Cosmological Redshift Without Spatial Expansion: A Scale-Field Interpretation of Gravitation, Time Dilation, and Cosmic Redshift

This preprint presents an alternative interpretation of cosmological redshift. Instead of metric expansion, redshift is understood as a relational scale difference between emission and detection within a universal scale-field framework. The model introduces a dimensionless scale field Ω(x,t) while preserving local physical consistency and the invariance of dimensionless constants. Within this framework, gravitation, time dilation, and cosmological redshift are treated as different manifestations of a common underlying scale structure. The paper discusses implications for gravitational time dilation, Tolman surface brightness, angular-size relations, the cosmic microwave background, and the role of dark energy in standard cosmology. It also outlines falsifiable empirical distinctions from the expansion-based interpretation, including the absence of a necessary cosmological redshift drift in the standard expansion sense under uniform exponential scale evolution. Version 2.1 further develops the framework by proposing that the same global measure drift that explains cosmological redshift also weakens the homogeneous gravitational background over time, thereby providing a natural large-scale stabilization mechanism for a spatially static universe without invoking metric expansion or dark energy. This preprint presents an expanded and revised English version of the author’s scale-field interpretation of cosmological redshift. Version 2.1, revised April 2026. Preprint - not peer reviewed.