern science experimental projects, the 1919 solar
eclipse — the Eddington eclipse — mission could also be considered extremely
heavy in financial expenditure, in view of the state of the world in the late
1910s, just freed from a bloody worldwide war. It is presented in section 2.3.
Unquestionable money-driven projects are described in section 2.4. Final re-
marks appear in section 2.5.

1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332849428

11
12 CHAPTER 2. EDDINGTON’S ECLIPSE

2.2 Arthur Eddington

The astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Arthur Eddington was a “rising
star” in the academic world of Cambridge already at the age of 25: he devel-
oped a new statistical astronomical method and for that he won, in 1907, a
prestigious prize awarded annually at the University of Cambridge, the Smith’s
Prize. Shortly after, in 1914, Eddington was named the director of the Cam-
bridge Observatory and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at that same year.
Soon he became an expert in GRT, published in its final form in 1916. In
1918 he wrote and published the “Report on the relativity theory of gravitation”
[10], the first account of GRT to the English speaking world. The authority of
Eddington regarding GRT was publicly acknowledged. The following anecdote
is frequently told when exhalting Eddington’s expertise in the matter. I quote
Wikipedia [11] (see also [12, p. 353]):
(. . . ) He was an early advocate of Einstein’s General Relativity, and an
interesting anecdote well illustrates his humor and personal intellectual in-
vestment: Ludwik Silberstein, a physicist who thought of himself as an ex-
pert on relativity, approached Eddington at the Royal Society’s (6 Novem-
ber) 1919 meeting where he had defended Einstein’s Relativity with his
Brazil-Principe Solar Eclipse calculations with some degree of skepticism,
and ruefully charged Arthur as one who claimed to be one of three men
who actually understood the theory (Silberstein, of course, was including
himself and Einstein as the other). When Eddington refrained from re-
plying, he insisted Arthur not be “so shy”, whereupon Eddington replied,
“Oh, no! I was wondering who the third one might be!”.
The solar eclipse of 1919 would offer an excellent opportunity for an observa-
tional test of one of the predictions derived from GRT, namely, the bending
of stellar light at grazing incidence on the sun [13]. It can be genuinely called
the Eddington eclipse, mostly because it was the driving force of reassuring Ed-
dington’s preconceptions relative to GRT. Irrespective of the outcome of the
observations, Eddington was sure that the eclipse would prove GRT prediction
right and it really did it, not without his and collaborators biased analysis of
the data. According to [12, p. 353]:
Eddington was enthralled by general relativity as soon as he was exposed to
it by de Sitter, and he rapidly became Einstein’s self-appointed evangelist
in Britain. He once admitted that if it had been up to him, he wouldn’t
have bothered making an eclipse expedition because he was already certain
that the theory had to be right.
Eddington repeat here a well-known behavior of Einstein himself, which is sum-
marized in [14].

2.3 The Eddington eclipse

One of the most famous predictions of GRT was the gravitational deflection
of light. The proof of this effect could, in principle, be done during a solar
2.3. THE EDDINGTON ECLIPSE 13

eclipse. Background stars around the solar disc could be used as light sources
for an observational experiment. GRT predicts that, at grazing incidence on
the solar limb, there is a deflection of 1.75 arc second in the trajectory of a
light ray. In other words, the position of a star observed close to the solar disc,
during the eclipse, should be displaced of this angle, when observed without
the gravitational influence of the Sun on the light, i.e., when observed a few
months later. There is also a purely Newtonian prediction for the effect, which
is precisely one half of the relativistic prediction (more details in [15, p. 188]
and a summary in [13]).
There are two pertinent questions, namely:
1. Is there a gravitational deflection of light?
2. If so, what is the better theoretical description of the phenomenon, the
Einsteinian, the Newtonian or a third alternative?
In 1919, Frank Dyson (1868-1939), then director of the Cambridge Observatory
and Astronomer Royal, with the aid and counseling of Arthur Eddington, or-
ganized two scientific expeditions for the observation of the solar eclipse that
occurred 100 years ago on May 29th. Astronomers Andrew Crommelin (1865-
1939) and Charles R. Davidson (1875-1970) head one of the expeditions, to the
city of Sobral, in Northeast Brazil, and Eddington and Edwin T. Cottingham
(1869-1940) head the other one, to Principe island, located on the western coast
of Africa.
A typical non critical account of both expeditions is given in chapter 16 of
the most renowned biography of Einstein, that of Abraham Pais [16]; ref. [17]
is a recent one, with the same bias. References [12, chs. 14 and 25] and [18]
present critical historical accounts of the expeditions, from which I extracted and
enumerated below the main technical issues that precluded a definite answer,
at the occasion, to question 2 above.
1. A major problem — immediately noticed — for the comparison between
the observations during the eclipse, at daytime, and out, at nighttime, was
variations in room temperature. These alter the structure of the instru-
ments and, therefore, alter the focuses of the telescopes. The temperature
has also influence in the conditions of the atmospheric turbulence. In to-
tal, there were twelve different kinds of factors that should be accounted
for, which implied in the need of observations of a minimum of six pairs
of stars, in and out of the eclipse ([12, p. 356]).
2. There were two instruments in Sobral, an astrographic camera, from
Greenwich, and an Irish telescope, with a 10-cm lens. In the Principe is-
land, there was another astrograph. Bad weather predominated at Principe,
but Eddington insisted in taking photographs and obtained two plates in
which there were only five stars, albeit with blurred images. Even so,
Eddington, using additional assumptions and approximations, was able to
obtain a result for the deflection of light, namely, 1.61 arc second. In So-
bral, the meteorological conditions were better. The Irish telescope gave
14 CHAPTER 2. EDDINGTON’S ECLIPSE

the best results: seven plates with seven stars. Eddington’s analysis re-
sulted in 1.98 ± 0.12 arc second. The astrograph recorded more stars,
but the temperature effect on the instrument was drastic. The result was
0.86 arc second — the Newtonian prediction —, nonetheless, with a large
uncertainty. Which would be the correct answer? Eddington decided to
neglect the Sobral astrograph result and simply took the mean of the other
results. Precisely 1.75 arc second, the relativistic prediction ([12, p. 359]).

3. The local seeing, i.e., the blurring of a stellar image due to atmospheric
turbulence, in both sites, would avoid measuring details smaller than 2–3
arc seconds. At that time it was already clear that only in exceptional
atmospheric conditions a resolution of the order of 1 arcsec could be ob-
tained. Nowadays it is recognized that by means of active and adaptive
optics techniques, it is possible to reduce seeing to less than 0.5 arcsec,
but still needing exceptional conditions of observation. Such a problem
increases during afternoons, due to the heat accumulated in the ground.
The observations in Sobral were realized close to noon, and in the Principe
island around 2 pm. The seeing for the Irish telescope could never be less
than 1.25 arcsec, which would invalidate the quoted accuracy of 0.01 arcsec
for some of the results ([18, app. II]).

4. During the stay in Sobral, the temperature varied from 24 ◦ C, at night, to

36 ◦ C, in the afternoon. Effects on the Sobral astrograph were especially
disastrous. Its focus seemed to have changed, from the night of May 27th
until the beginning of the eclipse, in the early 29th afternoon. When the
team returned to Sobral, in July, to record the comparison plates, it was
realized that the instrument was back to the previous focus ([18, app. II]).

5. Marmet and Couture [18] also pointed out that the small number of ob-
served stars was an impediment for the correct interpretation of the data.

6. From the theoretical standpoint, it is reported that the Polish-American

physicist Ludwik Silberstein (1872-1948) indicated, in a meeting of the
Royal Astronomical Society, that the displacements of the stars were not
radial, with respect to the Sun center, as predicted by GRT, but sometimes
deviated from that direction by up to 35◦ .

It is worthwhile mentioning at this point that none of later solar eclipse missions
in 1922, 1929, 1936, 1947 and 1952 yielded conclusive results about the amount
of light deflection (Newtonian or Einsteinian, cf. [19, p. 68]). The GRT result
has been indeed confirmed later by observations in the radio wavelength range.
Only recently, from observations of the total solar eclipse on August 21st, 2017,
it was claimed that the 1.75 arc second bending was observed in visible light,
with an accuracy of 3% (cf. [20]). It is an instructive exercise to compare the
extreme rigor, the modern techniques and instrumentations used in ref. [20]
with the rough experiment undertaken in the Dyson-Eddington missions. The
impossibility of a conclusive result therein will clearly emerge.
2.4. SIMILAR CASES IN MODERN SCIENCE 15

Nobody really knew, then, the specifics of the data reduction process realized
by Dyson in conjunction with Eddington. Marmet and Couture, Appendix C
[18] describes the praise of authority in a section of the Royal Astronomical
Society:

The results from the 1919 expedition were quickly accepted by the scientific
community. When preliminary results were announced, Joseph Thomson
(from the Chair) said: “It is difficult for the audience to weigh fully the
meaning of the figures that have been put before us, but the Astronomer
Royal [Dyson] and Prof. Eddington have studied the material carefully,
and they regard the evidence as decisively in favor of the larger value for
the displacement.”

2.4 Similar cases in modern science

In modern science the “authority” of a person is substituted by the “authority”
of, first, a group of scientists that lend their joint support to a particular scien-
tific view, and, second, the enormous financial resources applied to an — often
unique in many aspects — experiment. In the latter case, preliminary results
are heralded as great discoveries in order to justify the huge investments made
(such as LHC, LIGO-Virgo, EHT, etc.).
The prevalence of the Standard Model of Cosmology — with the ad hoc
components of dark matter and dark energy — is an example of the first case.
The “detection” of the Higgs boson (2013), the “discovery” of gravitational
waves (2016) and the putative observed “image” of a black hole (2019) are
examples of the second case. All of these are contaminated by the “Eddington
effect”, that is, by the acceptance through “authority”.
Note that the imposition by authority works particularly well for the experiment-
authority case because the experiment can only be replicated by the very ones
that claim the discovery in the first place. No checks and balances are available
whatsoever if there are not independent confirmation of the claimed event.

2.5 Final remarks

It is interesting to see than even now, a hundred years after the Eddington
eclipse, learned scholars are eager to prove that Eddington was right, the last
example being ref. [17], where one learns that both Sobral and Principe Island
photographic plates are nowhere to find, that is to say, there is no way of
reanalyzing them with modern and finer techniques. Anyhow, it the plates were
still here, an enhanced analysis would not improve the outcome, since the main
issue with the observations is the accuracy of the data acquisition procedure.
Frank Dyson, responsible for the expeditions, coordinated the analysis of
Sobral’s data; he had not been there, though, as seen in section 2.3. It has
been said (cf. [17]) that the analysis of Sobral’s data, in charge of Dyson,
and of Principe’s data, in charge of Eddington, was completely independent
16 CHAPTER 2. EDDINGTON’S ECLIPSE

of each other. That is not true, to say the least. Dyson and Eddington were
closely related in their scientific competences and preferences. Eddington was
earlier under Dyson orders and was then raising himself to high altitudes in
the British scientific community. There is a similar fallacy in modern times in
cosmology where the two groups that claim to have discovered the accelerated
expansion of the universe are said to have gotten their conclusion in a completely
independent way. That cannot be true since the expert in supernovae, crucial in
both experiments, was the same, i.e., A.V. Filippenko (cf. [21]). Hence, to make
things worse, there was, of course, detailed coordination in the data reduction
procedures of both groups, under Eddington’s guidance. The independence card
is always played when a strong point is intended in a scientific dispute, especially
those plagued by the Eddington effect.
It is worthwhile recalling that although the 1919 eclipse be always called
upon whenever Einstein’s gravity is remembered in a historical context, there
are other gravity theories that predicted the same result (cf. [15]).
Sobral and Principe were the scene of a scientific farce, directed by Edding-
ton, that perpetuated and replicated itself in other forms until today.
One can trace some of the roots of modern distrust in science in Eddington’s
fake result of the 1919 observations. Because of the many examples of Edding-
ton’s effect in early and modern science, the lay public often feels justified in
its questioning of scientists’ assertions that deal with important issues of public
life. The most clear cut example is regarding climate change; scientists are not
trustworthily considered in the issue.
Chapter 3

Father Lemaı̂tre and the

expanding universe1

3.1 Introduction
The Belgian cosmologist Father Georges Lemaı̂tre (1894-1966) is widely consid-
ered as one of the “founding fathers” of the expanding-universe paradigm.
In 1922, the Russian cosmologist Alexander Friedmann (1888-1925) put for-
ward a relativistic cosmological model that implied in the concept of an evolving
universe departing from an initial state of extremely, if not infinitely, high den-
sity — a singularity. The idea had little impact until, some years later, when
Georges Lemaı̂tre came with his investigation, independent of Friedmann, of
a relativistic universe also dynamic and that evolved from a high-density ini-
tial state, which he called Primeval Atom. The English cosmologist Edward
Harrison (1919-2007), in his Cosmology [22], on page 413, states that, because
Lemaı̂tre was a priest, some contemporary cosmologists looked at the Primeval
Atom with reservations and considered Lemaı̂tre’s theory as an amalgam of sci-
ence and religion. Such a reputation also fell over the theory that succeeded
the Primeval Atom, namely, the Hot Big-Bang theory, being one of its main
detractors the English astrophysicist and cosmologist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001).
I return now to the controversial issue of the alleged “expansion of the uni-
verse”, motivated by the reading of a fairly interesting article, by the Irishman,
from Dublin, solid-state physicist Cormac ORaifeartaigh. The article is entitled
The contribution of VM Slipher to the discovery of the expanding
universe [23], in which, on the pretext of claiming a nobler position for the
American spectroscopist Vesto Slipher (1875-1969) in the worldwide pantheon
of cosmology, ORaifeartaigh makes a general account of modern relativistic
cosmology. And, as I said, it is fairly interesting: it presents misplaced general-
izations and, to some degree, acceptable overviews.
1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
~dsoares/lemaitre/lemaitre-e.htm

17
18 CHAPTER 3. FATHER LEMAÎTRE

On page 8, in the second before last paragraph, there is a discussion about

Hubble’s law, in which ORaifeartaigh writes about the suggestions to change the
law’s name to “Hubble-Lemaı̂tre’s law” or even “Lemaı̂tre’ law”. The tale is not
new. Amongst others, the French cosmologist Jean-Pierre Luminet praised the
Belgian cosmologist in an article entitled Editorial note to “The beginning
of the world from the point of view of quantum theory” [24], in which
the author claims in the first line that “The year 1931 can undoubtedly be called
Georges Lemaı̂tre’s annus mirabilis”, and advocates in the following pages the
idea that Hubble’s law should be called “Lemaı̂tre’s law”.
Let’s recall: Lemaı̂tre published in 1927, in a Belgian scientific journal (An-
nales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles), an article, written in French, in
which he puts forward a relativist model of an expanding universe. Lemaı̂tre
makes a preliminary derivation of the constant of expansion (the future Hub-
ble constant), using observational data of velocity and distance available at the
time. Hubble would published his analysis of velocities and distances in 1929
— therefore, two years later —, where he presents his famous v×d diagram and
the derivation of the constant of expansion. In 1931, Father Lemaı̂tre’s article is
translated to English and appears in the prestigious English scientific periodical
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). In the transla-
tion, the derivation of the rate of expansion does not appear. Much speculation
was done about this — who would have censored the text with the aim of ex-
cluding the calculation? —, until it was discovered by the astronomer Mario
Livio (cf. Mystery of the missing text solved [25]) that it was Lemaı̂tre
himself that had translated his paper to English, and that himself had omitted
the passage in question.
Now, the Irishman mentions a statement of Lemaı̂tre’s, in a letter, that
accompanies the 1931 article, in which he writes that “I do not think it is
advisable to reprint the provisional discussion of radial velocities which is clearly
of no actual interest”. And many years later, in 1952, Lemaı̂tre remembers the
case, with the following assertion, that I show in French and in English:
“Naturellement, avant la découverte et l’étude des amas des neb-
uleuses, il ne pouvait être question d’établir la loi de Hubble.”

