Let me add that I am very disappointed in Science - Since it really only started in the 1920's, it made huge strides by converting the occult philosophies of relativity and quantum mechanics into rigorous systems in its first few years of existence, and then petered out, having done noting of equal import since. Science is nearly a hundred years old now, and in the last sixty, about the best it can boast about is remaking the occult mysticism of the continental drift doctrine into properly falsifiable Plate Tectonics. Really, it's Tragic.
I would argue that while it is debatable when exactly science started it was before the 1920's. Newton was certainly important but I agree that he wasn't really a modern scientist. There was however plenty of science done before the 1920's much of classical mechanics and wave dynamics, rudimentary atomic theory and thermodynamics was all good science and done well before the 1920's.
The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were never occult philosophies describing them as such really ignores the history of how they were discovered and formalised. They were both very much science from the start, falsifiable hypothesis created to explain gaps in current theories to explain experimental evidence. That were then confirmed by experiment before being widely accepted.
I don't know where you get the idea that nothing has been done in the last 60 years. For a start the formalism of QFT and into making predictions and its amazing agreement with experiment are within that time frame. The standard model including precision measurements of CP violation, most of QCD and neutrino physics (the discovery of their mass very recent) are all new. Cosmology and astrophysics have also made huge progress recently as has condensed matter and nano technology physics. These are all just examples from physics since I can name these off the top of my head but the other sciences have also been busy.
I'm confused.
You have a telescope that receives light from a distant object. At first:
-you don't know what it is made of
-you don't know how far away it is
-and you don't know how fast its relative motion is
How can you use red shift to predict relative motion? A shift implies a motion, and you don't know where it is moving from.
How can you make any prediction about composition if you can't be sure of the shift?
How can you make and prediction about distance if you are making up numbers about the previous two?
I've got to read a book or two on cosmology sometime. I suspect there is a lot of 'splaining left out.
And I would expect the oldest galaxies to have the least amount of hydrogen left, having had stars burning it the longest.
It goes like this:
You use epctral analysis to determine what its made of by looking for known patterns in the spectrum of the light
You measure the redshift, to estimate the distance you either guess the absolute magnitude (which can often be done with gallaxies to at least give an upper limit) or you use hubbles law and assuming you have a good value of hubbles parameter you can convert red shift to distance. This is a bit circular and relies on you allready having found the distance of lots of objects without having to resort to this.
The redshift gives the relative motion and can be measured very acuratly and very easily.
You can tell the composition beofer you know the shift in fact you use the composition you get the shift.
While your not making up the numbers of the previous two it is worth pointing out that the distance measurement is not independent in some cases so you have to be very carefull the measurement of distance may be relying on your cosmological assumptions. Not all distance measurements are like this but the further back you go the harder it is to get a an independent measurement.
If you read a couple of books on cosmology most will cover these very basic principles any explaining left out will be in the larger more advanced books on cosmology.
Remember telescopes look back in time, these gallaxies are the ones that formed earliest.
The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh
