When cosmic redshift was first discovered, it was assumed to be a basic doppler shift, that these galaxies are moving away from us in space. The problem was that the more they examined, the more it became apparent this redshift is proportional to distance in all directions. Either it was an optical effect, or we are at the center of the entire universe. Given the light was clear, it wasn't "tired," so the idea became that space itself must be expanding.
Consider the inchworm crawling on an expanding balloon analogy, with light as the inchworm and space as the balloon. The fact remains that both are specifying a metric. The rate the inchworm crawls and the rate the balloon expands.
Now some might argue light speed is only measured locally, ie, the inchworm, while space expands globally, ie, the balloon, but the balloon has to expand locally, under the inchworm, in order to expand globally.
Some years ago, I came across an interesting paper, since buried in Amazon's cloud, but the link still seems to work; 2008CChristov_WaveMotion_45_154_EvolutionWavePackets.pdf
The gist of which is that while single spectrum light will only redshift due to recession, multi spectrum light "packets" redshift over distance, as the higher frequencies dissipate faster.
So if cosmic redshift is an optical effect, which compounds on itself, it would start gradually and eventually go parabolic. Which is basically what we see, from our point of view outward. Yet the current model needs dark energy to explain this curve in the rate, where the initial expansion/furtherest redshift seems to decline relatively rapidly, then level off. To use a ballistics analogy, it's as if the universe were shot out of a cannon, then after it slowed, a rocket motor kicks in to sustain the apparently latter rate.
Of course, this premise poses real problems, because it would mean we are sampling a wave front, not observing individual photons traveling billions of lightyears. So is quantification fundamental, or a property of absorption and measurement?
On a tangental note, the reason we experience time as the point of the present moving past to future, is because we are mobile organisms, with our sentience coalescing as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate. The reality is that change turns future to past. Tomorrow become yesterday, because the earth turns.
There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.
Energy is conserved, because it is the present, creating time, as well as temperature, pressure, color and sound. Time is frequency, events are amplitude.
So energy, as process and present, goes past to future, while the patterns generated go future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall.
Galaxies are energy radiating out, as structure coalesces in.
Synchronization is centripetal, harmonization is centrifugal. So, nodes and networks, organisms and ecosystems. Particles and fields.
Consciousness also goes past to future, while the perceptions, emotions and thoughts giving it form and structure go future to past. Though it's the digestive, respiratory and circulatory systems processing the energy, feeding the flame, while the central nervous system sorts the information, signals from the noise. Consequently there is an intellectual bias toward patterns over process.
Epicycles were brilliant math, as description, while the crystalline spheres were lousy physics, as explanation.
We seem to be in a similar situation today.
Yes, I know I'm another crackpot, but I will make a prediction; That IF the James Webb gets up and working, it will find the cosmic background radiation to be the light of ever further sources, shifted off the visible spectrum, not evidence of some primordial state, or event. The solution to Olber's paradox.