“Naturally, before the discovery and study of the clusters of nebu-

lae, it was not possible to establish Hubble’s law.”
Why was not of “actual interest” the publication of the discussion of the expan-
sion rate in MNRAS? Lemaı̂tre’s later allegation, in 1952, points to his answer:
since the existence of galaxies was not yet a fully established fact, it was not
appropriate, or relevant, the discussion of their expansion rate.
I see two problems in this answer. First, why was the discussion relevant to
the Belgian Annales but not for MNRAS? Second, the issue of the existence of
galaxies was already being discussed, in objective and scientific manners, since,
at least, 1920, when in April of that year, there occurred in the United States the
famous Great Debate. Also called “Shapley-Curtis debate”, the Great Debate
was a public discussion, very important and widely spread at the time, between
3.2. FATHER LEMAÎTRE AND THE ROYAL SOCIETY 19

the renowned astronomers Harlow Shapley (1885-1972) and Heber Curtis (1872-
1942), about the nature of the spiral nebulae, ultimately, about the size of the
universe. Curtis championed that the spiral nebulae were independent galaxies
of enormous sizes, and Shapley defended the opposing view. This debate did not
solve the question, which would only be solved by Edwin Hubble (1889-1953),
whose research about the topic was published in a sequence of three articles
about galaxies of the Local Group: NGC 6822 (Barnard’s galaxy, in 1925), M33
(Triangulum galaxy, in 1926) and M31 (Andromeda galaxy, in 1929). Such a
research is masterfully and clearly documented in Hubble’s book The Realm of
the Nebulae [26], in the chapters IV (Distances of Nebulae) and VI (The Local
Group). In other words, already in 1925, galaxies were a scientifically proved
reality (see, for example, the article about NGC 6822 in [27]).

3.2 Father Lemaı̂tre and the Royal Society

Hence, why did Lemaı̂tre avoid the controversial issue in the 1931 English ver-
sion? The answer is simple: Lemaı̂tre, so to speak, sold his soul! — which, we
should agree, does not bode well, not even for a common citizen, let alone for a
member of a religious institution.
Let us now address the nature of the sale.
The main character is the English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-
1944), whom is one of the most influential — if not the most influential — scien-
tific personalities of the time. Eddington was Hubble’s friend and admirer and
had been Lemaı̂tre’s advisor, in his initial studies of astronomy in Cambridge
during 1923 and 1924. (Then he would depart to the United States, where he
would undertake his doctorate under the orientation of Harlow Shapley at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.) Lemaı̂tre in his secular eagerness to
become a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, and knowing about the
influence that Eddington would have in this quest, avoided the conflict with
Hubble about the priority in the calculation of the “expansion rate”. Hubble
had already expressed his will to Eddington that the questions relative to the
“velocity” – distance diagram should be considered an undertaking of Mount
Wilson Observatory — in other words, of himself and of his immediate col-
laborators. (And, conceptually, indeed and in practice it was, as all historical
records show, if objectively analyzed.)
This is, therefore, the nature of the sale. Some corroborating details of
such a hypothesis are in Mario Livio’s article mentioned above. There, he
states that on May 12, 1939, Father Georges Lemaı̂tre was elected member
of the Royal Astronomical Society. And more, in 1953, he was the first to
be awarded with the Eddington Medal, of this institution, for his important
scientific contributions (“for investigations of outstanding merit in theoretical
astrophysics”, cf. Awards, Medals and Prizes of the Royal Astronomical Society
at http://www.ras.org.uk/awards-and-grants/awards).
20 CHAPTER 3. FATHER LEMAÎTRE

3.3 Charles Darwin and Hubble’s law

Let us now examine one more argument against the use of the name Lemaı̂tre
in the identification of the famous cosmology law. Father Lemaı̂tre, in a sense,
neglected the importance of the phenomenology expressed in the law and, there-
fore, must not have any credit whatsoever in its naming. Surprisingly, we can
find support for this view in a source that is distant from cosmology, namely,
in the thoughts of the great naturalist Charles Darwin (1809-1882), who, as we
shall see, would agree with me on this issue.
In an excerpt from the most important edition of his autobiography — that
annotated by his granddaughter Nora Barlow [28] —, I found a comment by
Darwin in which he discards his primacy in certain discovery in favour of those
that best expressed it. In the following text, the reference to his major work
“The Origin of Species” is made by mentioning the “Origin”. Page 102:

“Hardly any point gave me so much satisfaction when I was at work

on the Origin, as the explanation of the wide difference in many
classes between the embryo and the adult animal, and of the close
resemblance of embryos within the same class. No notice of this
point was taken, as far as I remember, in the early reviews of the
Origin, and I recollect expressing my surprise on this head in a let-
ter to Asa Gray. Within late years several reviewers have given the
whole credit of the idea to Fritz Müller and Häckel, who undoubtedly
have worked it out much more fully and in some respects more cor-
rectly than I did. I had materials for a whole chapter on the subject,
and I ought to have made my discussion longer; for it is clear
that I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in
doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit.”

(Boldfaces are mine.)

Hubble indeed impressed his readers. Father Lemaı̂tre not.

3.4 The role of al-Khwarizmi

It has already appeared another person suggesting that the law should be called
“Hubble-Lemaitre-Slipher’s law”! Look at Reasons in favor of a Hubble-
Lemaitre-Slipher’s (HLS) law in [29].
Now, if it is to put in the name of the law everybody that collaborated
for its formulation, I suggest one more, namely, “Hubble-Lemaı̂tre-Slipher-al-
Khwarizmi’s law”, because it would not be possible the formulation of the law
without the extraordinary contribution of Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi
to the fundamentals of algebra and the concept of numbers (see, for example,
https://www.famousscientists.org/muhammad-ibn-musa-al-khwarizmi).
3.4. THE ROLE OF AL-KHWARIZMI 21

Epilogue
The renaming of Hubble’s law can still be seen from another point of view. The
empirical relationship between redshift and apparent magnitude is an observa-
tional fact. This is what concerns Hubble’s work. Lemaı̂tre’s work is related to
the theoretical relationship between recessional velocity and distance (cf. [30]).
The empirical relationship is firmly established, whereas the theoretical rela-
tionship is still a hypothetical statement. The IAU motion has the inconvenient
and misleading result of equating a truly indisputable relation (Hubble’s law)
with a clearly disputable theoretical relation, since modern relativistic cosmol-
ogy strives with multiple unknowns (dark energy, dark nonbaryonic matter, dark
baryonic matter, etc.).

Acknowledgment – The epilogue resulted from message exchanges in a dis-

cussion group of A Cosmology Group, a site maintained by Louis Marmet at
the address http://cosmology.info/. I acknowledge the contributions of Eric
Lerner and Louis Marmet who have drawn my attention to the above argument.
22 CHAPTER 3. FATHER LEMAÎTRE
 Part II

Relativistic blunders

23
Chapter 4

Are black holes real?1

4.1 Introduction
In 1916, soon after the publication of the articles on General Relativity Theory
(GRT) by Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the German astronomer Karl Schwarzschild
(1873-1916) solved Einstein’s field equations for a very special case, at the same
time simple and of great experimental and observational applicabilities. It refers
to the determination of the space-time metric in the exterior of a static and
spherically symmetric mass distribution M. The Schwarzschild’s solution is a
vacuum solution, outside the object with mass M, and valid only in this region
of space-time.
The metric is very successful in its applications. It is verified in the planetary
motion, in the deflection of light due to presence of a mass concentration, in the
correct prediction of the advance of Mercury’s perihelion — where Newtonian
gravity breaks down — and in modern applications of global positioning systems.
Schwarzschild’s metric has a caveat that turned out to be very fruitful in its
features, namely the existence of two singularities in its mathematical expres-
sion. One of the singularities, at the so-called “Schwarzschild radius”, raised
theoretical discussions on a plausible inhabitant of the natural world, that is,
the well-known “black hole” (BH). The existence of the black hole in the physi-
cal world is accepted by many but is questioned by others. My main goal here is
to answer the question posed in the article’s title. I do this both by examining
details of the Schwarzschild metric and by comparing it with the gravitational
field of a classical Newtonian object, that is, a homogeneous material sphere.
Schwarzschild’s metric is discussed in section 4.2 as well as the definition of
the black hole as presented by Capelo [31]. In section 4.3, I discuss the New-
tonian equivalent to the relativistic Schwarzschild metric field, i.e., the gravi-
tational field of a homogeneous sphere. The proposed question is answered in
section 4.4 and additional remarks are presented in section 4.5.

1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
~dsoares/extn/brcs/bhno.pdf

25
26 CHAPTER 4. ARE BLACK HOLES REAL?

4.2 Schwarzschild’s metric and the definition of

a black hole
The definition of the BH used in the present discussion is that by Capelo [31].
He begins with the Schwarzschild metric that is described by the expression of
the space-time interval ds:
 
2 2 2 1
(ds) = −(1−2GM/rc )(cdt) + (dr)2 +(rdθ)2 +(r sin θ dφ)2 ,
1 − 2GM/rc2
(4.1)
where r, θ and φ are the usual spherical coordinates, c is the speed of light in
vacuum and M is the source mass. The “Schwarzschild radius” is defined as
2GM
rS = . (4.2)
c2
This radius defines the so-called “Schwarzschild sphere”. In the language of
GRT the metric field is the physical equivalent to the Newtonian gravitational
field (cf. [32, sec. 1.1]). Its two-dimensional representation is shown in figure 4.1.
It is worthwhile mentioning that such a representation breaks down for r < rS ,
because in that region there is no known theoretical physical description — eq.
4.1 is not defined there — and hence figure 4.1 shows just a possible, but most
certainly unphysical, extrapolation inside Schwarzschild’s sphere (more on this
in [6]).

Figure 4.1: The metric field — i.e., the gravity — of a black hole shown as
a two-dimensional warped surface. The black hole hosts a physical singularity
inside the Schwarzschild sphere. The representation for r < rS is most certainly
invalid because the metric is not defined there.
4.3. GRAVITY OF A HOMOGENEOUS SPHERE 27

In his article, Capelo defines the BH and review the main features of various
types of BHs. An excerpt of the abstract of Capelo’s article reads:

“. . . we introduce the concept of a black hole (BH) and recount

the initial theoretical predictions. We then review the possible types
of BHs in nature, from primordial, to stellar-mass, to supermassive
BHs.”

I treat here only of the definition of a BH; the reader is referred to Capelo’s
article for the other considerations.
There are two singularities in eq. 4.1. The equation diverges at both r = 0
and r = rS . From Capelo’s words, only the former is a true physical singularity
(i.e. the Riemann curvature tensor is infinite only at r = 0), with the space-time
being nonsingular at the so-called Schwarzschild radius. This fact can be easily
seen, according to Capelo, by transforming the system of coordinates in which
eq. 4.1 is presented (e.g., [33]).
However, the vicinity of Schwarzschild’s radius is a quite peculiar region,
because the future of a particle traveling towards the centre is inevitable, that
is, when it crosses r = rS the only possible future of that particle is the singu-
larity. The BH is then unstable at its conception or, more precisely, it sets off
instabilities wherever it is formed (see also [33, fig. 2]).
The external surface of Schwarzschild’s sphere is called “event horizon” of
the BH. Capelo then describes a very drastic property of the BH with respect to
a particle moving near the boundary represented by the event horizon, namely
that a static observer at infinity will never observe such a boundary (or event
horizon) crossing, as the observed time will reach infinity (even though the proper
time of the particle is finite) and any radiation sent from the particle and reach-
ing the observer will be infinitely redshifted. In other words, a photon sent from
rS would need infinite energy to reach the observer, effectively making the space-
time region within the event horizon causally disconnected from the rest of the
Universe. This is the rigorous technical reason for why a mass M confined to
rS is called a “black hole” and represents, therefore, its definition.
Since the mass is confined to the Schwarzschild sphere, it prompts for a par-
allel with a mass M confined to a given radius R, i.e., a classical Newtonian
homogeneous sphere. The great difference between the two is that the gravi-
tational field of the homogeneous sphere is well defined inside the confinement
radius (r < R) and the great similarity is, obviously, that in both the total mass
sits inside a sphere of known radius.

4.3 Gravity of a homogeneous sphere

I consider now a Newtonian classical object, that is, the above-mentioned ho-
mogeneous sphere (HS) of mass M and radius R. (Notice that the black hole is,
strictly speaking, a classical object as well, since it does not require any quan-
tum mechanical fundamentals in its prescription.) The gravitational field of the
28 CHAPTER 4. ARE BLACK HOLES REAL?

sphere is described by:

→
−r
→
−
g (r) = −Gm(r) 3 (4.3)
r
with
M 3
m(r) = r (0 ≤ r < R),
R3
m(r) = M (r ≥ R).

The magnitude of →
−
g (r) is plotted in figure 4.2.

Figure 4.2: The magnitude of the gravitational field inside (r < R) and outside
(r ≥ R) a homogeneous sphere of mass M and radius R (eq. 4.3). Notice the
absence of singularities.

Gravitational fields of the BH and the HS have different descriptions, but

it can be shown that in the limit of weak field, i.e., for r  rS , the metric
field given by eq. 4.1 reduces to Newton’s gravitational law (e.g., [34]). Gravity
fields of the BH and of the HS show a perfect symmetry for large r. That is
not the case for small r, r < rS (BH) and r < R (HS). The gravitational field
is perfectly well defined for the former and diverges for the latter, that is, they
show here a perfect asymmetry.
The gravitational field inside the HS is well defined including at r = 0. In
contrast, the BH has a physical singularity at the very center of the Schwarzschild
sphere. Such an asymmetry is striking and indicates that something very crucial
4.4. THE ANSWER 29

is missing in the theoretical description of the Schwarzschild metric, which is,

of course, a quantum gravity theory.

4.4 The answer

A tentative answer to the question posed in the title might be framed within
three remarkable features of the BH presented in sections 4.2 and 4.3. They
are:

1. The BH sets off instabilities wherever it is formed (section 4.2).

2. The space-time region within rS (the radius of the event horizon) is

causally disconnected from the rest of the Universe (section 4.2).

3. Gravity fields of the BH and of the HS show a perfect symmetry for large
r, but a perfect asymmetry for small r (section 4.3).

Although points 1 and 2 above are by themselves sufficient to a “no” answer,

the most remarkable argument for the answer resides in item 3. The asymmetry
observed at small r in the description of these two classical objects is funda-
mentally an asymmetry between physical and unphysical realms. That is to say,
it is not necessarily required that the gravitational fields be the same at small
radii as they are for large ones. The crucial requirement is that both fields be
physical. Since they are not, the only possible answer is “no”.
A well-defined and physical object is suggested by Soares [2] as an alternative
to the BH.

