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Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: Pritiblond on 04/04/2011 18:25:55

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: Pritiblond on 04/04/2011 18:25:55

Planck's equation for energy of photons is:  e = hν.  The second law of thermodynamics requires all nature process to diminish in free energy.  Light propogating through space is a natural process.  If planck's constant is indeed a constant, then any energy loss must appear as a decrease in frequency, i.e., a red shift.  Therefore, shouldn't we expect a redshift in the light from distant galaxies as a function of distance, regardless of their relative velocities to us, and regardless of cosmological redshift?

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: Soul Surfer on 04/04/2011 22:53:55

it is a frequently asked question but the answer is no.  As long as the photons do not interact with anything there is no reason to expect that they will loose energy and become red shifted.

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: yor_on on 05/04/2011 01:38:52

Thermodynamics is very much about 'heat'. When our universe was very small we might assume a plasma. In that plasma you had a lot of 'photons' interacting, expressing themselves as heat. As the expansion continued that plasma became space & invariant matter, and radiation. That radiation is still photons but not interacting as much as the distances in where that can interact have become so much bigger. Therefore the universes 'cooling' and the CMB (cosmic background radiation) we see today, interacting with our detectors.

You don't really see anything at a 'distance'. Any visual information your brain processes is stimulations from light quanta interacting with you. The rest is the brain processing that information and putting it into a context. so in that motto everything you observe is a direct interaction, no distances involved. And light only exist in its interaction. That we see it interact everywhere we are, and possibly, also able to do so outside Planck time (virtual particles) doesn't change anything. In some weird way light seems to be 'at rest' while propagating, losing no energy until that interaction. All red and blue shift we see is also a relation. The relation between you/the detector and what you 'watch', and if you move towards each other that will become 'extra energy' (blue-shift) for you, but for the guy next to you wandering away it will be a red-shift. And both will be correct.

So there are some definitions involved here. One of them is lights propagation, with that become 'distances' that it then will have to traverse. But as light is massless as well as timeless it has no intrinsic time. And time is a must for any thermodynamic process to work. So having no experience of time (times arrow) in itself it just ignores it. But then we come to the question how it can know about us? Well, I have my suspicions :)

Those build on it not 'propagating, and that virtual particles and what we call 'real photons' are the exact same. But with our 'arrow of time' doing some mighty magic magic, keeping us 'in place'. Einstein accepted the idea of particles as I understands it, but also expected the ultimate 'reality' to be one of 'fields'. And there it stops. I'm not really sure how to see 'fields' although it makes sense to me. Think of a fluid, assume that 'SpaceTime' in one consistency with 'virtual particles/quantum fog' being another. Furthermore assume that they all 'mix' as seen from the 'universe', as they must, if you want any idea of them as 'force carriers' between particles to be true . Then ask yourself why we don't/can't notice it?

How about the arrow of time?

(https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fimgs.xkcd.com%2Fcomics%2Ftoo_old_for_this_shit.png&hash=3a9b5addc3d47061b21c150136b9af20)

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: Pritiblond on 06/04/2011 02:01:14

Perhaps light reacts with the hypothetical "dark matter".  Seems to me that doppler and cosmological red shift, the main pillar of the big bang theory, lacks a rigorous investigation into alternative causation.

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: Geezer on 06/04/2011 03:29:40

I think it's still a very good question. Current theories seem to be based on the belief that red shift is telling us that the further galaxies are from us, the more they are accelerating away from us, and, if I have it right, this leads to the conclusion that dark energy is responsible for the inflation.

Unfortunately, nobody ever observed a galaxy accelerating (at least I'm not aware of any observations), so the correct interpretation of red shift is rather crucial. If there was some other factor at play here, even if it only had a small effect, it might throw a rather large monkey wrench into to the works.

That said, I don't think anyone has ever demonstrated that photons "get tired" while travelling great distances, so the inflation idea seems like a very logical conclusion.

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: Pritiblond on 06/04/2011 06:17:00

On the other hand, no one has demonstrated inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, yet the big bang theory persists as the favored theory.  I read that alternate explanations of red shift by Zwicky, Arp, Marmet, Crawford, etc. were discarded because they couldn't demonstrate their theories, but the same standard of excellence is never applied to the big bang.  It seems that at each critical juncture, a new untested phenomenon is added to account for its weaknesses.

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: yor_on on 06/04/2011 07:09:39

The idea of the accelerating galaxies redshift builds on the 'space' itself expanding as I understands it, the red shift created much the same way you stretch a rubber band. Although without any tension of the light-waves, as they are made out of light, not matter. And as this should be increasing the further away you look, you can expect a accelerating effect.

The dark matter has to do with the idea of a "critical density" universe. that would be a universe where the 'gravitation/distortion' of the universes invariant mass would slow down this 'expansion' to an almost standstill. But we seem to lack around 80-90 percent of that mass, as we study what we see existing. So that's where the need for dark matter comes to be, as I understands it. We need it for finding that 'cosmic balance'.

"Zwicky estimated the total mass of a group of galaxies by measuring their brightness. When he used a different method to compute the mass of the same cluster of galaxies, he came up with a number that was 400 times his original estimate. This discrepancy in the observed and computed masses is now known as "the missing mass problem."" He also proposed the 'tired light' explanation as a alternative to Hubble's view of the redshift being due to a 'expansion' of space.

"According to observations of structures larger than galaxies, as well as Big Bang cosmology interpreted under the Friedmann equations and the FLRW metric, dark matter accounts for 23% of the mass-energy density of the observable universe. Dark matter was postulated by Fritz Zwicky in 1934 to account for evidence of "missing mass" in the orbital velocities of galaxies in clusters.

Dark matter plays a central role in state-of-the-art modeling of structure formation and galaxy evolution, and has measurable effects on the anisotropies observed in the cosmic microwave background. The largest part of dark matter, which does not interact with electromagnetic radiation, is not only "dark" but also, by definition, utterly transparent."

Another definition is the cosmological constant that Einstein added to general relativity, repulsing and counteracting gravity's effect, which otherwise might cause the universe to collapse into a heap of matter. Though he gave up on that idea after finding from Hubble that the universe actually was expanding, the cosmic acceleration we've found, now found to be of a greater magnitude than what's expected, has lead to a new interest in it. So there's two ideas that both tries to explain it. To those you can add the idea of 'dark energy' that should work similar to Einsteins cosmological constant. This expansion also explain Olber's Paradox as we must live in an expanding universe not to be cooked by the radiation that otherwise would light us up constantly.

Those theories comes from observations of rotational speeds of galaxies, gravitational lensing and temperature distribution of hot gas in the universe, observations of Type Ia supernovae, CMB and redshift. Assuming that gravity is existent everywhere it should mean that this 'expansion' either will be regulated by 'c', or that 'gravity' becomes in every new 'stretch' of space, instantly.

Title: Could Planck's equation explain red shift in astronomy?
Post by: yor_on on 06/04/2011 07:28:11

Accepting tired light should destroy the theory of relativity, and expansion. And as I see it invalidate all experiments made from, or with, the assumption of lights speed in a vacuum as a constant, until valid reinterpretations. It''s much the same as with the idea of photon's having a mass. There's a lot of theory and mathematical validations that would have to be looked over if it ever was proven true. And I don't expect those ideas to be true myself. Personally I'm sure that Einstein's SpaceTime will survive us all :)

About tired light. (http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/tiredlit.htm)