I'm not sure I follow you here. In what sense would an intelligent universe require 'connectivity'? What do you mean by that? It seems a bit much to make a blanket statement about something as otherworldy as an 'intelligent universe'. How can we know what such intellect would require to think?
A better question is, in what sense would anything intelligent NOT require connectivity? I can't think of any possible way for an entity to have intelligence in any sense without communication between the components, be they neurons, plasma, or radiation. Can there be intelligence WITHOUT communication?
And communication necessarily means connectivity, a way for the messages to be perceived across the entity. And for something as large as a universe, light speed may be too slow.
And yes I recognise the limitations of a human trying to conceive of such things, but information theory suggests some things are basic. And if the universe somehow has intelligence with no need for communication nor connections, I think any speculation on our part would be irrelevant anyway. :D
But we also have a heap more evidence which says that redshift is a true effect upon light travelling away from the observer. Can you really say that isn't the case, at least sometimes? The exception doesn't prove the rule. But I am of course curious about the evidence you have; obviously, I am not a scientist and have a definitely lay-understanding of the SM- I have nothing invested in believing the universe is expanding- so I am curious and not asking you so I can try and attack it. My mind is open here
.
Actually, the evidence is surprisingly little.
In a local sense, we can pick up Redshift (RS) in stars moving towards and away from us, so yes, there IS ecidence light can be affected that way. But in an extra-galactic sense, there is pretty much zero evidence and a lot of assumption.
Brief synopsis...
Hubble discovered RS in everything he saw out there. Physics reject 'special' situations and neither the ideas of Relativity (the Observer's frame of reference) nor Quantum Theory (the Collapser of probability) appear to have altered that view. (to me it seems pretty obvious that the observer is 'special' in both theories) But with no special situations, the cosmologists couldn't accept that maybe everything IS moving away from Earth/solar system because that would make us 'special' in a physics sense. They have discarded the idea and no longer think of it near as I can tell.
So the logical follow-up is that something is pushing everything apart from everything else, and they called that something Dark Energy. In a way the logic makes sense, in that the further something is, the faster it is moving away from us. BUT, and it's a biggie, the distance is determined by the very thing the distance is explaining. X galaxy is 100 million light years (mly) away because it has B RS and it has B RS because it is 100mly away.
So, if an object has a RS of (say) 1.1 and another object has a RS of 2.5, the 2.5 object is MUCH further away (as in millions of light years further) and travelling at MUCH greater speed.
Except we have high RS and low RS objects with physical and radiation connections. Halton Arp is worth researching. He got pilloried for showing his pictures of such things but you and I can download the originals and simply increase the brightness or contrast and we can SEE those connections. I am aware a number of people have done an 'explanation' job on Arp, which led him finally to retire because it interfered with his work as a professional astronomer, but the explanations are just that - I have yet to see one that rises above, "oh but I think this"
Hubble himself did not like the Dark Energy explanation and there are a number of other ideas about the universe that don't require the 'magic' (as I call it) of Inflation, Dark Matter and Dark Energy. In fact most of them don't even need the underlying 'magic' of the Big Bang.
So if you have a theory which requires inventing special forces just so the theory will produce something we can all see out there, and you have another theory from which what we see comes naturally WITHOUT inventing stuff we can't explain, which would you go for?
In other news, in Science, as a general rule, as you approach truth, things get simpler. They look almighty complicated when you don't have the basic, but once you get it, things fall into place and you can even predict other things you didn't know. Both the SMC and the SMP (Standard Model of Particles) suffer from ever-increasing complexity. To me that suggests something basic is incorrect. So I look elsewhere to see what the options are.
Regarding the singularity. Just after the big bang, matter and energy expanded much faster then the current speed of light. I would argue that this wasn't really a function of the universe we are in, but possibly a function of whatever medium our universe itself may be in (or may not)- it was space and time beginning, in which case a violation of such would not be possible.
For all we know, the universe resides within a medium and is currently travelling faster then the cosmological speed of light. But that couldn't really be called a violation of our universes laws.
Its a huge leap from saying there are doubts about the origins and nature of the universe to saying our current knowledge is "false". I don't think there is much evidence for that.
I hope this isn't too off-topic; we are discussing at least one facet of the possible multiverse....
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
There is a problem with having the Universe 'in a medium' because as far as we know or can speculate, the Universe is everything, multiverse ideas notwithstanding. Mostly we speculate about things like a multiverse to try to explain the problems arising from the SMC and SMP. With no 'special' place, we have an issue as to why our Universe is so finely tuned to allow us to live here. It's not special so it must be just one of billions and so random chance lets us be here.
The Big Bang is problematic to say the least. The 'way above the speed of light' sounds OK to say, but as the Big Bang expands, it creates the Universe we live in and THAT universe has a speed limit. So how does matter and energy within that universe exceed the speed limit? And if it could do it then, how come it can't now?
Then there is the law that energy cannot be created or destroyed, yet we have (apparently) every photon, every particle and anything else we might find ALL being created from nothingness in an instant. Now it might be that the law about energy didn't exist before the universe but the physics involved in the incredible amount of energy and mass all coming into being in a Planck instant (10
-35 seconds) is way beyond anything we can conceive of.
Then there is Inflation, a magical force which comes along and stretches everything, but only just enough so the Big Bang theory can produce the Universe we look at every day, with galaxies and the like. Without Inflation the Big Bang theory produces a MUCH smaller universe with much more homogeneity - i.e. a mass of energy and matter evenly spread across much less space. Then Inflation goes away and for 10 billion years or so everything ticks along... then, suddenly, just in time to explain RS, we have Dark Energy gets a Guernsey and comes along about 5 billion years ago to kick along the expansion.
And we shouldn't forget how special galaxies are. Our solar system pretty much obeys laws of motion discovered centuries back. The farther from the Sun, the slower a planet moves. The disks of the galaxies are not like that - across almost the entire disk, the stars all move at the same speed, which is what causes those 'arms' we see in them. So Dark Matter is invented to cause that to happen and it's a weird particle because it only interacts with the normal universe
just enough to cause galaxies to form like they have...
And yet we have theories like the Dynamic Steady State Universe theory that provide almost all of this without the use of magic.
Which is why I am a sceptic.
(in spite of the opinions generated by some in other threads :D)