4.5 Additional remarks

Although a change of coordinates is able to transform the character of a singu-
larity from physical to non physical (section 4.2), the singularities at r = 0 and
r = rS are still uncomfortably concrete in the coordinates of eq. 4.1. Further-
more, it is conceivable that there might exist a system of coordinates in which
the singularity at r = 0 is removed whilst the singularity at r = rS is kept and,
if that is realized, one would be led to the conclusion that changing coordinates
are mere mathematical artifacts that in the end are not really able to remove
non physical descriptions.
Assuming that indeed the singularity at the Schwarzschild radius is not
physical, it did not exclude the fact that the Schwarzschild sphere harbors a
very real physical singularity. Would not that suffice to declare a BH as a
non physical object and inexistent in nature? Is not the so-called “Object
of Gravitational Extreme” (OGE), put forward by Soares [2], a much more
palatable concept than the BH? The OGE has all the physical features of a BH
except the singularities at r = 0 and at r = rS .
Mathematical maneuvers, such as changing coordinate systems, are inca-
pable of removing non physical characteristics of a BH, because the main issue
30 CHAPTER 4. ARE BLACK HOLES REAL?

in all of this is that GRT is an incomplete gravity theory, i.e., still there does
not exist a quantum gravity theory that certainly would remove in a natural
way both singularities present in the Schwarzschild metric.
The brilliant and clear exposition by Capelo [31] is very useful for those
interested in the wonders of the intriguing concept of a black hole. The article
almost shook my conviction that BHs are the most subtle expression of a very
refined “scientific digression” (cf. [6]).
Additionally, one might want to read the article written by Bernstein [45],
which presents a very interesting historical perspective on black holes, by featur-
ing Einstein’s denial of their existence in 1939 and the first scientific proposition
of the black-hole concept by J.R. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) and H.S. Snyder
(1913-1962), in that same year.
Chapter 5

Object of Gravitational
Extreme1

5.1 Introduction
Immediately after the conclusion of the General Relativity Theory (GRT) by
Albert Einstein (1879-1955) in 1915, the German astronomer and physicist Karl
Schwarzschild (1873-1916) derived a particular solution of GRT’s field equations
that revealed itself to be extremely important. He had the intention to apply it
to stars without rotation (or with negligible rotation) and perfectly spherical.
His solution exhibits a singularity in the metric equation, i.e., an infinite result
for a given value of the spatial coordinates. Generally speaking, the metric
represents the space-time geometry of any space-time and gives the way of
calculating the distance between any two events, which are characterized by
three spatial coordinates and one temporal. Schwarzschild’s metric is given by
(equation 6 of [34]):
 
2 2 2 1
(ds) = −(1 − 2GM/rc )(cdt) + (dr)2 +
1 − 2GM/rc2

+(rdθ)2 + (r sin θ dφ)2 , (5.1)

M is the body mass, G is the universal gravitational constant and c is the
speed of light in vacuum. One sees immediately that Schwarzschild’s metric ds
diverges to infinity at r = RS = 2GM/c2 , where RS is called Schwarzschild
radius ([36, sec. 2]).
Einstein and the English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), the
greatest authorities in GRT in the early decades after its formulation, rejected
any physical meaning associated to the singularity for obvious reasons (see more
details in [37]). Researches related to the “Schwarzschild singularity” only began
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31
32 CHAPTER 5. OBJECT OF GRAVITATIONAL EXTREME

in the decade of 1960, especially from 1967 onwards, when John Archibald
Wheeler (1911-2008) coined the term “black hole” (BH) to identify them.
The BH soon started to have status of “real object” and several physical,
astronomical and cosmological consequences were deduced from it. But the BH
is fundamentally, and will always be, the name of the “unknown”, since it is
associated to a mathematical singularity. Such an object, therefore and indeed,
does not exist. If BHs do not exist, so what? What astronomical object might
be associated to the Schwarzschild singularity? That is what I intend to answer.
In the next section I present some features of the SS that are usually assigned
to BHs. Section 5.3 is dedicated to the answer of the question put forward here.
I finish with some additional remarks.

5.2 Schwarzschild’s singularity

The SS is currently identified with the BH. Normally one says that a BH is an
object of extremely high density. It is important to clarify such an idea before
we find a better physical conception for the SS, as proposed in the previous
section. We shall see that an SS — the BH — can have extremely low density.
Let ρS be the mean density inside a sphere of radius equal to the Schwarzschild
radius, that is, ρS = M/[(4/3)πRS3 ]. Consider now BHs that are often discussed
in modern scientific literature:

1) BH of stellar mass MS = 1 MSun and RS = 3 km,

2) BH of mass equal to the BH believed to exist in the center of the Milky

Way with MM W = 4×106 MSun (4 million solar masses) and RS = 1×107
(10 million) km and

3) BH of mass equal to the BH believed to exist in the center of the giant

elliptical galaxy M87 with MM 87 = 6 × 109 MSun (6 billion solar masses)
and RS = 2 × 1010 (20 billion) km.

(Schwarzschild radii RS were calculated with the expression RS = 3 (M/MSun )

km, cf. [6, sec. 2.2].)
Figure 5.1 shows the location of these BHs on the diagram ρS × RS (ρS ∝
1/RS2 ; the scales of the axes are expressed as logarithms of the coordinates). The
density of water (H2 O) is marked and one can see that we can have BHs with
any mean densities, much larger and much smaller than the density of water.
In particular the putative BH of stellar mass has ρ = 2 × 1016 (20 thousand
trillion) g/cm3 , the BH at the center of the Milky Way has ρ = 10, 000 g/cm3
and the BH at the center of M87 has density equal to 0.0004 g/cm3 .
5.3. OBJECT OF GRAVITATIONAL EXTREME 33

Figure 5.1: Schwarzschild’s singularities in the diagram ρS × RS : S, mass equal

to 1 MSun , RS = 3 km, MW, mass equal to 4 × 106 MSun , RS = 1 × 107 km
≈ 15 × RSun and M87, mass equal to 6 × 109 MSun , RS = 2 × 1010 km ≈
130 × dSun−Earth .

This analysis shows that the object associated to the SS does not necessarily
have extremely high density. The object cannot be also associated to r = RS
because we have there an infinite value for the metric. Hence the object must
be defined for r > RS , but as close as to RS as one wishes, i.e., the object is to
be defined for r → RS . Let us go now to its definition.

5.3 Object of Gravitational Extreme

In the neighborhood of r = RS the space-time curvature is very large. The
space-time curvature is GRT’s representation of the Newtonian gravitational
potential. In fact, one has for r → RS an extreme space-time curvature and,
therefore, a gravitational extreme. Or else, let us see.
If we are so close to the SS as we wish we have, thus, r → 2GM/c2 , whose
terms may be rearranged in the form GM/r → (1/2)c2 . We see then that M/r
34 CHAPTER 5. OBJECT OF GRAVITATIONAL EXTREME

(∝ gravitational potential) tends towards an extreme (c2 /2G). Whereas M/r3

(∝ density inside the sphere of radius r) may be, as we saw, large or small.
In other words, the packing of matter-energy is an extreme, but that does not
necessarily mean that the density is an extreme inside r = RS as well. What is
an extreme is the packing and consequently the gravitation in the neighborhood
of r = RS .
From what has been said above the new object, that exists immediately be-
fore Schwarzschild’s radius, may be appropriately called “object of gravitational
extreme” (hereafter “gravex”). Before achieving the stage of a gravex we can
have objects with large gravitation like white-dwarf stars and neutron stars, if
we consider only objects of stellar masses. These stars are compact ones but
have radii that are larger than the Schwarzschild radii corresponding to their
masses.
Figure 5.2 illustrates the space-time configuration of the gravex next to white
dwarfs and neutron stars. The Schwarzschild radius defines, in this new context,
a spherical surface called “horizon of gravitational extreme”; a gravex, of any
mass, by definition, never reaches such horizon. Gravex, like BHs, may have
stellar masses, be microscopic or supermassive.

Figure 5.2: GRT shows us that space — more precisely, space-time — curves
itself near any body. It is as space were a rubber sheet and the bodies “sank”
on it. Above we see space curvature around the Sun, a white-dwarf star, a
neutron star and a gravex. Notice that the gravex is formed before the “horizon
of gravitational extreme”, defined by the sphere whose radius is “Schwarzschild
radius” shown in the figure (adapted from figure 3 of [6]).

As we see in figure 5.2, the gravex have conventional space-time structures

similar to those of white dwarfs and neutron stars. The stellar-mass gravex may
5.4. FINAL REMARKS 35

be called stellar extremes, or simply extremes, and represent the next objects in
the sequence of stellar objects of large gravitation already known. The BHs are
the ones that occupy this place in the vision of orthodox modern science. As
mentioned above, one can talk also of microgravex and supermassive gravex.
There are two important questions to be addressed with respect to the
gravex.
1) What is the physical mechanism (the force field) that support the struc-
ture of a gravex? We know the mechanisms for white dwarfs (degenerate
electron repulsion) and for neutron stars (degenerate neutron repulsion
and repulsion due to the strong interaction, the same that exists in the
atomic nucleus).
The answer to the first question pave the way for the formulation of the second.
2) Will be a gravex stable or will not be the case that, from a given limit
mass, a gravex breaks itself in stable gravex of smaller masses?
These questions are intellectually more satisfactory than living with the un-
known scenario in which the BH inhabits, always waiting for the advent of a
redeeming new theory of gravitation that solves the problem of the singularity.
The gravex avoids the singularity and may — or not — be the definitive answer
to the question of objects with large gravitation.

5.4 Final remarks

The existence of the SS denounces in a clear way the necessity of a quantum
gravity theory (QGT) and emphasizes the precariousness of the classical theories
of gravity such as GRT and Newtonian gravity (see an ampler discussion about
this aspect in [6]). A QGT would expand the scope of the Schwarzschild solution
in the domains constrained by the existence of the singularity.
The mean densities of the SSs illustrated in figure 5.1 cover an enormous
range, from 10−4 g/cm3 (supermassive SS) to 1016 g/cm3 (stellar SS). In this
range we have, in absolute terms, very small values and very large values. Nev-
ertheless, it is worthwhile pointing out that such values are extraordinarily large
when compared to the mean densities of the sites where it is assumed that the
SSs are found. For example, the mean densities in galaxies range from ∼ 10−24
g/cm3 in the outer regions to ∼ 10−21 g/cm3 in the nuclear regions. A stel-
lar SS located in the external regions has a mean density of about 1040 times
as large as the mean density of its neighborhood, whereas a supermassive SS
located in the center of a galaxy has density about 1017 times as large as the
galactic nuclear density. This is the reason why SSs are usually associated to
objects of enormous densities, that is, extremely compacts, instead of to objects
of gravitational extremes, as it is conceptually more appropriate.
Supermassive gravex resemble the “superstars” discussed by the American
physicist Richard Feynman (1918-1988) in his book Lectures on Gravitation
[38], especially in Lecture 14. Feynman’s Lectures were given in the beginning
36 CHAPTER 5. OBJECT OF GRAVITATIONAL EXTREME

of the decade of 1960, well before the BH “fever” being installed. Feynman has
verified that the superstars are unstable relativistic objects. Incidentally, it is
worthwhile reading the comments by physicists John Preskill and Kip Thorne
presented in the Lectures preface. This preface is by its own an interesting
lecture on gravitation and is available in [39].
As Einstein in 1939, Feynman was concerned about the SS issue. On p.
156, section 11.4, he states the problem: “The metric eq. (11.3.6) [eq. 5.1 here]
has a singularity at r=2m [r = 2Gm/c2 in my system of unities]. To find out
whether this is a physically troublesome or meaningful singularity, we must see
whether this corresponds to a physical value of the measured radius from the
origin of the coordinates (which is not the same as our coordinate r!) (. . . )”
The result of his analysis is the permanence of the singularity, now in another
system of coordinates. What is impressive to me in Feynman words above are
the expression “physically troublesome or meaningful singularity”. A “physically
troublesome” singularity must be discarded, this is easy to understand. But
what is a “physically meaningful singularity”? Can, to begin with, a singularity
be “physically meaningful”? Feynman’s calculations — and common sense—
seem to show it cannot. Again, one sees here the need of a QGT to solve the
problem and eliminate the singularity.
In section 11.5 of Feynman’s Lectures we have a curiosity in the realm of
“science digression” (cf. [6]). Feynman presents an initial discussion about
the possible extrapolations around SSs, which at that time were, according to
him, “called ‘wormholes’ by J.A. Wheeler”. J.A. Wheeler is the already-cited
John Archibald Wheeler, whom some years later would christen such “possible
extrapolation” as “black hole”, giving up the initial denomination of wormhole.
This, afterwards, would be applied to another extremely aberrant object (see
[6, sec. 2.1]). It is worthwhile remembering that the Lectures were given in
the years 1962 and 1963 and that Wheeler invented the black hole in 1967, as
history records.

Acknowledgment – Jos Victor Neto, subscriber and frequent commenta-

tor of my cosmology list COSMOS (http://www.fisica.ufmg.br/dsoares/
cosmos/cosmos.htm, in Portuguese), brought to my knowledge a most inter-
esting book by Feynman Lectures on Gravitation, which I mention in this
article; I certainly share his enthusiasm for this remarkable work.
Chapter 6

Science digression:
relativistic holes1

6.1 Introduction
Science fiction (ScF): the Merriam-Webster dictionary [40] quotes the following.
“Stories about how people and societies are affected by imaginary scientific de-
velopments in the future.” As a general rule then when one speaks of “science
fiction” one thinks of a “story”, an artistic and literary creation. But there
is another kind of scientific discourse that I shall call “science digression”
(ScD). (Warning, not to be confused with “science dissemination”, which is a
different story.) ScD is the extrapolation of established scientific knowledge by
means of the consideration of future possibilities of theoretical, experimental
and observational scientific advancements.
ScF is completely free — the artistic activity is free by definition; ScD has
limited freedom, because it has one foot on the known laws of natural sciences
and other in the “well-educated speculation”.
One of the greatest exponents of ScD is the American physicist Kip Thorne.
He was a student of the great John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008), who was
his mentor both in theoretical physics and in ScD — which, by the way, is a
branch of theoretical physics. ScF drinks from the wellhead of ScD and ScD
drinks from the wellhead of ScF.
Kip Thorne was the protagonist of a recent episode of ScF and ScD: the
movie Interstellar. I shall not comment on the movie, but on some ScD aspects
present therein. Those interested on the movie might watch Kip Thorne himself
talking about it in a curious one-hour presentation in The Science of Interstellar
[41].
Kip Thorne is also the author of a scientific dissemination book entitled
Black Holes & Time Warps [5], where one can find the most precious pearls of
his crop of ScD, many of them present in Interstellar. My purpose is to comment
1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
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37
38 CHAPTER 6. SCIENCE DIGRESSION

on some of those pearls, especially wormholes (WHs), time machines (TMs)

and black holes (BHs).
In the examples discussed below, namely, WHs, TMs and BHs, the plausi-
bility of the specific ScDs of each case are frequently supported by the belief
that we shall achieve in the future a theory of Quantum Gravity (QG), that
would vindicate and justify the speculations done. This sort of belief — that of
the emergence of a more complete theory in the future — is a distinct feature
of ScDs in general.

6.2 Pearls of Science Digression

According to [5, p. 485], WHs were mathematically discovered in 1916 by

the Austrian physicist Ludwig Flamm (1885-1964) as a solution of the field
equation of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), a few months after Einstein formulated
his equation of the General Relativity Theory (GRT). Einstein and the American
physicist Nathan Rosen (1909-1995) explored them in the decade of 1930 and
Wheeler and his group (which has Kip Thorne as a member) in the 1950s. WHs
are the most popular candidates for being TMs in all modern ScDs.
The modern conceptual possibility of the existence of BHs arose also in 1916,
as a direct consequence of the work of the German astronomer and physicist
Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916). His solution of GRT’s field equation showed a
singularity, i.e., an infinity result for a given value of the spatial coordinates.
Any physical meaning associated to this singularity was rejected by Einstein
and by the English astrophysicist Arthur Eddington (1882-1944), the greatest
authorities in GRT during the first decades after the formulation of the theory
([5, p. 134]). Only in the 1960s the researches with BHs, as we know them
today, began to be done, especially after 1967, when Wheeler coined the term
“black hole” ([5, p. 256]).
Next, I shall briefly talk about each of these ScDs.

