"Brian Tung" wrote in message
...
Androcles wrote:
What causes the red shift? Only one cause?

No. There are understood to be at least three distinct causes of the
red shift: recessional red shift, gravitation red shift, and cosmological
(expansion) red shift.

What about E = h\nu ?

What about it? I'm not trying to be sarcastic; you're really being too
elliptic.

Actually I'm being parabolic, trying to bring about a focus.

Isn't E spread over a greater surface area, the further away the
emitter is?

Yes. What are you driving at?

Of these questions, the first is quantum-mechanical; the second is
classical. Would you like to clarify why you are asking these disparate
questions?

Radio transmitters emit waves, waves can be focused into beams.
The inverse square law does not apply to Cassini-Huyghens at Saturn
or to single photons emitted by atoms/ions.
A photon is a wave of short duration, a single cycle.
Beams diverge, so there IS an inverse power law 1/r^(something) for
photons and beams.
Photons have an annoying habit of passing through more than one slit
of a diffraction grating used to measure energy.
The answer to redshift is both quantum mechanical and classical,
not recessional. I expect to observe redshift from a distant emitter.
The single photon diverges. Multiple photons spread like buckshot,
single photons spread like splatted flies on a windshield.
There is no evidence of a Big Bang, it is conjecture based on
a misunderstanding of the nature of electromagnetic radiation.
Hubble was not listening to Planck.
Androcles.
"That fellow seems to me to possess but one idea, and that is a wrong
one."--Dr. Samuel Johnson


Brian Tung
The Astronomy Corner at http://astro.isi.edu/
Unofficial C5+ Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/c5plus/
The PleiadAtlas Home Page at http://astro.isi.edu/pleiadatlas/
My Own Personal FAQ (SAA) at http://astro.isi.edu/reference/faq.txt