Consider the lowly photon ...

Sorry for my recent absense. I've been distracted.

<b>[Jim] " ...so don't make dumb connections ..."</b>

Jim, this clearly qualfies as a personal attack. In the grand scheme of things it is more like a middle finger flash than a shove or a slap in the face, but it is still not appropriate here. Please cut it out.

Shando - thank you for being the adult here and not taking offense.

***

In nature, all waves are observed to lose energy as they propagate through their medium. One of the terms we use to describe this phenomenon is 'red shift'.

(see also 'blue shift')

In those cases where we can actually observe the partcles comprising the medium (sound waves in the atmosphere, for example) we are able to see that one of the energy loss mechanisms causing red shift is friction among the particles. Another loss mechanism is a relative velocity between the observer and the propagating medium. There can be others.

Red shift is one of those wave-properties that light seems to have. But so far we are not able to detect the particles that must be there (if light actually is a wave phenomenon). Because of this, and other historical reasons, we latched on to the velocity-of-recession idea a while back and have never seriously considered other loss mechanisms to explain the observed frequency/distance relationship.

In general, any energy loss mechanism that is proportional to distance traveled by a wave will cause a frequency reduction (red shift) in that wave like the one observed for the light from distant galaxes.

Friction is one.

Scattering from intergalactic dust and atoms is another, but it is disqualified in this case since it also predicts that blurring would happen and said blurring is not observed.

LB

Good to hear from you Larry!

I am beginning to wonder if the reason "we latched on to the velocity-of-recession idea" was the assumption that light speed "c" is a constant? Occam's razor would suggest that there MUST be a simpler explanation for the observed red-shift in light from intergalactic sources than an "expanding universe".

I recently viewed a presentation by Rupert Sheldrake at the Electric Universe Conference in Jan 2013. There are two parts to the presentation on UTUBE and I don't remember in which part he said that he had examined all the 'speed of light' determination experimental data and found that there was a decreasing trend in 'c' until the '70s and then it turned positive and was still increasing. (Such is the power of the 'constant c' paradigm that this has been 'fixed' by making the defined length of a meter to be the distance light travels over a specific time period.) If c were constant and the different values caused by systematic errors, they would have been randomly high and low, and not apt to have displayed trends.

Now that there appears to be evidence that c may not be constant over time and/or space, maybe we should think about a simpler approach to red shift theory. My thinking is going in the direction that there is no "Hubble Constant" - rather there may be a family of Hubble Constants.

That is, the Hubble Constants are comprised of several parts:

RS = H1 + H2 + H3 + H4

Where:
RS = observed Red Shift of a particular light source
H1 = a factor related to f(D), a function of the distance D travelled by the light wave/photons
H2 = a factor related to f(S), a function of the speed (+ or -) S of the light source with respect to the direction of propagation at the time of generation
H3 = a factor related to f(O), a function of the speed (+ or -) O of the observer with respect to the direction of the light wave at the time of observation
H4 = a factor related to f(X), a function of one or more unknown variables represented by X (eg: gravity at the source at the time of light generation) yet to be determined.

If this is true, the Hubble Constants will probably be unique for each light source observed.

Of course, this is not new. Arp suggested in Seeing Red, the redshift of matter is an inverse function of the age of that matter.

Still after 15 years, as tom said in his review of Seeing Red, "One wonders how many different ways nature must repeat this message about redshift not corresponding to distance before it sinks in with the astronomers."

The problem is that red shift DOES correspond to distance (and therefore indirectly to velocity) - <b>some of the time</b>.

(Tom and I did argue about a few things. I wish he were still here to defend his opinions.)

In fact, this is probably the case most of the time. Simple friction with the propagating medium (aether, LCM, space-time-continuum-suff, dark matter, etc. - take your pick) is a logical explanation but it is not guaranteed to be the right one. Even if light energy is not a 100% wave phenomenon, it has to have some part of it that is a wave in order to have so many wave properties. And that part will lose energy as it propagates through whatever medium it uses. And that energy loss will be observed as a red shift.

The real problem is getting people to realize that even though the observed red shift for a lot of objects is distance related, for <u>some objects</u> a part (maybe most) of the red shift comes from other causes.

***

Reality is seldom so simple that one thing can be said to be the (only) cause of another thing. The universe is not digital.

LB

I wonder what a "drake equation" for red shift would look like?

Pretty much like your red shift equation above.

You probably ought to use a name other than Hubble for the terms. And if it is different for each object then it is not really a constant.

"SV" for shando variable?

There are two basic processes to think about that might cause light to red shift: a slow steady loss while propagating through space, and a one time event at (or possibly very near) the originating object. So your equation will most likely only have two terms. Many theories tend to focus on one or the other. That just seems unlikely to me. At the very least it is premature.


LB

As I said above, "Rupert Sheldrake ... said that he had examined all the 'speed of light' determination experimental data and found that there was a decreasing trend in 'c' until the '70s and then it turned positive and was still increasing."

The thought occurred that maybe it isn't "c" that is changing, maybe it is "t" that is inconstant.