6.2.1 Wormholes and time machines

WHs are tunnels through hyperspace (hypothetical space where real space-time
is embedded), which connect a space-time region of the universe to another.
They are like space-time shortcuts. Its name come from the analogy with the
hole that a guava’s worm does when it traverses it through its interior. Its path
from one point on the guava peel to another point on the peel can in this way
be smaller than the path made over the guava peel. Figure 6.1 shows examples
of these two paths.
6.2. PEARLS OF SCIENCE DIGRESSION 39

Figure 6.1: The guava worm W can go from point 1 to point 2 by the two paths
shown in the figure. The “wormhole” inside the guava represents the shortest.

Interstellar travels would then be possible, in spite of the enormous dis-

tances to the nearest stars. The travel could be done more quickly by a shortcut
through the hyperspace with the aid of a WH. Kip Thorne uses another nomen-
clature in his talk mentioned above: he calls Brane, short for “Membrane”, the
four-dimensional (3 spatial coordinates + 1 temporal) universe where we live.
Hence, the Brane contains the 4 dimensions of our universe. Outside the Brane
is the hyperspace, that he calls the Volume, which is space of more dimensions
where the Brane is embedded. It is worthwhile to point out that hyperspace
(the Volume) is a hypothetical space, it does not exist, but is useful for the
understanding of the phenomena that occur in the Brane.

Figure 6.2 illustrates the case described above. The four-dimensional Brane
is represented by a surface. The WH connects two points of the Brane by a
shortcut through the Volume. In the guava example of figure 6.1, the guava
peel is the Brane and its pulp is the inside Volume and the region exterior to
the guava is the outside Volume. The hole of the worm may be considered as an
alteration of the topology — i.e., of the shape — of the peel, being, therefore,
an extension of the Brane that traverse the inside Volume.
40 CHAPTER 6. SCIENCE DIGRESSION

Figure 6.2: The interstellar voyager can go from Earth (E) to the star S by
the two ways shown in the figure. The “wormhole” through the Volume (hy-
perspace) represents the shortest. The Brane entry and exit regions are called
“mouths” of the WH.

The important issue is that since the discovery of the WHs it was verified
that they are unstable. After being created they are quickly destroyed by the
shrinking of their walls. And the contraction of the walls is so rapid that not
even a light ray is able to travel the path from mouth to mouth. Here comes
then the ScD. The shrinking of the WH can be avoided if there exists in its
interior a reservoir of “negative energy” which would exert pression against
the gravitational contraction. Is that possible? Yes, but the substance that
has such a negative energy is yet to be found. It might be similar to the
dark energy of the Standard Model of Cosmology (the Hot Big Bang model, cf.
[42]), which exerts the cosmic pression that resists the decelerating gravitational
pression and makes the expansion of the universe accelerated from recent epochs
onwards. Everything is possible, but it requires an high dose of ScD, with
frequent references to the putative theory of QG.
What about TMs? The TMs can be WHs (amongst other curious ScDs,
which I shall not treat here). Now, due to the fact that WHs connect two space-
time events of the universe, they can very well connect two points of space, one
of them being in the present and the other in the past. That is, one may go
into a WM mouth in the present and come out the other one in the past. Of
course, if one could avoid the contraction of the WH, which a highly advanced
civilization would be able to do. The problem is that in addition to the tech-
nological limitations there may be a natural limitation, which I shall refer to
below, through Kip Thorne’s words.

6.2.2 Black holes

The black hole is a singular theoretical object that appears in one of the solutions
of the GRT field equation, namely, the Schwarzschild solution (cf. section 15.2
6.2. PEARLS OF SCIENCE DIGRESSION 41

of [36]). The Schwarzschild solution gives the spacetime structure in the exterior
of a spherical body that does not rotate. The BH is a singularity of this solution.
In theoretical physics, a singularity is something that does not exist, neither in
nature nor in the formal conception of the theory, ultimately, is the collapse of
a theory. In physics jargon, one says that that the solution “explodes” when it
encounters a singularity. In general, in a singularity the solution tends to an
infinite value. That is what happens with Schwarzschild solution. It explodes
in the so-called Schwarzschild radius, which is given by:
2GM
RS = ,
c2
where M is the body mass, G is the universal gravitation constant and c is the
speed of light in vacuum. A BH is characterized by the so-called event horizon
— or simply horizon — which is a spherical surface of radius RS . Classically,
i.e., outside the QG domain, the BH is a body of mass M that occupies a
spherical region of radius RS , in spite of the fact that the solution is not defined
at R = RS .
Figure 6.3 shows the singularity called BH. The question mark indicates that
for R ≤ RS the Schwarzschild solution is unknown, or more precisely, does not
exist.

Figure 6.3: GRT shows that space — more precisely, space-time — curves near
any body. It is as space behaves like a rubber sheet that is warped by the bodies
sitting on it. Above one sees the warping of space around the Sun, a white-dwarf
star, a neutron star and a black hole. The black hole makes a “bottomless pit”
in space, or in other words, a hole whose bottom is completely unknown.

Space around the black hole is well-defined only for R > RS , where RS , the
Schwarzschild radius, is shown in the figure. The question mark draws attention
42 CHAPTER 6. SCIENCE DIGRESSION

to this fact. The representations shown above are two-dimensional analogies of

three-dimensional space realities. Try to imagine the latter.
The Schwarzschild radius can be written in terms of the Sun mass as RS =
3(M/MSun ) km. That is, a BH with the mass M equal to the Sun mass will
have RS = 3 km and its event horizon will be the spherical surface of 3 km of
radius.
Strictly speaking, all scientific research about BHs belongs to the realm of the
purest ScD. Incidentally, contrary to what is frequently stated, the singularity
is not inside the event horizon; the singularity is the event horizon, located at
R = RS . For those interested in the subject, [5, chap. 3] is the finest piece of
black-hole ScD.

6.3 Kip Thorne speaks up

Let’s move now to Kip Thorne’s labor with respect to the ScDs presented in
section 2. First, I show excerpts about WHs and TMs and next those related
to BHs.
We can imagine two strategies for constructing a wormhole where before
there was none: a quantum strategy, and a classical strategy. The quan-
tum strategy relies on gravitational vacuum fluctuations, the gravitational
analogue of the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations. . .

In 1955, John Wheeler, by combining the laws of quantum mechanics and

the laws of general relativity in a tentative and crude way, deduced that
in a region the size of the Planck-Wheeler length, 1.62 × 10−33 centimeter
or smaller, the vacuum fluctuations are so huge that space as we know it
“boils” and becomes a froth of quantum foam — the same sort of quantum
foam as makes up the core of a spacetime singularity [5, p. 494].

Notice that this is the same quantum foam that is believed to reside inside of a
black-hole singularity (cf. [5, p. 478]).

We do not understand the laws of quantum gravity well enough to deduce,

in 1993, whether the quantum construction of wormholes is possible. We
do understand the laws of classical gravity (general relativity) well enough
to know that the classical construction of wormholes is permitted only
if the construction machinery, whatever it might be, twists time up so
strongly, as seen in all reference frames, that it produces, at least briefly,
a time machine [5, p. 498].

Kip Thorne’s book [5] was written in 1993, which explains mentioning the year;
the issue related to QG remains the same nowadays. “Twisting time” seems
something weird, but it is worthwhile recalling that in GRT “twisted time” is
one of the names of “gravitation”. The matter-energy content of the universe
and their pressure twist time and space, being this the way GRT describes
gravitational effects, which are described in another way by Newtonian theory.
6.3. KIP THORNE SPEAKS UP 43

The laws of general relativity predict, unequivocally, the flow of time at

the two mouths [of the WH], and they predict, unequivocally, that the
two time flows will be the same when compared through the wormhole,
but will be different when compared outside the wormhole. Time, in this
sense, hooks up to itself differently through the wormhole than through
the external Universe, when the two mouths are moving relative to each
other.

And this difference of hookup, I then realized, implies that from a single
wormhole, an infinitely advanced civilization can make a time machine [5,
p. 502].

The TM requires, therefore, an infinitely advanced civilization. The TM is also

closely related to a Time Warp (the Time Warp of [5]), i.e., to a different
perception of the flow of time from different frames of reference.
The English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking believes that TMs are
impossible to exist in nature. In the absence of a QG theory he cannot proof
his belief — his ScD —, then he put forward a conjecture about the issue. The
following are Kip Thorne’s words about it.

Hawking has a firm opinion on time machines. He thinks that nature

abhors them, and he has embodied that abhorrence in a conjecture, the
chronology protection conjecture, which says that the laws of physics do
not allow time machines [5, p. 521].

If some day, the conjecture can be proved, even an infinitely advanced civiliza-
tion will not be able to build a time machine. Perhaps Hawking is right and for
this reason until now, as it seems, we did not receive the visit of a inhabitant of
the future.
Kip Thorne is so convinced of the urgent need of a QG theory that he makes
mistakes when writes about Einstein’s aspirations for an unified physical theory.
Let us read:

Albert Einstein spent most of his last twenty-five years in a fruitless quest
to unify his general relativistic laws of physics with Maxwell’s laws of
electromagnetism; he did not know that the most important unification
is with quantum mechanics. He died in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1955 at
the age of seventy-six [5, p. 525].

Kip Thorne errs here. The desired unification is much ampler and Einstein cer-
tainly knew that. Long before 1955 there were already works on the unification
of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics, which would result in quantum
electrodynamics. The unification of quantum electrodynamics with the weak
nuclear interaction was underway and would be crowned with the 1979 Nobel
prize to its developers, whom have created the “theory of the electroweak in-
teraction”. There was in addition the strong nuclear interaction, that was not
unknown to Einstein. In other words, the unification project is much more than
the one depicted by Thorne and attributed to Einstein.
44 CHAPTER 6. SCIENCE DIGRESSION

About Karl Schwarzschild, whose particular solution of Einstein’s field equa-

tion led to the idea of BH, Kip Thorne states:
The first step (after the inaugural presentation of GRT in 1915 [34]) was
made by Karl Schwarzschild, one of the most distinguished astrophysicists
of the early twentieth century.
(. . . )
Almost immediately he set out to discover what predictions Einstein’s
new gravitation laws might make about stars. Since it would be very
complicated, mathematically, to analyze a star that spins or is nonspher-
ical, Schwarzschild confined himself to stars that do not spin tat all and
that are precisely spherical, and to ease his calculations, he sought first
a mathematical description of the star’s exterior and delayed its interior
until later.
(. . . )
His calculation was elegant and beautiful, and the curved spacetime ge-
ometry that it predicted, the Schwarzschild geometry as it soon came to
be known, was destined to have enormous impact on our understanding
of gravity and the Universe [5, p. 124].

The BH is, as mentioned above, a singularity of Schwarzschild’s geometry, and

was known as “Schwarzschild’s singularity” during a long time. The singularity
has had other names, until the name coined by John Wheeler ended up pre-
vailing. Schwarzschild’s solution represents the greater — if not, so far, the
only — contribution of GRT to gravitation. It possesses several applications of
real success like, for example, in the calculation of the dynamics of planetary
systems (amongst these, the solar system), in the calculation of the deflection
of light by a given body and in the development of technologies of localization
by satellites like GPS (Global Positioning System). The BH is a ScD of the
Schwarzschild solution. Gravitational waves and other extreme gravitational
phenomena are out of the scope of Schwarzschild’s solution, but belong to the
most genuine ScDs, some of them for requiring extremely sensitive and special
detectors being, therefore, not observed, and others for waiting “a complete
theory of QG”. Schwarzschild’s solution does not wait for anything and has
practical applications of high experimental accuracy. The enormous scientific
consideration enjoyed by GRT comes precisely from the solution found by Karl
Schwarzschild in 1916 (cf. stressed in [34]).
Einstein himself did not like Schwarzschild’s singularity:
“The essential result of this investigation,” Albert Einstein wrote in a
technical paper in 1939 [37], “is a clear understanding as to why the
‘Schwarzschild singularities’ do not exist in physical reality.” With these
words, Einstein made clear and unequivocal his rejection of his own intel-
lectual legacy: the black holes that his general relativistic laws of gravity
seemed to be predicting [5, p. 121].

The above-mentioned Einstein’s quotation is in the penultimate paragraph of

the 15 pages of the 1939 article and the last one has the following words (bold-
face added): “This investigation arose out of discussions the author conducted
6.4. FINAL REMARKS 45

with Professor H. P. Robertson and with Drs. V. Bargmann and P. Bergmann

on the mathematical and physical significance of the Schwarzschild
singularity. The problem quite naturally leads to the question, answered by
this paper in the negative, as to whether physical models are capable of ex-
hibiting such a singularity.”
Contrary to what is often stated, BHs are still pieces of ScD. Rigorously,
they do not exist, but represent unknown limits of known physics. Kip Thorne
validates this judgement in many places of his book [5].

6.4 Final remarks

The recurring mention of the need of a theory of Quantum Gravity highlights
the factual precarity of the ScDs mentioned here. They are clear examples of the
concept of ScD, i.e., fiction coupled to educated speculation, the latter frequently
anchored in the possibility of a QG in the future.
In this short inventory of relativistic holes certainly someone might have
missed white holes. These may be thought as “time-reversed” black holes,
that is, their physical processes occur in a way that is reversed to the way they
occur in BHs. For example, matter and radiation emerge from a white hole
with high energy. This ScD was popular in the decade of 1970, according to
the English cosmologist Edward Harrison (1919-2007), and the idea seems not
sustainable any more, as he mentions in passing in the chapter about BHs of his
Cosmology, The Science of the Universe (2000). The white hole was a ScD that
did not hold water. Incidentally, there is no mention whatsoever about white
holes in [5].
Metaphorically, relativistic holes constitute true “holes” in the formal struc-
ture of GRT. According to many, Kip Thorne amongst them, such holes only
will be plugged when we have a repairing theory of QG.
Kip Thorne, with his book [5], was our main reference in the discussion of
relativistic holes. The quality of [5] as work of scientific dissemination may
be questioned, but certainly one has there one of best compendiums of science
digression.
46 CHAPTER 6. SCIENCE DIGRESSION
Chapter 7

Einsteinian blunders1

We are certainly not to relinquish

the evidence of experiments for
the sake of dreams and vain
fictions of our own devising.
Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy, Book III
– I. Newton, 1687

7.1 Introduction
“The World Year of Physics 2005 is an United Nations endorsed international
celebration of physics. Events throughout the year will highlight the vitality of
physics and its importance in the coming millennium, and will commemorate
the pioneering contribution of Albert Einstein in 1905.”
This is the opening statement that appears in the electronic page http:
//www.physics2005.org, which is dedicated to the World Year of Physics. The
idea seems to be, first, to celebrate physics, and, second, to commemorate Ein-
stein. However, one sees without much effort that already, in the beginning
of the year, there has been too much talking and writing on Einstein, with a
noticeable bias to scientific idolatry, an unimaginable feature in science. We,
scientists, are supposed to respect Nature as the sole source of inspiration for
our activities both in the experimental and theoretical realms.
It is beyond of doubt that 1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis. In that year
the world witnessed the publication of three masterpieces in the literature of
contemporary physics.They were the work on Brownian motion, establishing the
reality of atoms, the work on the photoelectric effect establishing the quanta of
radiation, and the special theory of relativity. There was though an antecedent
1 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502142

47
48 CHAPTER 7. EINSTEINIAN BLUNDERS

of such a high moment in science: the year 1666 is often remembered as Isaac
Newton’s annus mirabilis. From 1665 to 1667 he also opened the doors to
three new areas of scientific research, namely, he laid down the foundation of
differential and integral calculus, he developed the theory of colors, and put
forward his theory of gravitation. The publication in 1687 of his Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy marked the beginning of a new era in the
scientific endeavor. There is a clear parallel with Einstein’s contribution to
modern science.
In the following three sections I comment on aspects of Einstein’s scientific
life that are often seen with respectful acceptance, in spite of being bad examples
of scientific manners.

