Evidence that the key assumption made in discovery of dark energy is in error

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nz7neg/electric-universe-...

There are several reasons why explaining the observed acceleration is so hard. The cosmological constant (the measure of how much dark energy there is) is a tiny positive number which seems to require a lot of “fine tuning” to explain theoretically. We can easily include it in general relativity, but our best understanding of quantum physics says that if it is there then it should be much larger. This means there probably is something we don’t understand about its microscopic origins. If we try to build a microscopic model that has this small constant using string theory (our best guest at a complete theory), we find that such models are hard to create. In fact, it is not clear that any model that includes dark energy is even valid in string theory! Any way we look at it, it seems more difficult to explain this number if it is tiny and positive than if it is strictly zero (no acceleration).

Finally, theoreticians don’t have much to go on when explaining this phenomenon besides this one single number — there aren’t closely related experiments we can combine to come up with a coherent picture of what’s happening. Combine this with particle physics, where accelerators provide us with an abundance of data. It is a single tiny number that has puzzled theoreticians for decades.

No, it's not. The (local) metrics sourced by the Earth, Earth-Moon, Sun, solar system, Milky Way, and the Local Group are not at all like FLRW with or without a cosmological constant, while all those metrics are very much like Kerr or LTB, wherein ordinary matter like gas and dust gradually condenses into a point. Conversely, the metric globally is very much like FLRW with a small positive cosmological constant, and very much unlike a spacetime in which matter condenses into a point.

We can use Israel junctions to knit together "stacks" of regions that are well-approximated by a Kerr or LTB metric, and ultimately knit galaxy cluster sized LTB regions into expanding FLRW, representing the LTB regions as dust particles. This matches observations very well, and is called a "swiss cheese" cosmology, the name arising from how gravitational collapse ultimately creates voids -- holes -- in the otherwise homogeneous diluting dusts.

Kolb and others have a decent overview of how an Einstein-de Sitter-Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi swiss cheese universe works (the paper is in the context of the homogeneous-vs-inhomogeneous+backreacting cosmology debate, which is largely about connecting theory with astrophysical observations of a somewhat lumpy real universe especially in the transition from the matter-dominated era to the dark-energy dominated era) : https://www.osti.gov/biblio/21023997-cosmological-observable... ( PDF https://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/files/downloads/0/0/0/3/6/5... ). There's a good textbook treatment in Harwit's _Astrophysical Concepts_ as well (a preview exists at https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=gZfuBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA516&lp... ), and MTW has a (not very easy) overview of Israel-Darmois junctions in §21.13.

Such swiss cheese models match observations so well that it would be surprising (in a cool way) to find that there is any metric expansion at all in our solar system or in any of the galaxies and galaxy clusters we observe on the sky. We don't see that, though. In particular, one should take into account the evidence for accelerated expansion over the past few decades. Given that, one can consider a "fifth-force" (or nth, given Higgs etc.) representable as a field with a density and gradient, rather than the purely geometrical scaling in \Lambda-CDM. (This is at the root of some quintessence projects.) Results usually involve a lot of dynamics to suppress cosmological shear and other "little rip" effects at the margins of clusters with highly-luminous components, and adding several degrees of freedom that lack other physical support seems a lot worse than accepting an Einstein-de Sitter like swiss cheese geometrical model.

> local reference frame

It has nothing to do with reference frames; the metric tensor focuses matter and light one way or another (cf. Raychaudhuri) and within galaxy clusters practically all matter is focused towards a point in the future, whereas globally the same matter, and all other matter, and light, focus towards a point in the past (and the future focus points within galaxy clusters do not themselves focus together in the future). The only requirement is that the manifold is Lorentzian and time-orientable; you can use any system of coordinates that an arbitrary observer carries around with it, and you only need to do that if you care to describe when in the past or future and/or where relative to an observer the focus points lie.

> ... to match a distant galaxy's ...

How do you propose to do that? I think it's worth it for you to think about that a little: does your conception of a frame in which \lambda_{obsv} = \lambda_{emit} (rather than 1 + z = \frac{\lambda_{obsv}}{\lambda_{emit}}) extend into the distant past and distant future? How accelerated is this z-suppressing frame? In this frame what's the expectation for the wavelength of a CMB photon over time, or for galactic and extragalctic H I lines ?

> doppler expansion due to the nature of differing relativistic reference frames

Kinematical interpretations fall apart really spectacularly at high z, and conveniently we have a probe of (6 > z > 1) in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman-alpha_forest which is a challenge for constructing a sensible z-suppressing frame of reference.

(See also MTW §29.2)