Article in New Scientist 10 May 2008 p12 by Michael brooks "Red Shift will put us in our place" "Is

out spot in the universe somehow special? It is an age old question but now there's a way to answer it once and for all - as long as we're patient. Convention has it that our neck of the woods is very ordinary, based on what is known as the Copernican principle, which states that the cosmos is pretty much the same wherever you go. It suggests space-time is expanding at the same rate in every part of the universe, meaning that the distribution of matter is roughly the same. Although this makes sense theoretically, nobody has managed to test this assumption definitively. Previous attempt have rested on further assumptions, such as the nature of gravity or how matter is distributed through the universe - in other words, they rely on trusting our cosmological models, which were built on the Copernican principle. Jean-Philippe Uzan (Paris Astrophysics Institute) , Chris Clarkson (UCT) and George Ellis (of UCT) have a test that gets round this problem. All you have to do is measure the light form objects such as quasars, and see if these measurements change over time. The paper will be published in Physical Review Letters. If true (i.e. if red shifts are out of kilter 10 years later) the case for dark energy would start to look shaky. Dark energy is though to be accelerating the expansions of the universe. But if expansion rates differ over areas of space rather than time, (MLD: makes one think of the Carmel-Hartnett metric), it would scupper dark energy models that assume acceleration is uniform. Ruth Durrer likes the idea.." it could help us get rid of dark energy"