FROZEN LIGHT IN DIVINE ALBERT'S WORLD

John Norton has discovered that Einstein's famous frozen-light thought experiment is very silly in Einstein's own interpretation but, in Norton's interpretation, it becomes a powerful weapon against Newton's emission theory of light:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
John Norton: "In the thought experiment, Einstein offered three objections to frozen light. They fail as objections to an ether based electrodynamics.. An emission theory also allows light to slow, when an observer chases after it, and to freeze, if the pursuit is fast enough. If we read Einstein's objections as leveled against an emission theory of light, they succeed, forcefully. The first objection was that we do not experience frozen light. That objection had little force against an ether theory since it merely reflected the fact that we are not moving at c in the ether. In an emission theory, light emitted by a body receding from us propagates slower than c. The speed of recession of the source is subtracted from c to find the speed we will measure. In the extreme case, if the source recedes from us at c, we will find the light emitted by the source to be frozen. As this moving source passes through space, it paints a frozen light wave across space. The universe is filled with many luminous bodies. All it takes is for there to be just one light source moving at or near c with respect to us for our space to be painted with frozen light. That is a firm prediction of the emission theory. Yet we have never experienced such a thing. An emission theory can only survive, then, if we make the dubious assumption that no fast moving, luminous bodies have passed through our corner of space - not even one. This is the first failure of an emission theory."

What a failure of the emission theory! Yet there is hope - some light source may have passed the Earth at almost c but since the almost frozen light is coming towards us very slowly, the emission theory will find its confirmation in, say, a few billion years.

In a world different from Divine Albert's world the redshift that the observer measures when he starts moving away from the light source would be a sign that, relative to that observer, the light slows down and approaches the "freezing point":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC0Q6-xt-Xs
"Doppler effect - when an observer moves away from a stationary source. Pay attention to the velocity of the wave relative to the observer. When an observer moves away from a stationary source, the period of the wave emitted by a source is longer and the observed frequency is lower. Because the velocity of the wave relative to the observer is slower than that when it is still."

http://www.cmmp.ucl.ac.uk/~ahh/teach...24n/lect19.pdf
Tony Harker, University College London: "The Doppler Effect: Moving sources and receivers. The phenomena which occur when a source of sound is in motion are well known. The example which is usually cited is the change in pitch of the engine of a moving vehicle as it approaches. In our treatment we shall not specify the type of wave motion involved, and our results will be applicable to sound or to light. (...) Now suppose that the observer is moving with a velocity Vo away from the source. (....) If the observer moves with a speed Vo away from the source (...), then in a time t the number of waves which reach the observer are those in a distance (c-Vo)t, so the number of waves observed is (c-Vo)t/lambda, giving an observed frequency f'=f(1-Vo/c) when the observer is moving away from the source at a speed Vo."

If in a time t the number of waves which reach the observer are those in a distance (c-Vo)t, then the speed of the waves relative to the observer is:

c' = (c - Vo)t/t = c - Vo

Pentcho Valev

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
Albert Einstein quoted by John Norton: "...a paradox upon which I had already hit at the age of sixteen: If I pursue a beam of light with the velocity c (velocity of light in a vacuum), I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest though spatially oscillating. There seems to be no such thing, however, neither on the basis of experience nor according to Maxwell's equations."

John Norton knows why young Albert was unable to see frozen light. The faster Albert ran after the light waves, the longer the wavelength looked to him. If Albert had run against the waves, he would have seen the wavelength contracting:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...ved/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."

Wavelength elongation and wavelength contraction are fundamental, although somewhat clandestine, tenets of special relativity. They are physically absurd but without them the speed of light (relative to the observer) would vary with the speed of the observer, Einsteinians would be kicked out of universities, their children would go hungry in the streets... No need for such tragedy.

Pentcho Valev