<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by tvanflandern</i>
If photon 1 is emitted at the instant of maximum supernova brightness (t1), and photon 2 is emitted at the instant when the lightcurve falls to half-maximum brightness (t2), then the time interval (t2-t1) is set at the source (assumed to be a fixed distance away), and cannot change anywhere along the journey to Earth unless the speed of photon 2 is different than the speed of photon 1. And if nothing affects the brightness of the two photons differently, the lightcurve (brightness vs. time) will be perfectly preserved regardless of any changes in wavelength or frequency.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Yes, I realize now that with a constant compression factor, the relative decay of the lightcurve should stay the same. However, as you indicated yourself earlier in this thread, the compression (reduction in intensity) should be a necessary consequence of the redshift in a steady state universe, which means that, unless you take this effect into account, you underestimate the absolute brightness of the supernova and hence conclude that the lightcurve must have broadened (because for the apparent brightness you would expect a faster decay of the lightcurve).
It is however also possible that the speed of light does actually slightly depend on its intensity: as suggested by me, the redshift is caused by the electric 'micro'field due to the intergalactic plasma if the wavelength and/or coherence length is smaller than the average distance between the charged particles, and the same condition might also be associated with a variation of the speed of light i.e. weaker signals travel slower than stronger signals. This would then obviously lead to a stretching of any lightcurve at least for the decaying part (one should bear in mind that a delay of the lightcurve of one week corresponds only to about a fraction 10^-11 of the total travel time (1 billion years); this is less than the accuracy with which the speed of light is known and this effect does therefore not contradict conventional physics (which made its experiments anyway for completely different physical conditions for which the effect would be unlikely to occur).
By the way, I don't think that at this stage the new paper you quoted above can be taken as definitive proof for the non-existence of the broadening of supernova lightcurves, simply because the statistical errors of the data are too large.
The main problem for any steady-state theory is anyway to explain the redshift in the first place, and in this respect the paper does not give any answers. The Radiative Transfer effect it suggests holds only for objects like quasars and does not apply generally. In my opinion, the intergalactic plasma is the only candidate for the 'cosmological' redshift of galaxies (as suggested on my website
www.plasmaphysics.org.uk/research/#A11
).
www.physicsmyths.org.uk
www.plasmaphysics.org.uk