7.2 The cosmological constant

In an important paper published in the Annals of the Royal Prussian Acade-
my of Sciences in 1917 entitled “Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur Allgemeinen
Relativitätstheorie”, i.e., ”Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory
of Relativity”, Einstein inaugurated the era of modern cosmology applying his
ideas from General Relativity to the universe as a whole. Towards that aim, he
abandoned his original field equations in favor of a new law in which there was
an additional constant term that represented a constant repulsive gravitational
potential. The term gives a small repulsion near the origin but increased directly
proportional to the distance until counterbalance the gravitational attraction
between masses. His intention was obviously obtain a static model. Remember
that at that time even galaxies were not known as independent cosmological
entities. Only in the late 1920s, with the work of the astronomer Edwin P.
Hubble the existence of galaxies came to be definitely proved. The solutions
he had initially obtained with the application of the original field equations
were unstable for gravitational collapse. The modification preserved the general
covariance of the theory and solved the instability problem [19, chap. 5]. The
constant became known as the cosmological constant, and is until today the
matter of much debate.
I describe now some facts that led to the first Einsteinian blunder. It turns
out to be a double-blunder, as I suggest below.
The introduction of the cosmological constant led to a great debate on many
aspects of the new horizons opened up by General Relativity concerning the
universe. A infinite model has obvious boundary condition problems, something
that was recognized even in the context of a Newtonian cosmology (see [22],
chapter 16). With the cosmological constant, Einstein solved all problems by
introducing a finite, spatially closed and static model, the latter feature being
a result of Einstein’s — and of most scientists at the time — belief concerning
the physical world.
Nevertheless, Einstein came later to reject his own modification of the field
equations. North ([19, p. 86]) quotes that already by 1919 Einstein considered
that the introduction of the constant was “gravely detrimental to the formal
7.3. THE 1919 SOLAR ECLIPSE 49

beauty of the theory”; he considered it as an ad hoc addition to the field equa-

tions. Later on, he was further led to such a rejection by two new developments:
on the observational side, Hubble’s work on the redshift-distance relation for
galaxies was being interpreted as an indication of an expanding universe2 — no
need of static solutions —, and on the theoretical side, the 1922 solution of the
field equations by the Russian Aleksandr Friedmann and the 1927 solution by
the Belgian Georges Lemaı̂tre which allowed for expanding models.
George Gamov [43] tells the now legendary story that Einstein once has said
to him that the cosmological constant was “my biggest blunder” 3 .
But why a double-blunder? Einstein rejected the cosmological constant
based on what he found to be physical and aesthetic inconsistencies that re-
sulted from its adoption. Here he saw a blunder, his biggest one. On the other
hand, from the strict theoretical and formal point of views, General Relativity is
in fact enriched by the addition of the new term, while still keeping its features
as a viable general covariant theory of gravitation. And that is where the double
character comes from. The simple fact of abandoning it constitutes a blunder
after a blunder. This is also suggested by Norh’s arguments [19, p. 86], who
writes that “he finally discarded the term in 1931, and in doing so deliberately
restricted the generality of his theory.”
Recent claims, from the late 1990s and on, of a accelerating expanding uni-
verse have led to the resurrection of the cosmological constant, which would
give the cosmic repulsion responsible for the acceleration. This idea and other
variants became a strong feature of modern cosmology. The present status quo
of modern cosmology is not though free of opposition. An example of that has
recently materialized in An Open Letter to the Scientific Community [44].

7.3 The 1919 solar eclipse

In a short biography [45], Einstein’s reactions to the scientific results obtained
from the solar eclipse of 1919 are described. The main issue was light bend-
ing by a gravitational source, and the occasion was most appropriate for the
observational tests.
Two astronomical expeditions, one in Brazil and another in the African
coast, were organized by Sir Arthur Eddington, a renowned scientist at the
time, in order to measure the stellar positions around the solar disk during the
total eclipse of May 29, 1919. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider, Einstein’s student, tells
2 Itis worthwhile to note at this point that the interpretation of Hubble’s redshift-distance
relation as indicative of an expanding universe is only true when one takes for granted that
the underlying theory under consideration, i.e., General Relativity in modern cosmology, is
true. This is still a matter of debate since present cosmological models have led to a variety
of hypotheses concerning the matter-energy content of the universe, such as baryonic dark
matter, non-baryonic dark matter and the yet more mysterious dark energy. None of these
have been so far proved to exist by any experimental or observational means.
3 This of course entirely justifies the title of the present article: if Einstein admits his

“biggest” blunder, that implies the existence of the “smallest”, and a whole gradation of
blunders in between.
50 CHAPTER 7. EINSTEINIAN BLUNDERS

that Einstein’s first reaction to the news that the measurements pointed to an
agreement with General Relativity predictions for the light bending was: “— I
knew it was correct”.
She asked him: “— What would it be if your prediction was not confirmed?”.
He replied: “— Da könnt’ mir halt der liebe Gott leid tun, die Theorie stimmt
doch.” Or, “— Then I would be sorry for the good Lord, but the Theory is
correct.”
Is this an acceptable reaction of a theorist when confronted with experiments
or observations that are relevant to his theory? Certainly not.

7.4 Einstein meets Hubble

The protagonist here is another Einstein — Elsa — Einstein’s second wife. She
is sometimes featured as a woman of somewhat faint character (see [46]). The
story appears in many sources. The one I quote here is from the probably best
biography of the great extragalactic astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble [47], the
man that successfully proved the existence of external galaxies and would be
awarded the Nobel prize in Physics in the early 1950s. It did not happen due
to his premature death in 1953 (for a short account, see [48]).
Einstein’s visit to the institutes of Caltech, in early 1931, was motivated
by his curiosity on the work in mathematical physics done by Richard Tolman,
who was working on relativity, and on the observational work by Hubble at the
Mount Wilson Observatory.
He and wife made their first trip to the mountain, where the Observatory
was located, in mid-February. They were accompanied by Hubble and others.
They visit all the installations in the Observatory, including the 100-inch
dome, which houses the Hooker telescope — then the largest telescope of the
world —, where most of Hubble’s work on extragalactic astronomy was being
conducted.
Hubble’s biographer writes (p. 206): “When Elsa Einstein, who seemed al-
ways to be in the defensive, was told that the giant Hooker telescope was essential
for determining the universe’s structure, she is said to have replied, ‘Well, well,
my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.’ ” As in the previous
section, one sees here the diminution of the relevance of experimental (strictly
speaking, observational) science.
One could argue that this is not a legitimate Einsteinian blunder because it
was Mrs. Elsa’s mouth that has spoken out the words. There are two counter-
arguments against such a claim. The weak and the strong arguments. The weak
one is just a play on words and goes like this: ”Elsa is Einstein therefore it
is an Einsteinian blunder”. The strong argument is that the episode appears
very frequently in Einstein’s biographies and in writings of various nature about
both Einstein and Hubble. It is an Einsteinian feature. As such, it might with
justice be included in the gallery of authentic Einsteinian blunders.
7.5. CONCLUDING REMARKS 51

7.5 Concluding remarks

It is understandable that amongst us, physicists and astronomers, there is fre-
quently almost an adoration of Albert Einstein. He is without doubt the greatest
scientist of the Twentieth century. Such an involuntary worship is everywhere:
the most celebrated Einstein’s biography, namely, that by Abraham Pais [46] is
also contaminated. He adopts the usual trend of skipping uncomfortable details
of Einstein’s personal and scientific life [49].
The reader certainly noticed that none of the above-mentioned stories refers
to Einstein’s annus mirabilis works but are at some extent related to General
Theory of Relativity, which was developed ten years later. The explanation is
simple. It is the result of a selection effect, given that the author of the present
article is an extragalactic astronomer. That is to say, it does not means that
there are not Einsteinian blunders related to that period. They can be mined,
for example, in Abraham Pais’ book. Not without some effort, it should be
added, as implied by the first paragraph,
And what about the atomic bomb? Certainly it cannot be classified as
an Einsteinian blunder, in spite of Einstein’s deep involvement with the issue
(especially on the political side, see [46] for details). The atomic bomb is rather
the world biggest blunder.
Scientific impartiality excludes, by definition, worshiping and the cult of
personality. To err is human and so has Einstein erred in many occasions. This
is the plain message to the younger generation of students and scientists.
Finally, young and old, let us all remember the famous Brazilian playwright
Nelson Rodrigues that always used to say that “any unanimity is stupid.” Def-
initely right.
52 CHAPTER 7. EINSTEINIAN BLUNDERS
 Part III

Life in the universe

53
Chapter 8

Search for Extraterrestrial

Intelligence1

Are we alone in the cosmos?

The question is the research subject of the American astrophysicist Frank
Drake for over 50 years. On October 19, 2017, I attended to a lecture given
by him, promoted by the Department of Astronomy of Cornell University, in
Ithaca, NY. This lecture was part of the cellebration of the 40 years of the
Voyager 1 and 2 missions for the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn (see https:
//www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/missions/voyager.html).
Frank Drake, 87 at the time, is a researcher at the SETI (Search for Ex-
traterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and is known, amongst other things, by the
“Drake equation”, which is a probabilistic formulation for the estimation
of the number of intelligent and technological civilizations in the Milky Way
galaxy, our galaxy, also called the Galaxy. Frank Drake considers an advanced
civilization as one capable of having radio astronomy. It is a limited definition,
but it makes it possible to estimate its number N, which will be the result of
the product of the factors of the equation:

N = N∗ × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × fL .

The estimations of the factors on the right-hand side of the Drake equation are
shown below and were put forward by Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in chapter XII
of his book COSMOS, where a more thorough discussion of the equation and
of the reasons for the choice of each factor can be seen. The factors are then:

N∗ = number of stars in the Galaxy (4 × 1011 ≡ 400 billion)

np = fraction of stars with planetary system (1/3; 100% is the modern value,
see below)
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55
56 CHAPTER 8. EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

ne = number of planets, in a given system, ecologically suitable for life (2; in

the solar system, for example, one has Earth, possibly Mars, Jupiter and
Titan, a satellite of Saturn, being, therefore, 2 a prudent number)
fl = fraction of suitable planets in which life really blossomed (1/3)

fi = fraction of inhabited planets in which intelligent life evolved

fc = fraction of planets inhabited by intelligent beings in which a communica-
tive technological civilization developed (fi × fc = 1/100 ≡ one percent)
fL = fraction of the duration of planetary life favored by a technological civ-
ilization (1/108 ≡ one per 100 million; fraction characteristic of Earth,
that has life with some billion years and a technological civilization char-
acterized by radio astronomy of only some decades)
With the relatively arbitrary factors adopted above (with the exception of N∗ ),
we obtain N = 10 planets with advanced intelligence in the Galaxy. We are sure
that N must be at least equal to 1 (the Earth!) but, if we have erred in some
of the factors above, N could be much larger than 10. Only the technological
development will enable us to a more precise estimation of the factors of Drake’s
equation and consequently of N .
Let’s go back now to Frank Drake’s lecture. Next, I enumerate some points
I found interesting, not exactly in the order they were presented but according
to my recollections.

1) The scientific interest for the search of extraterrestrial intelligence dates

back to XIX century with the German physicist, mathematician and as-
tronomer Carl Gauss (1777-1855) and the Italian physicist and inventor
Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937). Marconi tried to send radio signals to
space, but he would not succeed due to the fact that the frequency he
used does not go out (nor comes in) the Earth, because it is blocked by
the atmosphere.
2) Nowadays, the SETI research uses radio telescopes all over the world,
such as, Parkes, 65-m aperture, in Australia, Green Bank, 100 m, United
States, Arecibo, 305 m, Puerto Rico (United States; it was damaged by
the 2017 Hurricane Maria, but it will soon return to full operation), FAST
(Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope), 500 m (400-m
effective), China, the largest radio telescope in the world.
3) SETI is beginning to adopt visible light in its searches, an old idea, but
only now starts to be used. Laser beams are directed to all regions of our
galaxy and detectors try to observe pulsating lasers eventually transmitted
by extraterrestrial civilizations.
4) Pano-SETI or Panoramic SETI is a new SETI project that aims at ob-
serving all the sky continuously. There exists on average 1 star per 24
cubic light-years in the Milky Way and according to the results of the
 57

Kepler probe all stars have planetary systems and 1 in 5 stars has planets
in the so-called “habitable zone” (region around a star that offer similar
conditions to those prevailing on Earth to the development of life).

5) In 1974 there was a great investment for the reform of the Arecibo radio
telescope that had been inaugurated in 1963. It is located on the island
of Puerto Rico, an United States territory in the Caribbean sea. To com-
memorate the reinauguration of the telescope, Drake and colleagues had
the idea of using the telescope to send a message to our likely neighbors
of the Milky Way. The message could not be long in order not to bother
the authorities — it was a monotonous radio signal coded in such a way
to correspond to an audible sound signal. The radiofrequency used was
2380 MHz, which corresponds to the wavelength of 12.6 cm. The mes-
sage should contain images and information in the form of a sequence of
binary numbers (0 and 1), so as to be understood by a civilization that
has the logical characteristics of a intelligent mind — that was the idea
of Drake and colleagues. And so, they did. With the technology of the
time, the message was sent at a rate of 10 bit/s for 3 minutes, that is,
10 × 3 × 60 = 1800 bits = 1800/8 = simple 225 bytes (1 byte = 8 bits).

Exercise: look at the image of the Arecibo message below and count the
approximately 1800 little squares, 1 bit for each one; anyone wanting to
check his counting with the exact number of bits in the image may email
me ([email protected]).
58 CHAPTER 8. EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

The Arecibo message was sent on November 16, 1974 by the Arecibo radio
telescope. The colors are just for illustration.

6) The great difficulty of SETI is the profusion of spurious local radio signals
and especially signals from artificial terrestrial satellites. There are about
200 satellites in Earth orbit emitting signals (communication, meteorolog-
ical, military, etc.). All those signals must be identified and excluded from
the data base.

7) SETI counts primordially with private funding for its researches, because
 59

governmental agencies have difficulties in accepting research projects that

have no perspective of an ending. The success, or failure, of the search for
extraterrestrial intelligence cannot be predicted. Drake cited the example
of a Russian immigrant and investor that has made a commitment to
ensure to the SETI Institute a non-repayable grant of 100 million dollars
in 10 years. His name is Yuri Milner.

As we see, the Search goes on and with the trends of increasing sophistication,
keeping up with the scientific and technological development of humanity.
60 CHAPTER 8. EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
Chapter 9

Death and life in the Moon:

exploring the limits of
exobiology and exoecology1

On 20 July 2009 we celebrated 40 years of the descent of man on the Moon.

