🚀 go-pugleaf

Anthony Matonak wrote:
> TMA wrote:
>> The only example of perpetual motion in nature is the
>> electro-magnetic wave. 
> 
> Maybe not even that. A physical object, such as a speeding
> bullet, loses energy and slows down due to friction in the
> atmosphere. Perhaps electro-magnetic waves experience a
> kind of ether friction and lose energy as they pass through
> space. Light waves losing energy would show as red-shifted
> so the more distant an object (star or galaxy) is in space
> the more energy the light would have lost getting here and
> the more red-shifted it would appear.
> 
> Anthony


   Actually they don't.... however photons can lose energy
   to to the cosmic expansion of the universe.




   Tired light --- has just failed two crucial tests

   Ref: Volume 292, Number 5526, Issue of 29 Jun 2001, p. 2414.
     Copyright � 2001 by The American Association for the Advancement of Science

   ASTROPHYSICS: 'Tired-Light' Hypothesis Gets Re-Tired

   Charles Seife

   The "tired-light" hypothesis, mainstay of a dwindling band
   of contrarians who deny the big bang and its corollary, the
   expanding universe, has suffered a one-two punch.
   Observations of supernovae and of galaxies provide the best
   direct evidence that the universe is truly expanding and
   promise to shed light on the evolution of galaxies to boot.

   "The expansion is real. It's not due to an unknown physical
   process. That is the conclusion," says Allan Sandage, an
   astrophysicist at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena,
   California, and leader of the galaxy study.

   It's a conclusion that most astronomers reached long ago. In
   1929, Edwin Hubble announced that light from distant
   galaxies is redder than light from nearby ones. Hubble and
   others took the redshifts as evidence that the universe is
   expanding, causing distant galaxies to speed away faster
   than nearby ones. To an observer on Earth, they reasoned,
   this would appear to stretch the wavelength of their light,
   just as the sound of a police-car siren seems to drop in
   frequency as it speeds away. However, within a few months of
   the publication of Hubble's paper, astrophysicist Franz
   Zwicky came up with an alternative explanation: that
   galaxies' light reddens because it loses energy as it passes
   through space. In Zwicky's tired-light scenario, the
   universe doesn't expand at all. Distant galaxies are red not
   because they are moving, but because their light has
   traveled farther and gotten pooped along the way.

   Beyond the fringe. "Tired light"--a radical alternative to
   the standard expanding-universe model of the cosmos--has
   just failed two crucial tests.

   When experimenters first measured the cosmic microwave
   background more than 30 years ago, they found that the
   radiation was too dim to be explained by Zwicky's
   hypothesis. That realization relegated "tired light" firmly
   to the fringe of physics, but scientists still sought more
   direct proofs of the expansion of the cosmos.

   Two new papers provide the best direct evidence yet. The
   first, slated to appear in Astrophysical Journal, measures
   the brightening and dimming of a certain type of supernova.
   Thanks to Einstein's theory of relativity, if distant
   supernovae are speeding away from us, they will appear to
   flare and fade at a more leisurely pace than close-by ones.
   A team of scientists led by Gerson Goldhaber of the Lawrence
   Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in Berkeley, California,
   has shown that this is, indeed, the case with 42 recently
   analyzed supernovae. "It's such a clean-looking curve," says
   Saul Perlmutter, a member of the LBNL team. "It's very
   unambiguous."

   In the second study, Sandage and Lori Lubin of Johns Hopkins
   University in Baltimore analyzed space-based measurements of
   the surface brightness of galaxies. Both the standard
   expanding-universe and the tired-light theory, they
   realized, agree that redshifted light should make distant
   galaxies look dimmer than they really are. In an expanding
   universe, however, time dilation and other relativistic
   distortions will also dim distant galaxies, making them
   appear much fainter than tired-light theory dictates. What's
   more, young stars--and thus young galaxies--tend to be
   considerably brighter than old ones. When that extra
   brightness is taken into account, the observations match
   expanding-universe predictions, as Lubin and Sandage will
   report in Astronomical Journal. For the tired-light theory
   to be correct, young galaxies would have to be dimmer,
   rather than brighter, than old ones. "There's no way to
   explain that," says Lubin.

   Although not surprising in themselves, the results are
   useful for "tidying things up in our cosmology," says
   Michael Pahre, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian
   Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who
   performed a similar surface-brightness experiment in the
   mid-1990s. By comparing the expanding-universe theory's
   predictions with observed values of the surface brightness
   of distant galaxies, scientists can work backward and figure
   out how much brighter those galaxies must have been earlier
   in the history of the universe.

   Even so, researchers doubt whether the results will convert
   tired-light diehards. "I don't think it's possible to
   convince people who are holding on to tired light," says Ned
   Wright, an astrophysicist at the University of California,
   Los Angeles. "I would say it is more a problem for a
   psychological journal than for Science."