Pardon, my curiosity.... I don't see that anything is going to change
the energy of a photon. The question is what causes the waves of
photons to increase or decrease in frequency. How would the supposed
expansion of space affect the energy of the photon? As opposed to the
frequency?

Do you know what you are talking about?

photon energy: E = h *f = hbar*w = h*c / (wl)

[Old Man]

I realize my last question sounded rude, but it was simply blunt.
Obviously you do have a grasp of the topic. Still, the observation
isn't about the strength of the photon, but the frequency of the wave
and what might affect it. Do you have any basic insights as to that?

TomGee,

How does gravity cause space to collapse, and just what do you mean by
"collapse"?

Einstein proposed the cosmological constant because according to his
calculations, gravity would cause the entire universe to collapse to a
point.

A good example of this theory are black holes and the extent to
which they effectively collapse three dimensional space.

And what and how "is shedding...radiation."?

Light, basically. As gravity contracts matter, it radiates the
constituant energy..starlight.

When does space curve the other way? According to Einstein, massive
objects curve space as they move through it. Ostensibly, space
reverts to its original location after the mass passes. How would
radiation cause it to return to being "straight" instead of curved
after the object has passed?

There is no straight space.

There is expanding space and collapsing
space.

just like zero is not a number, but the state between positive
and negative numbers.

These two balance out so that the average is
effectively flat.

In the two dimensional description of gravity, mass
depresses the sheet.

Where there is no mass, the sheet isn't flat, but
curves upward.

As the actual distribution of mass is very dispersed,
this is not a pronounced effect.

I must sign in and give too much information for me to join that site.

Cosmology
Things fall apart
Feb 5th 2004
From The Economist print edition
What if the dark energy and dark matter essential to modern
explanations of the universe don't really exist?

IT WAS beautiful, complex and wrong. In 150AD, Ptolemy of Alexandria
(snip)
The remaining 70% is even stranger. It is known as dark energy, and acts
to push the universe apart. However, the existence of cold, dark
matter and dark energy has to be inferred from their effects on the
visible, familiar stuff. If something else is actually causing those
effects, the whole theoretical edifice would come crashing down.

Space

Tom Shanks' paper is published in Monthly Notices of the Royal
(snip)
According to a paper just published in the Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society by Tom Shanks and his colleagues at the
University of Durham, in England, that might be about to happen. Many
of the inferences about dark matter and dark energy come from detailed
observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

This is
radiation that pervades space, and is the earliest remnant of the Big
Bang which is thought to have started it all. Small irregularities in
the CMB have been used to deduce what the early universe looked like,
and thus how much cold, dark matter and dark energy there is around.

Dr Shanks thinks these irregularities may have been misinterpreted. He
and his colleagues have been analysing data on the CMB that were
collected by WMAP, a satellite launched in 2001 by NASA, America's
space agency. They have compared these data with those from telescopic
surveys of galaxy clusters, and have found correlations between the
two which, they say, indicate that the clusters are adding to the
energy of the CMB by a process called inverse Compton scattering, in
which hot gas boosts the energy of the microwaves. That, they say,
might be enough to explain the irregularities without resorting to
ghostly dark matter and energy.

Dr Shanks is not the only person questioning the status quo. In a pair
of papers published in a December issue of Astronomy and Astrophysics,
Sebastien Vauclair of the Astrophysics Laboratory of the
Midi-Pyrénées, in Toulouse, and his colleagues also report the use of
galaxy clusters to question the existence of dark energy. But their
method uses the clusters in a completely different way from Dr Shanks,
and thus opens a second flank against the conventional wisdom.

(snip)
The upshot was that the relationship between mass and age did not
match the predictions of conventional theory. It did, however, match
an alternative model with a much higher density of "ordinary" matter
in it.

Are you saying that the expansion of the universe creates additional
gravitation which impacts galaxies? If so, how?

No! The universe doesn't expand, but space does. The result is
pressure on gravitational systems.

So you think hydrogen and other elements condense out from space?

Not "space". The radiation pervading it. As starlight is constantly
adding to it and it is only stable to a very low level, just as the
atmosphere can only hold so much moisture before raindrops form.

C is the speed of light in a vacuum. As light passes through these
fields,

What fields?

The gravity fields of intermediate galaxies and other distributions
of matter throughout space.

it would be slowed somewhat, causing the waves to become
shorter, thus blueshifted. For this effect to be reversed, the light
would have to exceed C to reverse this slowing.

Do you mean for it to be reversed after the light passes the gravity
fields?

The argument has been that any effect of the light entering the
gravity field is reversed as it leaves the field.

Why wouldn't it be dark energy?

Because the assumption has been that only the initial force of the
singularity is what causes the expansion. It was assumed it should be
slowing down. Instead it is apparently speeding up. As my point has
been that the expansion is a factor of light, then it should be a
constant. So I don't need to explain where it comes from, ie. I don't
need the dark energy.

I just need to explain why light from closer
sources has a greater average redshift the light that has been
traveling further.

Are you saying that space remains curved after a massive body passes
through it?

This is actually a much more involved discussion as to the nature of
what space is. ...But what i was saying is that light waves that have
been blueshifted passing through gravity fields do not have the
effect cancelled, ie. the effect of falling into these gravity wells
isn't reversed by climbing back out of them.

regards,

brodix