On Wed, 8 May 2002, Andrzej Marecki wrote:

Yet another "non-orthodox" view on SN dimming attributed to the expansion of the Universe:

http://t8web.lanl.gov/people/terning/axion.html

Well, to me it looks like just one of the many theoretical ideas of what dark energy could be: it does not avoid having some form of quintessence/dark energy.

I'm not that worried whether or not � is positive, zero or negative. ;) (When people say "accelerating universe", they of course do not mean d^2 X/dt^2 > 0 where X is a spatial position, they mean that � > 0, where a is the scale factor.)

The fact of having new stuff in the universe is still exciting!

BTW, it's interesting that their ideas affect both (i) apparent magnitudes via physical change of photons (ii) the standard distance-redshift relations.

Standard comoving ruler measurements would be independent of (i).

But they would be able to measure (ii) by estimating w_Q. So, let's measure w_Q ;).

Cze�� boud