Tired light

The classic idea of an expanding universe causing red shift can have other explanations, unless you believe photons are magic.

In a billion year journey, a photon can have a trillion interactions in galactic space as it travels through nearly 6x10^21 miles. Light always travels at light speed so it cannot lose speed from interactions so it loses energy by red shifting, by it's frequency slowing down so the photons appear to move to the red end of the spectrum.

The further a photon travels, the more it is "red shifted".

Please don't quote the internet site criticising tired light because it is embarrassingly awful. I complained about the points made but it is still there.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

Please say so if this is stupid but the red light perceived has actually come back all the way here for us to perceive it right ? So how come all this tired light is only on the edge of the universe, it should be everywhere.

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I thought the redshift was due to the Doppler effect.
If the photons are really losing energy as kaneda says, shouldn't there be evidence that these tired photons are all around ?

 

I can't see anything really wrong with a "tired light" hypothesis. We are talking about millions and billions of years. A photon is an active system. Any system leaks energy over time. It would be stranger to believe that it does not.

 

No mechanism has ever been proposed for photons to "keep" energy.

 

Is the sound that a race car makes as it moves away from you due to "tired sound"? What about when it approaches? Does this hypothesis explain anything new or was it simply invented to try and fight the Big Bang theory?

 

James R. We know photons can be absorbed and re-emitted by electrons. Does a photon leave this interaction with 100% of it's energy intact or maybe just 99.999999999%?

A photon is a wave. The fact that it can break into smaller waves and so accomplish the double slit experiment suggests it is not an immortal, indestructible particle which forever remains unchanged.

Why do photons red or blue shift? How can something which always moves at light speed STRETCH? Why should something moving towards or away from them affect the "information" a photon carries?

As to cosmic dust, why shouldn't it exist throughout galactic space? The solar wind sweeps the solar system clean of such material but what happens to it then? Why shouldn't intergalactic space be full of that and the leftover material from the formation of the universe? I think these are ignored because it is believed that somehow the space between galaxies is considered "empty".

 

Enmos. I gave a figure of about 1/14th of the perceived distance to the edge of the visible universe as an example. Red shifts are perceivable at all distances in space.


Tired light through interactions would need a "fair distance" to be noticeable at our present level of technology. There is also the point that if another explanation is accepted, like the red shift which suggests an expanding universe and needs dark matter, dark energy, vacuum energy and other twaddle to help it along, would people bother looking for other explanations?

 

Zyxaos. Vibrations in air moving at about seven hundred miles an hour is not the same as pockets of energy moving at over 670,000,000 miles per hour through a vacuum.

Common-sense was invented to show the big bang idea wrong.

 

Who would like to move this thread? Anybody? :huh:

kaneda, cosmic dust has nothing to do with the birth of the universe. Expanding space causes red shift because the peaks and troughs of the wave get stretched out (that is, the wavelength increases) and this decreases the frequency, but not the velocity.

Have you heard of wave-particle duality? Because I think that if you realised that light is both a particle AND a wave then you wouldn't believe in this particular "common sense" theory of yours.

 

I see no reason to move this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tired_light

If supernova light curves are time dilated, then the stretching of space is a probable answer.

 

Zyxaos. This thread is about space. Why would you want to move it? Unproven? So is the big bang idea and similar nonsense.

Do you believe that the birth of the universe (however) only produced planets, moons and stars? No debris at all? It would have been an exceedingly messy business and I think galactic space is still full of the debris not hoovered up by gravitational sources.

A photon is a discrete bundle of energy which some mistake for a particle (though particles do not travel at light speed as I thought everyone knew).

Hubble constant is about 13 mps per million light years. If photons were able to be affected by such a negligible force, they would not survive. Gravity can red shift them. Think about it at the moment. How does a thousand gravities compare with an expansion rate that is equal to one part in 45x10^16 (per second). Do you honestly believe that a photon has so little cohesion that something so totally insignificant could affect it?

 

MetaKron. And of course, Type 1A supernovae are all standard. Not! If a dwarf star rotates faster it can hold upto twice as much mass before blowing up. If it accretes matter slower, it can take more than if it accretes faster. There is also the temperature and composition of the matter which the dwarf star takes in as well as the point in it's evolution the dwarf star is in at the time, etc. They are not standard candles, or standard anything else.

 

>>>>A photon is a discrete bundle of energy which some mistake for a particle (though particles do not travel at light speed as I thought everyone knew).

particles with mass, which doesn't include photons, which i thought everyone knew.

 

Isn't a discrete bundle the very definition of a particle?

 

Of mass, yes. But not of energy.