As I indicated in yesterday's post, I was disappointed by Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe: exploding the myth of cosmic expansion (2010). He fails to make his case, even to a will-to-believer like me, and he mixes up his case with a polemic against all of modern geometry, going back as far as Carl Friedrich Gauss . [Gauss is the rightwardmost figure in the photo above, a still of the afterlife of great mathematicians as represented in the stage show Fermat's Last Tango.] The wrongness of the paths followed by modern cosmology, then, has its origin prior to the mid-point of the 19th century, when Gauss started working on non-Euclidean space. As some of my readers may have learned at school, Euclid's geometry rests in large part upon the following axiom: "If a line segment intersects two straight lines forming two interior angles on the same side that sum to less than two right angles, then the two lines, if extended indefinitely, meet...." This...