The extraordinary enterprise was realized by the Americans with the Apollo 11
mission. They repeated it five times more, up to number 17. The exception
in the row is Apollo 13. That mission did not succeed but was a great success
of human persistence and creativity, to save the lives of its three astronauts, in
risk after the explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module.
The Saturn rocket, used to propel the command, service and lunar modules,
was gigantic. Its 120 m of height can be grossly compared to that of a 40 store
building.
Fortunately, nobody died on the Moon soil. We might well ask ourselves:
what if that happened?
The Moon is a tremendously inhospitable environment for humans. No
sign of atmosphere, let alone oxygen. Regarding room temperatures, NASA’s
probe Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has recently informed us again: from +100
degrees centigrades in daytime to -180 degrees at night.
Incidentally, on Earth, there exist certain organisms — generally called “ex-
tremophiles” — that live under extreme environmental conditions, such as those
prevailing on the depths of the oceans, in hot springs and ice caps.
Let us now imagine an astronaut that for some reason dies on the Moon
surface. The astronaut is an organism consisting of about 10 trillion cells —
much more than the number of stars in the Milky Way, around 100 billion. He
is not alone, though. It is estimated that the average human body has about
ten times as much as that number of microorganisms, sitting mainly in the gut,
but also in the skin, in the mouth, and in almost every human organ. They live
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61
62 CHAPTER 9. DEATH AND LIFE IN THE MOON

in our body in a symbiotic relationship, performing a number of useful functions

for our health.
In other words, the astronaut dies but this may not immediately be true
for his trillions of space-journey companions. We are faced, therefore, with a
potentially extraordinary experience of exobiology — biology outside Earth —
and of exoecology. Figures are astonishing: trillions and trillions of microorgan-
isms — bacteria, fungi, etc — fighting for survival. The theory of evolution by
natural selection of Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882) rests especially on these
two ingredients: the fight for survival and a large number of “fighters”. Would
there be a winner? Would there be then “life after death” in the Moon? Or,
would there be an effective and full “pasteurization”?
Anyhow, it is comforting to know that no astronaut died in the Moon, and
that the experience in exobiology put forth above happens only in our imagina-
tion.
I thank my wife Lu for helpful discussions.
Chapter 10

On the Rare Earth

Hypothesis1

Peter D. Ward and Donald Brownlee wrote an intriguing book, published in

2000, whose title is “Rare Earth” and subtitle “Why Complex Life Is Uncommon
in the Universe” [50]. In what follows I suggest that while they are convincing
in the title, they have most likely failed in the subtitle.
The Rare Earth Hypothesis states that microbial life is common in the uni-
verse but advanced forms, from simple multicellular organisms to large animals,
are uncommon and may even not exist outside Earth.
Throughout the book the authors elaborate on the several factors that make
Earth unique as a habitat for the evolution of advanced life forms. Earth has the
right mass, sits at the right distance from its star, which in turn has also the right
mass. Earth follows a stable orbit, has a large Moon that stabilizes its rotation
axis tilt, which has the right value for avoiding severe seasons. More, Earth has a
giant neighbor – Jupiter – that prevents impacts from comets and asteroids, and
it has plate tectonics that ultimately provides a global thermostat mechanism
by means of recycling greenhouse gas, especially carbon dioxide. Earth has a
magnetic field of the right magnitude so as to shield the surface from energetic
cosmic particles. Earth sits in the right galaxy, at the right location, in a galaxy
that has the right heavy element abundances. Furthermore, a dozen or so mass
extinction events had driven biological evolution towards the highly developed
mammals present on Earth today.
The combination of such specific conditions has led in the course of time to
the development of specific life forms, all DNA-based organisms. Life on Earth
is intrinsically a rare chemical phenomenon. Here the authors are probably
right: Earth as a laboratory is rare, the possible chemistry is rare, the resulting
life forms are rare.
There are two problems though in extrapolating the “rare” reasoning above
to complex life in the whole universe. First of all, life is not a chemical phe-
1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
~dsoares/rare/rare.htm

63
64 CHAPTER 10. ON RARE EARTH

nomenon, rather, it is a physical phenomenon. A living organism is a system that

by energetically interacting with its neighborhood has its entropy decreased. In
other words, it maintains itself in a state of order compared to the disordered
neighborhood [51]. Secondly, being a physical phenomenon, life may manifest
itself in unconceivable different chemical and non chemical processes. They are
in principle as innumerable as the different environments that exists in the uni-
verse, and may be even spread “serene in the space between the worlds” like the
structured minds envisaged by science-fiction author Ken MacLeod [52], or like
Fred Hoyle’s living interstellar cloud [53].
Ward and Brownlee’s book is in the order of the day for two seemingly differ-
ent reasons: the Rare Earth hypothesis will soon be tested because the search of
extrasolar planets is almost reaching the earth-like domain, with many planned
space missions worldwide, and, their somber suggestion that “the rise of an
intelligent species on any planet might be a common source of mass extinction”
due to their profligate use of planetary resources. Present global warming warn-
ings show that they might not have erred in the latter.
Chapter 11

The Aleph Cosmological

Principle1

I saw the Aleph from every point

and angle, and in the Aleph I saw
the earth and in the earth the
Aleph. . .

The Aleph
– Jorge Luis Borges, 1945

11.1 Introduction
The Anthropic cosmological principle [54, 55] has been criticized, and eventually
rejected as inadequate by some authors, for being heavily inspired on unproved
cosmological models, namely, those known as Hot Big Bang models [56].
Carter [54] presented his Anthropic principle in two versions, weak and
strong, whilst Barrow & Tipler [55] described other versions. The great novelty
lies in the weak version. The discussion that is done here focuses, therefore,
upon the weak version of the principle.
In fact — and it is worth-stressing —, the different versions of the Anthropic
Principle are not different versions of the same principle but rather are indepen-
dent principles by themselves, which is totally opposed to the view expressed
mainly by Barrow & Tipler. Such a thesis is further elaborated elsewhere [57].
Towards a broader and unprejudiced view, one can depart from the idea of
a universe as a world ensemble (e.g., [54]), except that in a different perspective
from what is usually found in the literature, namely, that of a multiverse (see
details in [58] and references therein). Let each world vector — i.e., each element
1 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0409003

65
66 CHAPTER 11. THE ALEPH COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

in the ensemble —, in fact, belong to the same universe, not being a universe by
itself, with its own cosmology, as assumed in the usual world-ensemble approach.
That is to say, the total mass-energy content of the universe is given by adding
up the mass-energy content of each world vector. Furthermore, each world
vector is assumed as potentially suitable for the existence — or development —
of life. In other words, the overall conditions in that — and all — world element
are such that live organisms are bound to emerge. It is thus characterized by
a X-Life world principle, which simply states that world is as it is because of
restrictions imposed by X-Life being the way it is. These are essentially the
same words in Carter’s formulation of his Anthropic principle. Here they are
used in the context of a much broader cosmological view as it will be apparent
below.
The Anthropic principle has been used in many ways since its proposition. A
sort of strange devotion sometimes characterizes those dealing with the principle.
This resulted into an exaggerated bending of the bow towards one direction. The
situation, comprehensibly, led Soares [56] to use irony on the whole issue, in an
attempt to bend the bow to the opposite direction, eventually reaching a state
of reasonable equilibrium. That is also the spirit pervading the present essay,
except that now with a grave approach.

11.2 The E-Life world principle

Ours — the only presently applicable X-Life world principle —, conveniently,
could be termed E-Life world principle, where ”E” stands obviously for ”Earth”.
Since the DNA-molecule is the unifying feature of terrestrial life, the principle
is thus stated as constraints derived from DNA-based life upon the world vector
properties. Very much so, it is the present general idea pervading the Anthropic
principle.
Except for the cosmological implications, much of the conclusions derived
from the Anthropic principle [55] surely still holds. For example, the prediction
by Fred Hoyle concerning the 7.7 MeV excited state of 12 C, which was necessary
in order to increase the probability of the reaction between helium and beryllium
to produce carbon, might be considered as a genuine E-Life world principle
prediction. In 1952, from the evident abundance of carbon — namely, E-Life
—, Hoyle predicted the existence of a resonance of 12 C, in nuclear reactions, at
around 7.7 MeV, and almost immediately, in 1953, D.N.F. Dunbar, R.F. Pixley,
W.A. Wenzel & W. Whaling [59], at Kellogg Radiation Laboratory, Caltech,
discovered a state with the correct properties, at 7.68±0.03 MeV excitation
energy. E-Life would not exist without the 7.7-MeV excited state of 12 C. Such
a prediction is, of course, often mentioned in classic Anthropic discussions (see
[55, p. 252]).
The reason why general cosmological implications are not valid is that a
given cosmology must be applied to the whole world ensemble and not to a sole
element of it. Aleph is the applicable principle here (see below). Cosmological
predictions are always biased when based in a X-Life world principle.
11.3. A HYPOTHETICAL X-LIFE WORLD PRINCIPLE 67

Intelligent life is always an issue whenever one speaks of life. Intelligence,

another variable in the general cosmological equation, is not considered in
the present discussion. Irrespective of its prevalence, communications between
world-ensemble elements, e.g., between a particular X-based organism and a
DNA-based one, may or may not be possible. In any case, whether or not two
elements of the world ensemble are or may be connected in one or other way —
communication being one of them — is entirely irrelevant here.

11.3 A hypothetical X-Life world principle

Sagan & Salpeter [60] discuss many aspects of a possible Jovian biology, an in-
vestigation motivated mainly by the fact that contemporary Jovian atmosphere
has many similarities to the primitive terrestrial atmosphere. They hypothe-
sized the characteristics of Jovian live organisms — in the form of sinkers and
floaters, understandable in a gaseous environment — departing from chemical
composition, temperature, density, pressure and other known features of the
planet atmosphere. Fundamental for the origin of life in Jupiter is the time-
scale taken by synthesized complex molecules to move towards large depths,
as a result of convective streaming. The time-scale should be short enough to
avoid reaching pyrolytic depths, which would severe restrict the possibility of
biological evolution.
Now, take the Sagan-Salpeter problem in the reverse order. Assume sinkers
and floaters are abundant in the Jovian atmosphere. One may then formulate
the J-Life world principle — ”J” for ”Jupiter”. With such a life principle,
properties of the Jovian atmosphere might be obtained in the same way E-Life
— Anthropic — predictions are made.
Incidentally, Jovian live balloons would be, in principle, totally disconnected
from DNA-based terrestrial life. In other words, J-Life world and E-Life world
would be disconnected from each other.
I am assuming here that Jovian organisms are not DNA-based, which may
not be true. But that does not invalidate the example.

11.4 Aleph and Copernicus principles

The Aleph Cosmological Principle is the underlying principle to the world en-
semble, i.e., to the universe. Predictions about the formation, evolution and
structure of the universe — cosmology — are related to the Aleph principle. It
is much more general in scope than each X-Life world principle.
Strictly speaking, X-Life world principles do not need intelligent life to hold.
In particular, E-Life world principle would still hold even in the absence of
mankind, of human beings. This is the essence of what could be termed the
Strong Copernicus principle. As long as any sort of DNA-based life do exist, the
E-Life principle would still be there. Useless, due to the absence of intelligent
life. But still there. The Strong Copernicus principle does not require the
68 CHAPTER 11. THE ALEPH COSMOLOGICAL PRINCIPLE

existence of human beings. Man is not central in the universe, it may even not
exist. Putting it in another form, amongst all DNA-based forms of life, man is
not special. Consciousness makes mankind different — not special — from other
E-life organisms, in the sense that mankind is dotted with moral and ethical
values. These are fundamental aspects of human life but do not change the
biological status of human life. In conclusion, the Strong Copernicus principle
is an imperative scientific principle.
The philosophical implications herein are innumerable and will not be treated
here.

11.5 Conclusion
At this point in time there is only one X-Life principle known. Conceivably, the
Aleph cosmological principle is a matter of speculation. Conceptually, however,
it leads to a broader scenario for the knowledge of the universe we live.
Soares [61] suggests that the arrow of time is given by the prominence of life,
that is, the universe evolves towards life. In an eternal universe, that would lead
to the startling conclusion that the universe itself is alive! The Aleph principle
is, then, at a certain point, vindicated.
The Aleph cosmological principle is the Aleph-Life principle. It is of course
prompted to speculation what is the nature of Aleph-Life, in a way or other,
the live universe. Highly speculative matter, on the other hand, scientifically
unavoidable.
Chapter 12

Do we live in an anthropic
universe?1

Amongst all possible universes we live in one that deserves us. This is what
could be called the naive version of the anthropic principle. At what extent this
view is consistent with modern scientific results obtained from theoretical and
observational work in cosmology?
The anthropic principle was originally put forward by the cosmologist Bran-
don Carter [54] with the statement that ‘our location in the universe is necessar-
ily privileged to the extent of being compatible with our existence as observers’.
(The italic is mine). The definite status as a consensual principle of nature
has been crowned with the thorough account of its implications in seemingly
unpaired areas of human knowledge such as philosophy, quantum mechanics,
cosmology, biochemistry, the search for extraterrestrial life and ultimately the
future of the universe, by John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, in the now clas-
sical book entitled The Anthropic Cosmological Principle ([55]but see Soares
[61]).
Since then, two major achievements in cosmology lie on our pathway, two
brilliant milestones. On the theoretical side, Alan Guth invented the inflation-
ary theory [62] in the early 80’s, and on the observational side, the first results
from the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite were published in the early 90’s
2
. The expanding universe paradigm gained strength with renewed blood from
these sources. Two recent reviews by Michael S. Turner [42] and Max Tegmark
[63] give a clear picture of the present situation. The evidence for a flat global
topology comes from both inflation and measurements of the anisotropy of the
cosmic microwave background on angular scales of about 1 degree. The mea-
surements were triggered by COBE’s spectacular results, from a plethora of
satellite and balloon experiments (see [63]).
Current cosmological models should be at least reassuring of an anthropic
1 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0209094
2 See COBE’s homepage at https://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/cobe/

69
70 CHAPTER 12. AN ANTHROPIC UNIVERSE?

universe. But, what does the cosmic budget tell us? Following Turner one has:
• Bright stars: 0.5%
• Baryonic dark matter: 3.5%
• Nonbaryonic dark matter: 30%

• Dark energy: 66%

Flatness requires that everything adds up to 100% of the closure density. Except
for a half per cent of visible, ordinary, observable matter, we are left with dark,
exquisite, unobservable stuff.
Now, back right to the beginning: aren’t we in the wrong universe?
Chapter 13

Time is life1
A non-specialist’s comment on extraterrestrial life

13.1 Introduction
Life is an event which is intrinsically non-deductible from first principles. This
idea, in a different context, has been claimed and argued by the biologist and
Nobel laureate Jacques Monod in a book published in 1970 [51, chap. II].
Since locally life can neither be denied nor fully predicted, a further step fol-
lows, namely, the declaration of the existence of extraterrestrial life as a principle
of Nature.
The main advantages of a principle for the existence of extraterrestrial life
are: (i) the solution of paradox-like statements concerning extraterrestrial life
(e.g., Fermi’s question), (ii) the suppression of geo- and anthropocentric ideas,
and (iii) the creation of a logical basis for future theoretical and experimental
investigations. In practice the latter means that one does not need to justify any
scientific project on extraterrestrial life searches (for example, [64]) regarding
its logical foundations: the principle provides (is) the foundation.
The crucial experiment for the origin of life has not to be done; it was al-
ready done on Earth. It seems fair to believe that given a set of yet unknown
environmental conditions life is bound to flourish. Examples of such a concep-
tion, i.e., that life is not a privilege of our local environment, are multiple in the
literature, from the early incursions by Giordano Bruno (e.g., [65]) and Christi-
aan Huygens [66] through the modern ages with Robert Goddard (see [67, chap.
18]), Sagan and Salpeter [60], and others.
It is worthwhile pointing out that the meaning of life used here is definitely
not restricted to carbon-based organisms developed upon watery substrates. A
broader concept is envisaged, which is not new and may be found, for example,
in the investigations by Sagan and Salpeter [60] of a possible Jovian ecology, or
in the literary speculations of a living interstellar cloud, by Hoyle [53], and of

1 http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0108180

71
72 CHAPTER 13. TIME IS LIFE

a structured cometary mind, by MacLeod [52] — incidentally, both likely being

fed by some sort of ubiquitous cosmic plankton.
Asserting the precise meaning of life is otherwise beyond the scope of the
present note; the reader is referred to the above-mentioned book by Monod for
a thorough discussion on the definition of a living organism.

