Lunacy

Some real crankery at Phys.org this morning.

How did this nonsense get published? This is some wild stuff.

New models of gravity and cosmology could also be premised on Lษ…. In cosmology, the energy released from the gravitational energy of the entire universe due to Lษ… can function as Einsteinโ€™s original cosmological constant ษ…, preventing cosmic collapse into a singularity. Gravity can be modeled as just the flipside of this process.

No it definitely cannot and is not! What in the hell.

This clown treats โ€œenergy released from gravityโ€ (turned into heat/light) as if it could play the role of the cosmological constant. It simply cannot. As any Physics 101 book will tell you, heat and light is ordinary energy that thins out as the universe expands. On the other hand, the cosmological constant is a special kind of โ€œvacuumโ€ effect that does not dilute the same way at all. Thatโ€™s why itโ€™s called a frickinโ€™ โ€œconstant!โ€

The article also assumes thereโ€™s a single, well-defined โ€œgravitational energy of the entire universeโ€ that you can draw down like a bank account. In standard general relativity for an expanding universe there isnโ€™t this kind of energy bookkeeping, so this makes no sense right at the outset.

It also implies this process could act like a constant background term. But anything tied to the expansion rate and to the universeโ€™s changing mass distribution would vary over time, which is the opposite of what โ€œacts like the cosmological constantโ€ means for any observation.

And what the heck does, โ€œGravity is the flipside of this processโ€ mean? No! It really isnโ€™t! Thatโ€™s a cereal box slogan, not a theory. Unless itโ€™s backed by precise equations that reproduce what gravity demonstrably does (lensing, time dilation, gravitational waves, equivalence principle, etc.), itโ€™s all absolute crap.

And then I looked the guy, Matthew Edwards, up. Heโ€™s a librarian. Not a physicist, not a cosmologist. And he has a whole passel of papers that are all absolutely lunatic.

Please keep this garbage out of Phys.org.

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