Ben,

One thing to consider about math is that it's reductionist. We distill our perceptions of this reality down to their most stable forms and patterns, but is this descriptive, or explanatory? Do we have the skeleton, or the seed?

It seems that many normal mathematicians seem to also view it somewhat religiously. That reality is composed of mathematical Platonic forms. Yet what has been distilled away, or unknown, to begin with?

For example, epicycles were brilliant math, as a predictively accurate description of our view of the sky, but the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation, because the bigger reality, of the territory was unknown.

Consider that when we say 1+1=2, what we are really saying is that if you add 2 sets of 1, you get one set of 2. If you actually add things together, say piles of sand, or ingredients of a cake, what you necessarily have is 1 of something larger, otherwise the process of addition didn't happen.

Consider as well the idea of space as 3 dimensional; What is really being referred to is the xyz coordinate system and that is a mapping device. Are longitude, latitude and altitude really foundational to the biosphere of this planet, or a mapping device used to describe it? Do they describe, or explain?

If you have 2 different coordinate systems, with different axes, wouldn' that be 6 dimensional? Think of political conflicts, where different peoples use different narrative timelines to map out the same space; Wouldn't that be political multiworlds?

Or the Big Bang Theory, which is assumed to be Holy Writ, yet it can't be falsified, as whenever there is a gap between prediction and observation, some enormous new force of nature is stuck in to fill the gap. What if your accountant could just write in, "dark money," whenever he finds a gap in the books. It would certainly save him the effort of actually going back and reviewing them, as cosmologists are saved from examining their premises.

The first patch applied to Big Bang theory, before Inflation and Dark Energy(Dark Matter is a patch over current theories of gravity), was when they realized that since redshift increases proportional to distance in all directions, it makes us appear to be at the center of this expansion, so it was changed from an expansion in space, to an expansion of space, because Spacetime!

Which totally ignores the central premise of Relativity, that the speed of light is measured as a constant in any frame. If intergalactic light is being redshifted, obviously it isn't constant to intergalactic space.

The Doppler Effect is due to a changing distance between the source and the receiver, not that the actual metric of space is changing. The train moving down the tracks doesn't stretch the tracks.

Similarly the presumed cause of cosmic redshift is because the light is taking longer to cross, as the space supposedly expands.

Yet this means the light is the real denominator. The space is expanding relative to it! There are more lightyears, not the lightyears being stretched. Just like the train tracks, the speed of light is not increasing.

The presumed expansion is measured by the redshift of the very same intergalactic light, so it is complete nonsense to say it is evidence of an expanding dimension of space, if the very metric creating this effect is otherwise stable.

Yet if you were to raise this very basic, mathematically simple point in any official cosmological forum, the response would be similar to questioning the Illuminati in their forums. You will be ridiculed, if not quickly banned and no one will contemplate examining the logic.

The fact is that we are at the center of our point of view, so an optical cause of redshift would be logical and it has been observed, obliquely, as reputations are at stake, that multispectrum light "packets" do redshift over distance, since the higher frequencies dissipate faster, but that would mean we are sampling a wave front, not observing individual photons travelling billions of years. Which raises the more problematic question of whether photons are indivisible point particles, or simply a quantity of light our material tools are able to detect.

People's reputations are based on the maps, not the territory.