13.2 Time is life: a principle

The principle is set up along the following two lines of arguments. (1) The
existence of life on Earth affirms the crucial experiment for the existence of life.
(2) The universe is empirically found to be at least three times as old as life on
Earth. The age of the oldest stars in the Milky Way is taken as a lower limit
estimate for the age of the universe, and the age of the solar system as an upper
limit estimate for the age of life on Earth. Both time-scales are observational
facts resting on well-established scientific studies. The first one, on the physics
of energy production in stars, and the second one, on the laws of radioactive
decay applied to meteorites.
The universe is old enough such that life and a local ecology are expected
features of any environment.
Time is life, that is to say, give it time and life is the irremediable end
product.

13.3 Discussion
In the light of the principle, a number of other topics deserve renewed atten-
tion. Below, four of them are briefly touched: Fermi’s question, the anthropic
principle, extraterrestrial intelligence and panspermia.
The famous question posed by Enrico Fermi in an informal conversation dur-
ing a lunch at Los Alamos, in the summer of 1950 (see later account by Eric M.
Jones [68]), became central in the discussion of the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations (e.g., [69]). “— Where is everybody?”, asked Fermi, talking about
extraterrestrial life. The answer to Fermi’s question is plain and uninteresting:
“— They are where they belong to”. Yet they are, states the extraterrestrial life
principle.
The anthropic principle (see, for example, [55]), which certainly with jus-
tice should be dubbed the masterpiece of the cosmological arrogance, is thus
irrelevant since the human ecology is but one amongst many.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (e.g., the SETI project, see http:
//www.seti.org/) is strengthened by the principle. But an eventual absence
of contact with extraterrestrial civilizations should not be confused with their
non-existence. Establishing contact with alien populations is not a prerogative
of intelligent life but of a given cultural and social characteristic of intelligent
life (e.g., mercantilism, in the case of mankind, as a driving force for contact
between distinct societies on Earth in the XV and XVI century).
13.3. DISCUSSION 73

Finally, it is important to remark that the acceptance, or the eventual empir-

ical verification, of the so-called panspermia paradigm (see electronic links to this
and related issues in http://www.panspermia.org/) makes the extraterrestrial
life principle obvious.

Acknowledgment — I would like to thank Dr. André K.T. Assis for comments
and suggestions on a earlier version of the manuscript.
74 CHAPTER 13. TIME IS LIFE
 Part IV

Various subjects

75
Chapter 14

Falls on the Moon: “That’s

one small fall for a
man. . . ” 1

I fall, therefore I am.

– Mário Novello, 20122

The Brazilian GloboNews cable TV show Espaço Aberto – Ciência e Tecnolo-

gia exhibited, on August 08, 2011, an interview with the ex-astronaut Eugene
Cernan (1934-2017), whom, amongst other missions, commanded in December
1972, the last manned mission to the Moon, the Apollo 17. He became known
as the last man on the Moon, because he was the last to enter the lunar module
at the end of the mission.
The interviewers were three boys and a girl and the interview lasted a little
more than 20 minutes. The Apollo 17 mission was the last to bring astronauts
to the surface of the Moon. The mission was 3 days long on the Moon, and
occurred in December 1972, more than 40 years ago.

1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
~dsoares/apolo-17/apolo-17-e.htm
2 Cosmos e Contexto (http://www.cosmosecontexto.org.br/?p=885)

77
78 CHAPTER 14. FALLS ON THE MOON

Eugene Andrew Cernan, engineer and astronaut, was born on March 14, 1934 and
passed away on January 16, 2017 (aged 82). (Photo: NASA).

One of the interviewers, the boy Daniel Turela Rodrigues (14 years old),
asked the following question: “— How was that moment that you fell on the
Moon, took a tumble?”
Eugene Cernan explained that the weight of anything on the Moon is 1/6
of the weight on Earth, and that makes jumping easy on its surface. Then, the
most efficient way of moving there was through little jumps, like rabbits. On
the other hand, whenever he had to stop, or make a turn, it was very difficult
and many times they took small tumbles.
Tumbles on the Moon highlight three important laws of Newtonian me-
chanics: the law of universal gravitation, the 1st and the 2nd laws of motion.
The law of universal gravitation explains why the weight on the surface of the
Moon is equal to one sixth of the weight on the surface of Earth. With the help
of this law one can mathematically express that statement writing
GMMoon 1 GMEarth
=
R2Moon 6 R2Earth
where G is the universal gravitational constant, the Ms represent the masses
 79

(7.349 × 1022 kg and 5.9736 × 1024 kg) and the Rs represent the radii (1,737.4
km and 6,378.1 km) of the Moon and of the Earth, respectively. GMMoon /R2Moon
is a constant and is called the gravitational acceleration on the Moon (gMoon ).
Likewise, GMEarth /R2Earth is a constant and is called the gravitational accelera-
tion on Earth (gEarth ≈ 9.8 m/s2 ). According to the law of universal gravitation,
a body of mass m has the weight mgMoon on the surface of the Moon and mgEarth
on Earth, therefore, mgMoon = 1/6 mgEarth because gMoon = 1/6 gEarth .
The 1st law is the famous law of inertia, and it states that every body stays
at rest or at uniform rectilinear motion unless there are forces acting upon it.
To change its state of motion, the 2nd law states that it is necessary a force
proportional to the desired change — that is, to the acceleration — multiplied
by the mass of the body, which is a measure of its inertia. All bodies have
inertia, the property to resist any change in their state of rest or motion.
Now, the weight on the Moon is 1/6 of the weight on Earth but the mass does
not change! In other words, the inertia of a body does not change. And note
that Eugene Cernan used an equipment of almost 100 kg! Summing everything
up, he “carried” an inertia of almost 180 kg! His own mass — about 80 kg
— plus the mass of his vest and equipment that, as mentioned, was of about
100 kg. When he tries to stop or make a lightly curved turn he needed the
muscular strength to stop 180 kg, or to have an 180 kg mass making a lightly
curved turn! Add the fact that his speed was often large and, therefore, the
needed acceleration to make a sudden stop or make a fast turn would be large
as well. The required force becomes also large because it is equal to mass times
acceleration, as we saw.
What is the best strategy for not falling? Mass cannot be changed, there-
fore one must change the acceleration. Eugene Cernan and his fellow should
stop slowly and make turns at low speed (remember that things get yet more
complicated in a curve, because the acceleration is proportional to the square
of the speed).
The astronaut also drew the attention to the high center of gravity, with
respect to the ground, of the combined set of astronaut, vest and equipment.
Especially in the curves, that increases considerably the instability leading to
falls. And we can add: irregularities on the terrain and the low flexibility of
the vest and equipment of the astronaut. All these factors, plus the implacable
play between weight and mass (inertia), discussed above, were responsible by
the innumerable falls on the Moon.
Let us appreciate now the lunar tumbles of Eugene Cernan and his fellow?
Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjOnsbodCus.
80 CHAPTER 14. FALLS ON THE MOON
Chapter 15

Observational tests of the

microwave background
radiation1

15.1 Introduction
The concept of a “cosmic” microwave background radiation is introduced in the
standard Big-Bang model in a ad hoc fashion. In spite of that, it is sometimes
taken as a proof of the model. But the MBR may not be cosmic in the first
place. Therefore there is a real necessity of investigating other causes or sources
for it. The present paper considers a local origin for the radiation (see more
details in [70]).
Following the discovery of the MBR, Penzias & Wilson published their find-
ings in the 142nd volume of ApJ, in 1965. An accompanying paper, by Dicke
et al. claimed the cosmic nature of the phenomenon, establishing therefrom the
key foundation of the Big Bang cosmological model. They have in fact appro-
priated themselves of the discovery without leaving any room for other tentative
interpretations of the finding.
But why, at that time, immediately cosmic?
In principle, there is no reason to believe that the MBR is of cosmolog-
ical origin, except if one is willing to accept a coordinated set of theoretical
propositions – with no firm and definitive observational bases – only in order to
legitimate a given cosmological model.
The plan of the present paper is as follows. In section 15.2, the magnetic
bottle scenario for a local MBR is presented and features of a related physical
model are summarized. Section 15.3 discusses observational tests of a local
MBR. In section 15.4, final remarks are presented.

1 http://lilith.fisica.ufmg.br/
~dsoares/mbr/otmbr.pdf

81
82 CHAPTER 15. TESTS OF THE MBR

15.2 The Microwave Background Radiation and

the magnetic bottle scenario

Let us then consider a local approach to the Microwave Background Radiation

(MBR). Earth’s magnetosphere is seen as a magnetic bottle whose walls are made
by solar wind particles trapped along the magnetic lines of the Earth field. A
minute fraction of Sun’s light reflected by the Earth surface is caught within
such a bottle and is thermalized through Thomson scattering on the bottle walls.
The first consequence is that one would expect that the thermalized radiation
should exhibit a dipole anisotropy, given the nature of Earth’s magnetic field.
And that is precisely what was observed by the COBE satellite from its 900-km
altitude orbit.

Although WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, sits far away
from Earth, at the Lagrangean L2 point of the Sun-Earth system (see WMAP
electronic page at the URL http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/ob_techorbit1.
html, which means about 1.5 million km from Earth, that is not enough for it
to be released from the magnetic influence from Earth.

It is located precisely and deep inside the bullet-shaped magnetopause, which

extends to 1000 times the Earth radius or more – approximately 10 million km
(see http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/wmpause.html for details
of the magnetopause).

Figures 15.1 and 15.2 display the same geometry, as far as the Sun-Earth
system is concerned. It is clear from the figures that as the Earth revolves about
the Sun the Lagrangean point L2 – thus WMAP – sits all the time inside Earth’s
magnetopause.
15.2. THE MAGNETIC BOTTLE SCENARIO 83

Figure 15.1: Lagrangean points of the Sun-Earth system. WMAP satellite is shown
at point L2. (Image credit: Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe electronic page.)
84 CHAPTER 15. TESTS OF THE MBR

Figure 15.2: A view of Earth’s magnetopause. The bullet-shaped magnetopause is

always along the Sun-Earth direction (coordinates in Earth radii). The magnetopause
extends to up to 1000 Earth radii. L2 is inside the magnetopause at about 230 Earth
radii. (Image credit: “The Exploration of the Earth’s Magnetosphere”, an educational
web site by David P. Stern and Mauricio Peredo.)

The Earth magnetosphere has a complex structure with variable electron

densities in multiple layers around a neutral sheet at its mid-plane. The tail
boundary – the magnetopause – can reach 500-1000 Earth radii (Figure 15.2).
A simple model for the blackbody cavity may, in a first approximation, ne-
glect anisotropies in the thermal spectrum [71]. The magnetopause is modeled as
a cylindrical cavity with its axis – the z-direction – running along the Sun-Earth
direction. Being R the polar radius, the electron density n(z, R), averaged over
the azimuthal angles, is a well-known observed quantity. Microwave photons
are Thomson scattered inside the cavity till thermal equilibrium is attained in a
time-scale much shorter than Earth’s age. The precise source of the microwave
photons is not critical since there are many possibilities. The most obvious is
the long wavelength tail of the solar spectrum; far infrared photons from Earth
itself might be another possibility (see below the discussion of radio thermal
15.3. OBSERVATIONAL TESTS 85

emission from solar system planets). Anisotropies are considered with a more
realistic electron density distribution [71].

15.3 Observational tests

As long as one considers a local MBR, a plethora of observational tests come to
light. Three major tests are discussed here.

15.3.1 Non earthly MBR probe

A straight consequence – easily testable – is that the background radiation
from other “magnetic bottles” – other planets – will be different, with a different
thermal spectrum, possibly non thermal and even nonexistent. A probe orbiting
another solar system planet like Mars, Venus, etc, would verify the hypothesis.

15.3.2 MBR anisotropy time variation

The Earth magnetotail oscillates about its axis during the yearly revolution
around the Sun by as much as 5 to 20 degrees [72]. This introduces a measurable
time variation on MBR anisotropies. An observational program that measures
the MBR at different phases of Earth’s orbit would detect such variations.

15.3.3 Planetary thermal glow

The importance of radio thermal emission from planets is twofold. First, thermal
emission may be the source of background radiation photons, and, second, the
thermal glow may be the exterior manifestation of the background radiation
itself. That is, the radiation which is interpreted as a “cosmic” background
radiation when measured from within the planetary environment – the magnetic
bottle – is observed as a thermal glow from the outside.
There are many antecedents in observing thermal glows from planets in the
radio-wave range. Mercury has a thermal 400 K glow and Venus was found to
have an approximate 500 K glow by Mayer et al. [73]. Radio emission from
Mars and Jupiter at 3.15 cm and 9.4 cm are reported by Mayer et al. [74]. A
blackbody temperature of 210 K was found for Mars and 140 K for Jupiter.
A reasonable prediction is that if one looks at the right wavelength range,
one should be able to find the magnetic bottle signature of planetary emission.
Thus, the detection of Earth’s 3 K thermal emission from the outside would be
a strong indication of a local MBR.

15.4 Concluding remarks

The next MBR anisotropy probe, NASA’s Planck satellite, is scheduled for
launch in 2007. Again, it is planned to sit at Lagrangean L2 point, just like
86 CHAPTER 15. TESTS OF THE MBR

WMAP (see briefing of Planck mission at https://www.esa.int/Enabling_

Support/Operations/Planck).
It would be a great opportunity to test the validity of the magnetic bottle
scenario if Planck’s observation site is moved to outside the earthly environment.
The immediate suggestion is a stationary point on a Mars orbit, with the probe
being obscured from solar radiation by the planet, similar to the Sun-Earth-
WMAP configuration.
Planck will measure, like WMAP did, background anisotropies. To measure
the background radiation spectrum a COBE-like probe should be sent to Mars,
with replicas of COBE’s three instruments, FIRAS, DMR and DIRBE. The goal
is to measure Martian background radiation spectrum and its anisotropies, just
like COBE did on Earth.
The obvious prediction is that the thermal background – if it is indeed
thermal – will be totally different from the 3 K spectrum observed from Earth’s
magnetic bottle.
The MBR investigation would be considerably enriched by the following
crucial observational tests:

1. time variability of the MBR on the scale of fraction of a solar year, and
2. measurement of the MBR in another planetary environment.
Both tests are unthinkable in the framework of a MBR with a cosmic origin but
are quite natural experiments from the point of view of a local origin for the
MBR.
Chapter 16

Sandage versus Hubble on

the reality of the expanding
universe1

We are certainly not to relinquish

the evidence of experiments for
the sake of dreams and vain
fictions of our own devising.
Mathematical Principles of Natural
Philosophy, Book III
– I. Newton, 1687

16.1 Introduction
To begin with let us state clearly what are Sandage’s and Hubble’s opinions on
the reality of the expanding universe.
Since his discovery of the redshift-distance linear relation, Hubble did not
accept the direct interpretation of a Doppler effect as being responsible for the
spectral shifts. He was still reluctant in accepting the reality of the expansion
as late as 1953, the year of his death ([75], hereafter LS01).
Sandage, on the contrary, mainly based on his and collaborators’ long time
work on the Tolman effect (in fact, since 1991, see references in LS01), believes
that the expansion of the universe is a reality.
Now, LS01’s conclusion is rather inconclusive, if one sticks to basic concepts
of epistemology. After their analysis of the surface brightness (SB) of 34 early-
type galaxies is completed, they state, at the end of §4.2: “Therefore, we assert
1 https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0605098

87
88 CHAPTER 16. SANDAGE VERSUS HUBBLE

that we have either (1) detected the evolutionary brightening directly from
the hSBi observations on the assumption that the Tolman effect exists or (2)
confirmed that the Tolman test for the reality of the expansion is positive,
provided that the theoretical luminosity correction for evolution is real (emphases
added).”
What do they assert anyway? We shall keep for the purposes of the present
paper what they write in the abstract: “We conclude that the Tolman surface
brightness test is consistent with the expansion to within the combined errors
of the observed hSBi depression and the theoretical corrections for luminos-
ity evolution (emphases added).” The effect may be consistent but given the
conditional statements it may not exist at all.
On the other side, Hubble’s position was much more coherent, from the
scientific point of view. Although referred to as “a reductionist bench scientist”
(LS01, §1.3), Hubble solely relied (mistakenly, according to Sandage) on the
interpretation of his observational data and their accuracy. As far as we know,
such a procedure — as regular scientific behavior — was inaugurated by the
brilliant Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, in the XVI century, and has proved
wise and successful beyond any doubt. But Sandage adds that besides that
mistake, Hubble used also a mistaken theory of how redshifts should vary with
distance. Why, one should ask: how could Hubble use the correct theory if he
was, to begin with, looking for the correct theory?
The approach adopted by Sandage in his investigation of the Tolman effect
is in fact a masterpiece of tautology and hermeneutical circularity, in spite of his
clear intention of hiding it (some hints in §2).
In the XXI century, Sandage still plays with q◦ , H◦ = 50 and Mattig’s
equations. When he is warned that his cosmology mates are talking now about
a Lambda-dominated universe, he reduces (a reductionist?) all of the entire
new-cosmology standard model to a simple and empty q◦ = 0 universe (quoted
as “almost identical”, see LS01, end of §5).
Cosmology is still a heavy-speculated field in spite of the enormous efforts
on presumable cosmology-sensitive observations. In such an environment, scien-
tists are not expected to make incisive statements unless they are supported by
definitely secure evidence, both on the theoretical and experimental or observa-
tional sides. The paper under criticism is an example of the uncertain chain that
links speculation to speculation in order to confirm speculation. The scientific
procedure is there but the scientific soul is not. In other words, pretty and nice
formal science leading to no real scientific conclusion. That is the way LS01
should be read.

