Breaking the light barrier

Changing the frequency and wavelength at a constant speed is precisely the same as what happens to light from a moving source. You decrease the frequency by increasing the wavelength and vice versa. It's governed by:

C = Lf

where L = wavelength, f = frequency, and C = the speed of light

Hello Ros and Brandon

If you (metaphorically speaking) shine a flashlight from the surface of a massive object the light, to a viewer in space, will appear to be "red shifted". It will do this because of the loss of energy required to climb out of the "gravity well". Apparently the starlight that we see on Earths surface will also be "blue shifted" as it runs "downhill" to us. This also seems to happen at radio frequencies.

When you observe the "event horizon" of a "black hole" it appears black as that is a location in space where the acceleration in space due to gravity equals or exceeds the propagation speeds of light (from our point of view). Consequently black to us anyhow

Both of these phenomena are fairly well observed. I'll look em up tomorrow as I am off. They tend to relate to the "bending" of light as a gravitational effect that I mentioned before.

But the point that I am pondering is. If the light is indeed red or blue shifting as seems to be evident, then what is happening? If the waves are spreading out whilst in space (red shifting) then to my humble notion some of them must be going faster than the others. If they are "blue shifting" where are the extra waves coming from? Matter of fact I suspect that the ones closest to the massive object must be actually travelling slower than the ones at greater distance. And if some of the waves aren't going faster than others then time must be changing



But if this isn't happening What Is Anyone

Ros,

I can deal with the changes in the speed of light when you change the medium. I would suspect that light to a fish is effectivly "blue shifted" as the waves slowed down (as they do in water) they would necessarily "bunch up".

However the average trout probably isn't too concerned :wink:

This is news to me. You have sources for this?

Ros,

Probably. Understand that my "flashlight" metaphor was pretty mechanically inadequate. You'd need a pretty good "Energizer Bunny" to see the effect.

Steven Hawking in "Black Holes and Baby Universes" discusses the phemonen of the acceleration of gravity exceeding "c" which results in black holes, ie. light or anything else being unable to travel fast enough to leave the area. This is called a Swartzchild radius.

Carl Sagan also mentions it in "Cosmos".

There are probably a few other examples kicking around, at least I have run across it often enough to be reasonably sure that it's but a ramification of the Doppler effect caused by gravity.

However my problem is wondering how you get it to change frequency without changing speed. I suspect it does but darned if I know how.

I note, and was aware of Brandons comment

Hi Mech, I'm familiar with the event horizon and black holes in general. However, gravitational distortions of this type have nothing to do with slowing the speed of light, and everything to do with bending space (the localized space in and around black holes also slows time, which means that the *speed* of light remains the same).

I think you may have misunderstood what was described in those books you mentioned.

My comment answers this question. A decrease in frequency is accompanied by an increase in wavelength, and together these two effects hold the speed constant, as per the equation.

Consider...

Sound waves of any sort including the sonic booms trailed behind bullets and jet aircraft travel at the speed of sound despite the fact that the things causing them travel through the air considerably faster than that.

Now, consider the situation of a democrat or some other sort of primitive person who has never seen a bullet or a jet aircraft and is trying to figure out what exactly makes a machinegun work. He can't really see the bullets; he's sitting there listening to the sound of the machinegun and staring at a rectangular target set up about 600 yards from the gun and rolled out horizontally, and watching the row of bullet holes which appears.

Like I say, he can detect the sound waves but not the bullets. As far as he can tell the sound waves seem to be arriving at mach I and he seems to be observing properties of both waves (the sound) and particles (the holes in the paper).

I should also mention there are two basic components to the sound of gunfire, i.e. muzzle blast and the sonic crack of the bullets and that, at 600 yards, our democrat or cannibal is hearing the muzzle blast faintly if at all and the main thing he is hearing is the sonic crack of the bullets. Having never seen a bullet however, he assumes the sound he is hearing is coming from the gun itself which he can see.

In his normal experience he knows that when he sees both lion and elephant dung on the ground it means that both lions and elephants have been around (and not that some magical sort of animal with properties of both lions AND elephants has been around) but this experience sort of overwhelms him and he fails to make the analogy. He assumes that what is producing the holes in the target is some sort of a thing with properties of both waves and particles, which he gives the name "auton", and he assumes that these "autons" move at the highest speed which he can observe, which is mach I.

