A "Freely Coasting" Universe

A strictly linear evolution of the cosmological scale factor is surprisingly an excellent fit to a host of cosmological observations. Any model that can support such a coasting presents itself as a falsifiable model as far as classical cosmological tests are concerned. This article discusses the concordance of such an evolution in relation to several standard observations. Such evolution is known to be comfortably concordant with the Hubble diagram as deduced from current supernovae 1a data, it passes constraints arising from the age and gravitational lensing statistics and just about clears basic constraints on nucleosynthesis. Such an evolution exhibits distinguishable and verifiable features for the recombination era. The overall viability of such models is discussed.