> To (1), he's talking about the distance ladder. Thank you for this! I didn't realize that "standard candle" is an actual term, and I thought it was Wheeler b

> To (1), he's talking about the distance ladder. Thank you for this! I didn't realize that "standard candle" is an actual term, and I thought it was Wheeler being playful with language, which he quite often does. I have some reading to do on this distance ladder stuff. Have the standard siren's in gravitational waves confirmed these expansion measurements? I realized Wheeler was older at the time of publication and given his death in 2008, he obviously couldn't know the measurements that have occurred in the last 15 years. I think by his last two sentences he wasn't outright rejecting it but rather being suspicious of both the measurements and the theory. There is a second edition of the book, published well after Wheeler's death, so I wonder if Taylor kept that section of the book. To Wheeler's credit, the section was in a specific box entitled: "Opinion: The Bang-to-Crunch Universe Too Simple to be Wrong!". Edit: I checked the second edition (again, Wheeler didn't appear to work on this edition), located here https://www.eftaylor.com/exploringblackholes/ https://www.eftaylor.com/exploringblackholes/, and it does indeed appear that there are now entire chapters dedicated to the expanding universe and cosmology and that the above quoted opinion section is removed.