Superseded catalogs:  The Half Million Quasars catalog (HMQ: 2015, PASA 32,10) is here.  MORX v1 (2016, PASA, 33, 52) is here.  ARXA (2010, PASA 27,283) is here.  QORG (2004, A&A 427, 387) is here.

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The Martian Clock is an analog 24-hour clock with a unique "Martian" clock movement -- it strikes the hour when all 3 hands point to that hour.  It can be used for Mars or Earth, see the local-time Earth version here.  It uses true Earth seconds for the Mars solar day, as an improvement over the "stretched" seconds currently used.  To enable this, the clock redefines the "minute" to be 1/100th of an hour -- thus Mars has 37 seconds per "minute", and Earth has 36 seconds per "minute", which is the only difference between the two clocks.  The time is written as hh.mm:ss, e.g., 12.87:08.  A paper has been written but not currently submitted.  Get the v0.1 (2024) desktop version here -- it is a zip file to be unzipped into any new directory/folder; a ReadMe and the paper are included.  Java 7 (or better) run time environment is needed to run this clock.  Clock movement ©2019 Eric Flesch. 

A fun radio-optical anomaly (see 2nd graphic on left) in a 1999 Alan Stockton paper on 3C212 was critiqued by me here.  The radio-optical offsets are intriguing and are evidence for a new kind of spatial distortion or shear -- or for a sheet of "dark matter" deflecting light as water does.  Unfortunately it hasn't been investigated since.

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Is our Standard Cosmological Model "fit for purpose"?  An engineer wouldn't think so, because there are three pieces of non-scientific magic built into it, being inflation. dark matter, and dark energy.  These 3 are placeholders, quantifications of what we don't know, the gaps between the standard model and what is actually observed. That "dark matter" is so often elaborated as a form of matter, just shows the social power of a word. If instead the term was e.g., "gravitational scalar", then a more eclectic set of explanations would be presented. Same story with "dark energy", so the terms "dark matter" and "dark energy" are unfortunate.  As for "inflation", it's a magic wand for transitioning the universe from its initial singularity to a larger universe that can be calculated and modelled.  Well, magic will hold up neither bridges nor universes.

Is today's cosmology run by a new generation of flat Earthers?  The current Standard model is underpinned by the "flat universe", a spatial manifold of zero curvature with local perturbations.  Guth's "inflation" theory provides a mechanism whereby a flat universe was attained as the result of an unknown causal process in the Universe's earliest moments.  Today's cosmologists use this flat manifold in all their cosmological calculations including matter ratios, missing (dark) matter, and so-called accelerating expansion due to "dark energy".  Thus, the flat universe is a crucial and indispensible platform for the Standard Cosmological Model.

But this Standard Model holds that things are flying apart at high speed, which should be very absurd and usually just shows a lack of calibration.  My own view is that a more general theory will, via additional dimensions, provide a physical alternative to expansion.  Thus we need a general model which subsumes the standard model just as, in relativity, GR subsumed SR.  We start by designating the Standard Model as the "Special Cosmological Model" -- special in that it requires a flat universal manifold.  We now generalize this into a "General Cosmological Model" by incorporating non-flat geometries, as follows. 

First, a quick simple description of the geometries.  In a flat (i.e., curvature=0) 3D manifold, a sphere has a surface area of 4πR².  A 3D manifold with curvature<0 is called spherical and in it a sphere has a lesser surface area, similarly curvature>0 is called hyperbolic in which a sphere has a greater surface area.  These "non-Euclidean" geometries are known to be mathematically complete and internally consistent just as flat space is.

Note that these geometries seamlessly transition from one to the other as curvature changes.  Flat space of curvature=0 is but a single point on the curvature range axis, just as, with time, the present is only a single point on the past-present-future time axis.  These two paradigms look the same and may indeed be the same paradigm -- given that "spacetime" unifies 3D space with time.  As we perceive time as a forward flow akin to migration across past/future, so it is indicated that spatial curvature may also be migrating from (say) hyperbolic to spherical, with "flat" space simply being the current state -- not because of any huge coincidence, but because we natively see the current curvature as flat regardless of wherever on the curvature axis it happens to be -- just as we see the current time moment as the "present" even though it is always migrating.

This notion that local space is flat simply because we natively see it as flat opens up interesting consequences:

(1)  As we look into deep space we are unknowingly looking into a universe of greater spatial curvature, thus our luminosity functions lose accuracy.  It is like the deep universe is lensed darkly, moreso the farther you observe.  This accounts for what is currently interpreted as "dark energy", a.k.a. the "accelerating expansion" of the universe.  In fact those distant galaxies are closer than they appear, the hyperbolic curvature making them look smaller & fainter than flat space would.  

(2)  This extrapolates to the first moment of the universe which then would have been almost infinitely
hyperbolic with every place contiguous to all others, allowing instantaneous action over the whole, a.k.a. "inflation".  With lightspeed near-infinite at that time (see next point), energy equations yield enormous energies so matter cannot be stable and the primordial explosion happens.  Since then, spatial curvature would decay with time via the standard exponential decay function C(t) = C(0)*e^(-kt) where k~Hubble time.

(3)  The value of lightspeed (c) is seen to vary with spatial curvature.  In hyperbolic space the "shells of space" contain larger volumes per radius R, but lightspeed travels along R so travels through those larger volumes of space.  To native onlookers who see space as flat, the appearance is of c travelling faster.  Thus measured lightspeed is a simple quantification of the local curvature of space.  Lightspeed would be invariate by a measure encompassing spatial curvature. 

This model thus obsoletes inflation & dark energy, and provides a mechanism for the redshift by virtue of the slowing lightspeed over the æons.  What we know as "universal expansion" is just a naïve interpretation (a.k.a. illusion) of the migrating spatial curvature. 

A remaining problem: "dark matter" should be obsoleted by the greater mass of earlier times (because more spatial curvature means more energy & mass) but it doesn't seem to be enough to account for the full amount of lensing seen, such as when a galaxy lenses a background quasar.  This issue remains, although maybe I'm just under-calculating the mass.   

The paradigm of lightspeed decreasing with universal time puts a crimp into the modern technique of defining the length of the metre (meter) in terms of light cycles.  Inflation will be seen to happen as our metre grows smaller causing old objects to measure as bigger (and heavier in metric terms), whether old standard kilograms or dinosaur bones.  Issues remain but the simplicity of this General Cosmological Model appeals.

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• The nature of the in-flight photon.
• So you still believe in Aliens?
• Minimalism: Bohr got it right.