Strange

No. Recessional speed is proportional to distance (because expansion is a scaling effect). That means that if you go far enough you can find objects moving apart at 2x, 3x, 10x .... the speed of light. (Anything more than about 3x the speed of light will be outside the observable universe.) Yes. The most distant galaxies were only about 4 billion light years away when the light we see was emitted. It has taken about 13 billon years to get here because it is "swimming upstream" against expanding space. Those galaxies are now about 45 billion light years away and moving proportionally faster. (Those numbers are from memory so may not be quite right, but they in the right ballpark...)

I'm not even allowed one joke? Sheesh. Tough crowd. I have already explained that kinetic energy is dependent on the observer. Therefore it cannot be intrinsic to the object.The energy of a photon is also observer dependent. Also, time dilation is observer dependent. How does your "mechanical" explanation of time dilation explain that? How can a single object (photon, electron, atom, clock, whatever) have multiple different "processing loads" and hence time dilations?

Because that only applies to a single frame of reference (and a closed system, etc). So, the energy of a photon that has undergone cosmological red shift is less than the original photon. That energy hasn't gone anywhere, we are just measuring it in a different frame of reference. The concept of energy, and therefore the conservation law, is not easily defined in GR: Is Energy Conserved in General Relativity? Energy is Not Conserved

Mass is not a "substance" either. Then it is wrong. Photons don't have kinetic energy. They are made of mahogany, with inlaid brass corners.

Nope. You said the speed of light is less, I said it is unchanged. There is no way that can be interpreted as being the same. It has nothing to do with time dilation. The gravitational time dilation caused by the Sun's mass is insignificant.

Which confirms it is a property (one of many) of all those things, not a thing in itself. There is no particle which has only mass or only energy; they all have several other properties. A photon (or an electron) is no more "pure energy" than it is "pure spin" or an electron is "pure charge". Then it is wrong. Kinetic energy, for example, is not an invariant. It depends on the speed relative to an observer. Different observers can observe the same object with different speeds and therefore different kinetic energy. This is inherent in the definition of energy. The same is true of time. And this is confirmed by experiment. Well done. You have taken the first steps in science by showing that your idea can be, and is, falsified. And that obviously cannot work.

Nope. The speed of light inside the Sun is exactly the same as outside. Light takes thousands of years to emerge from the Sun even though it is travelling at c. Perhaps you can work out why? I imagine your text is full of many more such errors but ... tl;dr. It isn't worth it.

But both the energy and the time dilation of a particle are functions of the observer. So two observers can see the same particle with different time dilations. How can that be explained by the particle having to do more "processing"? It has to do a little bit more for one observer and a lot more for the other? How does it know how many observers there are and what their relative speeds are?

It says that nothing can move faster than c. And nothing with mass can move at c. But that only applies locally. If you are talking about quasars then you probably need to take expansion into account and use GR. In which case things can move apart at more than c. We can see galaxies that are receding at more than the speed light.

That was probably me. The Big Bang model describes the expansion of space; it makes no difference if that space has a finite or infinite volume.

There is minimal proper motion so any Doppler shift is insignificant compared to the cosmological red-shift. The time dilation of distant galaxies exactly matches the red shift. (Note that this is cosmological time dilation, not that due to relative motion. In other words it is due to the change in scale factor.) Note that SR is a subset of GR so any effect that is calculated using GR (eg. cosmological red shift) already includes any effects that would be described by SR.

I think you need something a little more reputable than the opinions of Sheldrake. I don't know what "paper" you are referring to, but there is nothing in this thread that answers the question. So ... Please show that your idea reproduces the observed orbital velocities in galaxy clusters and galaxies. (Note: your reply needs to be quantitative: using mathematics to show the values predicted by your idea and comparing those with the observed data. Not just more claims.) 1) Please show that the gas around galaxies has the right density to cause the lensing predicted by GR. 2) Please explain why there is no dispersion if this is caused by refraction. 3) Please explain how gravitational lensing is caused by dark matter even in the absence of galaxies or any visible matter. 4) Please explain how the observed large structure of the universe forms in the absence of dark matter.

Huh? Welcome to the 16th century. It might come as a surprise to you, but for several hundred years we have known that, in fact, the Earth orbits the Sun. Then you need to demonstrate, quantitatively that your idea predicts the observed motions of galaxies in clusters and the velocity curves in galaxies. Can you do that? You also need to show how it explains all the other evidence for dark matter (gravitational lensing, large structure formation, etc.) Without this, all you have is a worthless idea. There are thousands of those. So far no theory that modifies gravity matches the evidence. You need to demonstrate that yours does before anyone will take it seriously. I think you need to provide a reference. Otherwise I have no idea what you are talking about: maybe you misunderstood what you read or you could just be making it up. Nope.

It is about understanding what we can know (and what “know” means) etc. But there is a thread about this...

Exactly. Our previous best there told us it was a force. That theory still works in most cases. So, in most cases, we can consider the force to be real (it certainly feels real). In other cases, we consider the curvature of space-time to be real and the force to be a fictitious force. No because a theory is correct when it works. Both Newtonian gravity and GR are correct, within the areas where they apply. For the early universe and black holes, we probably need yet another theory. But that won't make the others wrong, even if the new model is completely different again. Although some philosophers might argue about whether the universe is real or to, I won't. But I would say physics describes, rather than explains, the universe. It tells us how it behaves, not what it is ultimately made of.

As soon as you start discussing whether something is "real" or not, you are doing philosophy, not science. For example, in Newtonian theory, gravity is a force and you would assume that force is real. But along comes GR and the force no longer exists. Gravity is described as the curvature of space-time geometry. So is that real? Maybe. Or maybe another theory will come along describing gravity in a different way and perhaps in that theory space and time don't exist at all. So physics doesn't deal with reality (whatever that is) but with descriptions of what we observe.

Not at all. Quite the opposite if anything. If the universe were curved like the Earth then the curvature would decrease with expansion. But it isn’t, so it doesn’t. But I was referring to the word “affect” as it appeared in your statement. A “use vs mention” distinction.

The universe appears to be flat, so no. (Yet another fatal flaw with the analogy!) Which ones?

Maxwell's equations can be described in purely geometric terms. Kaluza-Klein theory was the first attempt to combine GR and EM in a single (geometric) model. Perhaps not surprisingly, it requires 5 dimensions because the "things" being curved by mass and by charge are not the same. (Which is yet another reason why I don't think these models describe "reality" but just the way it behaves.)

You know, I did think about that, for quite a long time, and decided that, in this context, "affect" (which is the topic of discussion) was OK. But, you know ... language...

Yes... Janus (as always) answered this far better than I could ... eg. angles of a triangle. Which is, basically, how we know the universe is, overall, flat.

Yeah. That’s exactly what I would have said if I weren’t on my phone...

Ideally, one would ignore the third dimension as we are talking intrinsic curvature See above ...

It’s an analogy. Not a balloon.

Not really because the field is invented to describe exactly that sort of affect.