The observations of Edwin Hubble in 1929 suggested that distant galaxies were all apparently moving away from us, so that many scientists came to accept that the universe was expanding. These scientists however did not include Hubble himself. While the metric expansion of space reading of Hubble's 1929 observations is viewed today by most scientists as the correct reading of the data, Hubble wrote six years later:
QUOTE (E. Hubble)
"... if redshift are not primarily due to velocity shift ... the velocity-distance relation is linear, the distribution of the nebula is uniform, there is no evidence of expansion, no trace of curvature, no restriction of the time scale ... and we find ourselves in the presence of one of the principle of nature that is still unknown to us today ... whereas, if redshifts are velocity shifts which measure the rate of expansion, the expanding models are definitely inconsistent with the observations that have been made ... expanding models are a forced interpretation of the observational results"
- E. Hubble, Ap. J., 84, 517, 1936
and
QUOTE (E.Hubble)
"[If the redshifts are a Doppler shift] ... the observations as they stand lead to the anomaly of a closed universe, curiously small and dense, and, it may be added, suspiciously young. On the other hand, if redshifts are not Doppler effects, these anomalies disappear and the region observed appears as a small, homogeneous, but insignificant portion of a universe extended indefinitely both in space and time."
- E. Hubble, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 97, 506, 1937
Mistake is the assumption that cosmic red shift is due to Doppler effect.
Existence of gravitational constant means that light is red-shifted due to repulsive gravity effect on very large distances.
Even Einstein himself apparently has been fooled by "expanding universe" idea and didn't finished his works based on cosmological constant. Maybe this is a reason why he didn't succeed with his general relativity theory: due to misconception.
Today I'm convinced that "expanding universe" is one of biggest mistakes which Physics has ever made. That's why we hear this constant mumbling about "dark energy" and "dark mass":
/Z