Now, a few days after the German army finishes testing their ordinary 308 caliber machinegun here in Baltimore or Detroit or wherever this little scene is transpiring, Emperor Ming (the Merciless) from Mongo sets up a base camp on Mars and begins testing a new hypervelocity 308 caliber machinegun on the same targets in the same area of Detroit or Baltimore, the bullets travelling through space to get there. He clearly figures to reduce his expenses for paper targets by using those of the Germans. The democrats/cannibals can now see bullet holes appearing and they can see the muzzle flash of Emperor Ming's gun with their telescopes, but they still can't see the bullets (too small and still too fast) and so they write a new chapter in their physics books describing the manner in which autons travel from Mars to Earth at Mach I and cause bullet holes to appear on paper targets.

Can anybody figure out what's wrong with the picture here? I mean, basically, there isn't really anything between Mars and Earth to carry a sound wave, is there?

At this point, hopefully some Christian missionary will step in and explain things to them...

Likewise there is nothing between ourselves and distant galaxies to carry any sort of a wave which might represent light, and the idea of any sort of a wave travelling through any sort of an electromagnetic field is basically ludicrous. What you have in real life is a pervasive neutrino soup of sorts which functions altogether as the sort of aether which was common in physics books from the 1800s, and little "machinegun bullets" which are almost unbelievably fast and tiny travelling through that neutrino aether and creating electromagnetic waves including light within it.

I should mention that there is a serious question as to whether the Michelson/Morley experiment actually failed:

http://www.orgonelab.org/miller.htm

and a serious likelihood that the announcement of the death of the aether idea was premature.

Ralph Sansbury describes those little machinegun bullets as sub-electron particles travelling at a computed necessary speed of something like 10^22 m/sec, which would get you to one of the near galaxies in a few seconds. His derivation of the need for such particles from electrostatic experiments makes perfect sense although I wouldn't recommend his idea of light as a pure force to anybody.

http://mysite.verizon.net/r9ns/book03.htm

There are two or three other similar descriptions of near-infinite-speed particles out there as necessary parts of explanations of the nature of light and gravity, e.g.

http://metaresearch.org/publications/books/PushingG.asp

Albert Einstein was trying to use deformable time to explain the fact that light refuses to obey normal additive laws for velocities. A better explanation is that scientists were assuming the sources of the light (distant galaxies) to be the cause of the light waves (like the democrats assuming the sonic crack of bullets to be caused by the gun itself) and that no motion of any light source adds any meaningful percentage difference to the motion of the particles which actually cause light waves.

Probably shoulda mentioned...

One of the most major arguments people use in claiming the universe to be 17 billion years old is the presumed time it would take light to get here from the furthest reaches of the cosmos, assuming light to be travelling at C. The above discussion leaves a pretty big question mark over that proposition.

I would GUESS that the universe itself is basically eternal for purely philosophical reasons, but I would not want to have to bet it at this point.

Hello everybody,

Thanks Boys and Girls,

It often helps to put out a question. Simply in framing the question to Ros the other night an "Eueka moment" attacked. Simply figuring out changes in frequencies of light in terms of "space-time" rather than any thought of any human imaginary time makes things fit very well.

ie. It seems possible to correlate any particular frequency shift effect with space-time. (I'll admit Einstein noted this about 1905 but I'm a slow learner)
It is also perfectly possible to correlate any shift effect with positional changes in the same space-time.

So if a person declares than an observed "red shift" (frequency change) indicates a relative motion then he must be prepared to discount any shift that is due to space-time influences.

Brandon, thanks, you probably triggered the attack of the eurekas. I knew that formula but it wasn't working.
Particularly around "black holes" I was under the misapprehsion that the light would be red shifted to infinity and I could not correlate that with the observations coming from the telescope named Chandra. It's not. It will be blue shifted to infinity in that particular space-time which translates to being red shifted to the X-Ray portion or higher by the time we see it.

Darn, now I have some more thinking to do



P.S. Gunga, My guess is with you. I'd just like to show it

Ralph Sansbury does pretty much show it. It's pretty hard to think of another explanation (besides sub-electron particles) for the idea of currents creating reversible electrostatic fields.