Redshift as a comparison of clocks

In standard General Relativity, light crossing an expanding cosmos stretches toward red and loses energy. That energy goes nowhere. Physicists accept this by citing Emmy Noether's work: when the geometry of space changes over time, energy need not be conserved. The paper calls this a "leaking bucket."

RSI rejects the leak. Light travels through a physical medium, the Eternal Consonance, with a density of 8.12 × 10⁻¹⁸ kg/m and a baseline tension of 0.73 N, and it carries its energy across that medium intact. Nothing is lost on the way.

RSI proposes instead that redshift is a comparison of clocks across time. What breathes is the tightness of the medium's folding. The Planck length is the tightest fold the medium can make, and RSI proposes that this limit is not fixed over the cycle: it grows finer and coarser like a giant universal wave, and because the medium is incompressible the change is felt everywhere at once. Every knot is a vortex pattern of the medium's own waves, so it tightens with the fold, as a stretched vortex in water becomes thinner and spins faster while its volume stays the same (unlike a stretched vortex, a knot shrinks in every direction, since it is a pattern of waves rather than a fixed parcel of fluid). Its size, mass, atomic frequencies and clocks all change together, and so does the clamp that holds it.

RSI proposes that the folding has been tightening, so knots have become smaller and faster, by the factor 1 + z since the light we now receive from redshift z was sent. Light that left a distant galaxy long ago was sent by atoms vibrating at the slower rhythm of their time. Our atoms vibrate faster now, so the old light looks redder by the factor 1 + z. Galaxies are not receding, and space is not expanding.

Nothing is compressed, and nothing measured locally changes. Every ruler and clock is made of knots that tighten with the fold, so every local measurement of the Planck length, the heartbeat of the medium, the 0.73 N tension, the clamp and the speed of light gives the same value in every era. Only a comparison with light that has travelled freely since long ago reveals the change, and that comparison is the redshift.

On this view the Cosmic Microwave Background is the steady glow of the medium itself, the balance of its tension across billions of years. Energy follows a closed path through the toroid: exhaled from the Still Core, carried outward, and drawn back in the Inhale to be concentrated anew, while the medium's breathing trades energy with the knots over the cycle.