I think there's a coherent explanation of the cmb be had there, but it's not the conventional explanation.
Under this alternative, the universe cooled to light transparency some time before the moment depicted by the cmb, and anything "further away" than that hugely magnified scene just happened outside of our light cone. That is to say, it's "elsewhere" (a technical term (https://web.phys.ksu.edu/fascination/Interlude1.pdf)).
Seems to me that in this alternative, cosmic expansion could be explained as gravitational attraction between elsewhere-matter and matter in our light cone.
Imagine there's some argument to be made for why this is not the case, but I don't know it. It would require a bit of explaining re: why that point in history and not some other?
- Is it that the maximal distance is constant and that the cmb is subtly changing in ways we havent noticed (as the point of most-distant-past moves forward in time)
- Or maybe something caused the speed of light to change at that time, pruning the rest of the universe from our view.
Under this alternative, the universe cooled to light transparency some time before the moment depicted by the cmb, and anything "further away" than that hugely magnified scene just happened outside of our light cone. That is to say, it's "elsewhere" (a technical term (https://web.phys.ksu.edu/fascination/Interlude1.pdf)).
Seems to me that in this alternative, cosmic expansion could be explained as gravitational attraction between elsewhere-matter and matter in our light cone.
Imagine there's some argument to be made for why this is not the case, but I don't know it. It would require a bit of explaining re: why that point in history and not some other?
- Is it that the maximal distance is constant and that the cmb is subtly changing in ways we havent noticed (as the point of most-distant-past moves forward in time)
- Or maybe something caused the speed of light to change at that time, pruning the rest of the universe from our view.