16.2 The Tolman effect

The Tolman test [76] for the reality of the expansion, in Friedmann-Robertson-
Walker universes, predicts a (1+z)4 dependence of the surface brightness with
redshift. It is formulated as follows. Consider a source of luminosity Le at
emission, located at comoving distance D, on the time of reception. An observer
16.3. SANDAGE AND COLLABORATORS’ INCONSISTENCIES 89

receives the luminosity Le /(1 + z)2 , dimmed by both the redshifted photons and
by time dilation on reception. The flux detected by the observer is then given
by F = Le /[(1 + z)2 4πD2 ].
The observed angular size of the source, with linear size Re at emission, is
θ = Re (1 + z)/D. The average surface brightness is calculated from hSBi =
F/(πθ2 ) = Le /[4π 2 Re2 (1 + z)4 ] = hSBe i/(1 + z)4 . This can be expressed in mag-
nitudes as hSBM i = hSBMe i + 2.5 log(1 + z)4 , which is the usual presentation
of the Tolman surface brightness test for the reality of the expanding universe.

16.3 Sandage and collaborators’ inconsistencies

There are a number of inconsistencies in Sandage and co-workers’ approach to
the Tolman test. Of course, these are often overlooked by a biased Reader.
In their last paper, LS01, the following list shows the main drawbacks in their
study.
1) The analysis is made upon a toy model of the universe. A Friedmann
model characterized by the deceleration parameter q◦ , a Hubble constant of
50, and the classical Mattig’s equations for the dependence of the quantities of
interest on the redshift z.
2) Three decisive proofs, presented in LS01, that the expansion is real are
everything but decisive (see §1.4 and references therein). Two of then, the time
dilation test in the light curves of supernovae, and the running of the blackbody
radiation as a function of redshift are jeopardized by evolutionary effects, still
unsolved. To accept these tests as real tests is left to anybody’s wish. The
third, namely, the so-called “vertical normalization” of the background Planck-
ian curve is justified by a conversation between Sandage and P.J.E. Peebles, as
stated in the acknowledgments. Now, science needs more than authoritative dis-
cussions as scientific demonstrations. Incidentally, the third proof is considered
by LS01 (§1.4.3) as the definitive proof of the Tolman effect. One might with
reason then ask: why go on further with the investigation?
Speaking of authority, it is worthwhile mentioning two authoritative opinions
on the significance of the microwave background radiation in cosmology. Fred
Hoyle [77] states that

“There is no explanation at all of the microwave background in the

Big Bang theory. All you can say for the theory is that it permits
you to put it in if you want to put it in. So, you look and it is there,
so you put it in directly. It isn’t an explanation.”

And Jean-Claude Pecker [78] reaffirms:

“Actually, the 3 degree radiation, to me, has not a cosmological

value. It is observed in any cosmology: in any cosmology you can
predict the 3 degree radiation. So it is a proof of no cosmology at
all, if it can be predicted of all cosmology.”
90 CHAPTER 16. SANDAGE VERSUS HUBBLE

3) Section 5 of LS01 is dedicated to the tired-light speculation, as they put it.

To be fair, the discussion presented in this section is useless, from the scientific
point of view, since it compares a speculation with a toy model (the Friedmann
cosmology). Besides that, “tired light” is in fact the name of a general paradigm:
it is still a paradigm in search of a theory (note that the same epithet has been
already addressed to another speculation, namely, Guth’s inflation). Being such,
there are many possible theories of the tired-light mechanism. It is not clear
what theory LS01 considers, which is another weak point of their comparison.
By the way, their intention is to compare the tired-light model with observations.
As shown above, epistemology again teaches us that their approach is not valid.
4) LS01 naturally recognizes that luminosity evolution affects both the ob-
served surface brightness and the absolute magnitude of galaxies. But they
make the crucial assumption that it does not affect galaxy radius (§3.1). Now,
such an assumption is probably not true since the radius is calculated from the
Petrossian metric radius, defined as the difference in magnitude between the
mean surface brightness averaged over the area interior to a particular radius
and the surface brightness at that radius (see §1.5).
5) The calculation of the theoretical luminosity evolution from stellar pop-
ulation synthesis is also plagued with LS01’s naive assumptions. The age as a
function of redshift, T(z) (eqs. 8 and 9), is taken from their preferred toy model.
Of course, Sandage’s stickiness to H◦ = 50 is somewhat alleviated here. In his
(their) words (§4.1): “For these calculations, we must use the real value of H◦
(emphasis added).” One should not be surprised to know that his real value of
H◦ is 58 km/s Mpc−1 .
6) In §4.2, with the evolutionary calculation, they assume overall solar abun-
dances because the metallicities of cluster galaxies are not strongly constrained
from the observations. It is well known that different input metallicities onto
evolutionary codes lead to substantial different synthesis results.
7) In section 7, they explicitly admit two systematic uncertainties in the
study. First, a minor technical problem in the galaxy radius calculation —
already contaminated by a major problem, as shown above –, and, second,
they acknowledge the selection bias present in the galaxy sample. Anyway, as
expected, they assure that “neither of them are severe enough to jeopardize the
results.” We may otherwise simply disagree with that.

16.4 Concluding remarks

As a matter of science, the Tolman surface brightness test for the reality of the
expansion of the universe remains inconclusive.

16.4.1 The contemporaneity of the doubt

Hubble versus Sandage: two antagonized scientific attitudes. Both scientists
are confronted with the unknown and their reactions are completely opposite
to each other. Why would Sandage’s attitude be on the wrong track? Simply
16.4. CONCLUDING REMARKS 91

because Friedmann models were at Hubble’s time as valid as arguing for an

still unknown behavior of Nature as the cause leading to the redshift-distance
relation. As time went by, such an attitude revealed itself to be more and
more trustful. Nowadays, one see that modern cosmological models — in fact,
modified Friedmann models — are totally unsatisfactory. One of the main
desired outcomes of modern cosmology, namely, the matter-energy content of
the universe does not conform to the real world: out of the total matter-energy
budget only 0.5% is proved to exist from direct observations (see summary in
Soares [79]).
One might well ask: how can Sandage and collaborators make so many weak
assumptions, in the dangerous terrain of the gravely unknown, yet be tolerated
by their science mates, and at the end conclude that something that is consistent
with the expansion model is indeed true, when even the expansion model itself
is totally in question because of its definitively wrong matter-energy budget
prediction?
Hubble’s initial caution would be much more desired, and remains valid
today. He had the essential skeptical attitude of a real investigator of Nature.
Today, we must doubt the reality of the expansion because the expansion
scenario is part of a cosmological model that has failed in giving a consistent
picture of the universe we live.

16.4.2 Sandage’s style

The fragility of Sandage’s scientific approach is hidden under an extreme ped-
agogical style of paper writing. His copious use of scientific references and
textbook style confuses rather than convinces the critical Reader.
It is curious — and one is referred here to the realm of psychology — that
Sandage does not mention the most likely and scientifically palatable reason
for Hubble’s reluctance in accepting the expanding universe explanation of his
redshift-distance law: the age problem. With Hubble’s constant of the time, the
age of the universe turns out to be about half of the geological age of the Earth.
Hubble died in 1953, precisely when Walter Baade made the first substantial
revision of Hubble’s constant. History tells us then that Sandage himself devoted
a gigantic effort to put it even down, reaching finally the now famous 50 figure.
One might well speculate — in the realm of psychology still — that Sandage
does not mention the age problem as the main scientific reason for Hubble’s
doubt because he would be revealing his own personal hell: he fights also with
an age problem — remember, he is a celebrated champion of modern cosmology
— and that is the reason of his beloved 50 or lower.

16.4.3 Last
The age problem, again and again. Where has it led modern Big Bang cosmology
to? To a completely dark and unknown universe. But, in principle, that is not
a big problem at all, as long as one is satisfied with playing with universe toy-
models. Exactly the way we witness Sandage and collaborators doing with their
92 CHAPTER 16. SANDAGE VERSUS HUBBLE

investigation of the Tolman effect.

16.4.4 But not least

A. Brynjolfsson [80] discussed Lubin and Sandage’s data in the light of plasma
redshift theory. He claims that the Tolman test is consistent with plasma red-
shift cosmology [81] which predicts that the Tolman factor is close to (1+z)3
and not to (1+z)4 , as required by the Big-Bang cosmology. It is worthwhile to
reproduce the abstract of Brynjolfsson’s work [80] mentioned above.

“Surface Brightness Test and Plasma Redshift”

The plasma redshift of photons in a hot sparse plasma follows from
basic axioms of physics. It has no adjustable parameters [81]. Both
the distance-redshift relation and the magnitude-redshift relation
for supernovae and galaxies are well-defined functions of the average
electron densities in intergalactic space. We have previously shown
that the predictions of the magnitude-redshift relation in plasma-
redshift cosmology match well the observed relations for the type
Ia supernovae (SNe). No adjustable parameters such as the time
variable “dark energy” and “dark matter” are needed. We have also
shown that plasma redshift cosmology predicts well the intensity and
black body spectrum of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
Plasma redshift explains also the spectrum below and above the 2.73
K black body CMB, and the X-ray background. In the following,
we will show that the good observations and analyses of the relation
between surface brightness and redshift for galaxies, as determined
by Allan Sandage and Lori M. Lubin in 2001 [75], are well predicted
by the plasma redshift. All these relations are inconsistent with
cosmic time dilation and the contemporary big-bang cosmology.

C.F. Gallo [82] presented, in the 2006 April meeting of the American Phys-
ical Society, work in progress, in which he discusses a general thermodynamic
argument that would justify a “Tired Light Concept”. In order to duplicate
a Doppler Redshift it is required a detailed microscopic treatment of the pho-
ton/light interaction with the interacting medium (plasma, atoms, molecules,
negative ions, etc), which has not been conclusively demonstrated theoretically
or experimentally yet.
Gallo’s abstract presented at the APS meeting is reproduced below.

“Thermalization Tendency of Electromagnetic Radiation in Transit

Through Astrophysical Mediums”
As Electromagnetic Radiation from a hot source transits through
a cooler interacting medium, the following are demonstrated from
thermodynamic arguments.
(1) The “hot” radiation always loses some energy to the cooler in-
teracting medium.
(2) Detailed behavior depends upon the microscopic nature of the
16.4. CONCLUDING REMARKS 93

interacting medium.
(3) A Redshift will occur, but not necessarily imitate the wavelength
dependence of the Doppler Redshift.
(4) A Doppler-type redshift will occur only under certain conditions.
(5) The loss of radiative energy to the intergalactic medium will con-
tribute to the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation.
The following characteristics depend upon the detailed nature of the
interacting medium.
(1) The photon energy loss per collision.
(2) The magnitude (cross-sections) of the thermalization process.
(3) The energy dependence of the cross- section for various mediums.
(4) Forward propagation characteristics of the Redshifted EM radi-
ation.
Although the effects are small, the cumulative redshift in astrophys-
ical situations can be significant. Earthly experiments are planned.

At this point it is interesting to recall what happened in the past, in a simi-

lar situation, when Einstein gave a heuristic interpretation to the photoelectric
effect. One can make an useful counterpoint to the redshift effect observed by
Hubble.
Einstein’s heuristic model departed from the following experimental evi-
dences (e.g., [83]):

(a) the effect does not depend on the intensity of the radiative source;

(b) short wavelength blackbody radiation is described by the Wien limit;

(c) large wavelength blackbody radiation is described by the Rayleigh-Jeans

distribution.

A heuristic program for the redshift effect might likewise consider at least the
following observational evidences:

(a) the effect depends on the flux of the source according to Hubble’s law;

(b) the effect does not depend on the wavelength of the radiation;

(c) the effect is quantized ([84, 85] and references therein).

Such a program would certainly clear the way for a theory to the tired-light
paradigm.
Turning now to the Microwave Background Radiation (MBR), Halton Arp
in one of his books [85, p. 237] cites an authentic Fred Hoyle’s aphorism:

“A man who falls asleep on the top of a mountain and who awakes
in a fog does not think he is looking at the origin of the Universe.
He thinks he is in a fog.”
94 CHAPTER 16. SANDAGE VERSUS HUBBLE

Let us then consider a local approach to MBR. Being freed from the “prison”
of the Hot Big Bang Cosmology one may speculate on an earthly origin for the
MBR. Earth’s magnetosphere can be seen as a magnetic bottle whose walls are
made by solar wind particles trapped along the magnetic lines of the Earth field.
A minute fraction of Sun’s light reflected by the Earth surface is caught within
such a bottle and is thermalized through Thomson scattering on the bottle walls.
The first consequence is that one would expect that the thermalized radiation
should exhibit a dipole anisotropy, given the nature of Earth’s magnetic field.
And that is precisely what was observed by the COBE satellite from its 900-km
altitude orbit.

A straight consequence — easily testable — is that the background radiation

from other “magnetic bottles” — other planets — will be different, with a
different thermal spectrum, possibly non thermal and even nonexistent. A probe
orbiting another solar system planet like Mars, Venus, etc, would verify the
hypothesis. Although WMAP, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, sits
far away from Earth, at the Lagrangean L2 point of the Sun-Earth system
(see WMAP electronic page at the URL http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_mm/
ob_techorbit1.html), which means about 1.5 million km from Earth, that is
not enough for it to be released from the magnetic influence from Earth (Figure
16.1).

Although its large altitude, it is located precisely and deep inside the bullet-
shaped magnetopause, which extends to 1000 times the Earth radius or more
— approximately 10 million km (see Figure 16.2 and http://www-spof.gsfc.
nasa.gov/Education/wmpause.html for more details about the magnetopause).
16.4. CONCLUDING REMARKS 95

Figure 16.1: Lagrangean points of the Sun-Earth system. WMAP is shown around
L2. Image credit: Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe electronic page.
96 CHAPTER 16. SANDAGE VERSUS HUBBLE

Figure 16.2: A view of Earth’s magnetopause. The bullet-shaped magnetopause

is always along the Sun-Earth direction. L2 is inside the magnetopause at about
230 Earth radii. Image credit: “The Exploration of the Earth’s Magnetosphere”, an
educational web site by David P. Stern and Mauricio Peredo.
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