Self Creation Cosmology An Alternative Gravitational Theory

A question is raised about the premature acceptance of the standard cosmological model, the ’ΛCDM’ paradigm; the non-metric, or semimetric, theory of Self Creation Cosmology is offered as an alternative and shown to be as equally concordant as the standard model with observed cosmological constraints and local observations. In self-creation the Brans Dicke theory is modified to enable the creation of matter and energy out of the self contained gravitational and scalar fields; such creation is constrained by the local conservation of energy so that rest masses vary whereas the observed Newtonian Gravitation ’constant’ does not. As a consequence there is a conformal equivalence between self-creation and General Relativity in vacuo, which results in the predictions of the two theories being equal in the standard tests. In self-creation test particles in vacuo follow the geodesics of General Relativity. Nevertheless there are three types of experiment that are able to distinguish between the two theories. There are also other local and cosmological observations that are readily explained by self-creation, such as the anomalous sunwards acceleration of the Pioneer spacecraft and a secular spinning up of the Earth’s rotation that both ’coincidentally’ echo Hubble’s constant. Moreover, the most significant feature of self-creation is that it is as consistent with cosmological constraints in the distant supernovae data, the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropies and primordial nucleo-synthesis, as the standard paradigm. Unlike that model, however, it does not require the addition of the undiscovered physics of Inflation, dark non-baryonic matter, or dark energy. Nevertheless it does demand an exotic equation of state, which requires the presence of false vacuum energy at a moderate density determined by the field equations. Consequently it is able to interface gravitation and quantum theories without creating a ’Lambda’ problem. In self-creation there are two frames of interpretation of observational data, which depend on whether energy or energy-momentum is to be conserved and whether photons or atoms respectively are chosen as the invariant standards of measurement. In the former frame the universe is stationary and eternal with exponentially shrinking rulers and accelerating atomic clocks, and in the latter frame the universe is freely coasting, expanding linearly from a Big Bang with rigid rulers and regular atomic clocks. A novel representation of space-time geometry is suggested. As