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Expansion

Since expansion was able to overcome gravity at the beginning - at the moment of gravity’s greatest attraction - therefore expansion has always been stronger than gravity. Which means that at no later time in the universe, would gravity be able to reverse the effect of expansion, pool matter, and form stars, galaxies and clusters. It would never happen.


The kluge to fix this problem is a very complex one, with with Baryonic Plasma cooling and arbitrary clumpiness at the moment of the Big Bang and with that clumpiness getting what they call “frozen in” at certain epochs of expansion, despite spacetime expanding faster than the speed of light.


A more elegant model might not have expansion and gravity fight and contradict each other, because gravity would always lose. A more elegant solution would be for expansion itself to lead directly to the clumping of particles, where the much weaker gravity could take over, and form galaxies and superstructures.


And if we look at the universe around us today, we don’t see something that looks like universal expansion, which would be that mist of particles. Instead, we see something more like Swiss cheese. We see an entirely consistent pattern of matter filaments, ringing huge nearly empty voids. This pattern repeats itself on all visible scales. The largest of those, the supervoids, can be billions upon billions of light years wide, with almost no matter at all.


That visible pattern of voids and filaments also makes it look like spacetime is not necessarily exanding at the same rate, which the Big Bang asserts. Because it sure looks as if space expanded a lot in the voids, and very little at the filaments. The Big Bang model, by contrast, insists that spacetime is expanding uniformally, despite how things appear. Later (or ‘In the comments below’), I’ll deal with some reasons why the Hubble Constant may be an illusion.


In fact, if the voids are evidence of expansion, then you can see how the expansion of those voids might actually help keep the filaments together. If this void and that void are both expanding toward the filament of matter between them, that expansion of spacetime from multiple directions could actually exert a sort of pressure, keeping the filament itself from spreading out. Thus, expansion of spacetime in the voids might actually lead to clumping of matter in the filaments. This would be a much more elegant solution than having gravity and expansion fight each other.


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