I finally was able to identify and resolve my confusion about Hubble's Law. First, let's use a geometric model to establish that the recessional velocity of distant galaxies increases as the universe expands. For convenience, assume the universe is spherically shaped and uniformly expanding, and consider two galaxies at distances of one and ten billion light years removed from our own. As r, the radius of the universe increases linearly, so will the separation distances of these remote galaxies, since the arc distances to these galaxies, if they placed e.g, on the equator, will also increase linearly. So in some unit of time, if say the rate of increase is 10%, the closer galaxy will recede by 10% of 1 billion light years, or 100 milllion light years, whereas the most distant galaxy will recede 1 billion light years in *the same time duration*. So clearly, in an expanding universe, more distant galaxies will recede faster than nearer galaxies.
Let's now consider the light emitted from these galaxies. The light reaching us left those galaxies 1 and 10 billion years ago respectively. If their red shifts represent their recessional velocities when the light was emitted, it would imply that in the early universe those galalaxies were receding very rapidly, the farther away *in time* they are, that is the more distant they are, the more rapidly they must be receding. But this contradicts the geometric model, wherein we have inferentially proven the opposite; that in early times, those galaxies were receding with *decreasing *velocity as their separation distances from us was decreasing. So what the hell is going on? The answer is that although the light emitted from those galaxies was emitted in the distant past, the expansion of the universe distorted those emissions as they propagated in our direction. That is, the red shifts observed were caused by the expansion of the universe, and therefore represents the current red shifts of those receding galaxies. AG -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/3489c308-bc34-47e8-934f-995322a0b415n%40googlegroups.com.
