New cosmological model does away with the Big Bang

sounds interesting

I've been hearing mentions of the Big Bang having been overturned. Interesting ideas to follow.

I remember. I was there. Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias (and my father) all worked at Bell Labs right down the street from my house. But I was a kid and they were adults. Bob Wilson was my best friend's father I spent a lot of time over their house when I was a kid.

Ros, that's cool!

So... can anyone tell me what length means in that article?

You were right length=distance between two points ie physical dimension. That would be a vector.

Yes, it's synonymous. Your length equals the distance between your head and your toes, even in Mr. Shu's model. More generally, he is talking about the (x, y, z) coordinates in the three-dimensional space of traditional Newtonian physics. But he can't use the plain-English word "space" here because it can be ambiguous and confusing in the context of relativistic physics. Physicists have always considered this a physical dimension.

The reason Mr. Shu needs mathematical trickery around basic concepts such as length, time, and mass is that he postulates a variable light speed and a variable gravitational constant. This is a problem because an astronomer would measure length in light years, not meters. So how does he distinguish the statements "light speed has gotten faster" from "everything has gotten longer" or "time is running slower"? Similarly, how does he distinguish the statement "the gravitational constant has increased" from "everything has gained mass"? To solve this problem, he needs to do some mathematical legwork to keep his houskeeping consistent. There's no deep insight behind it, just housekeeping.

Yes. I learned a lot at a very young age from hanging around with that family. They had a poster on their wall in the family room which had a cool "astronomy picture" and said "Naked Singularity" on it. That was long before I had ever knew what a Black Hole was, but I remember we (his son Phil and I) asked Bob what it meant one day and he explained it to us. I was probably 8yrs old. I don't remember understanding what he told us, but I remember him giving us an answer to our question (before we got bored and ran into the back yard).

I never met Arno Penzias, but Bob was (and still is) a very nice man. He's soft spoken and friendly with an easy smile. Our families are still friends even though we all live in different states now.

At last! Never been a fan of that big bang theory anyways.