Red Shift, Blue Shift

[Milton Bradley]

Is it possible that the entire expanding universe theory is flawed because of overlooking simple little things like this?


Is it possible we misunderstand the redshift theory because we fail to take into account the possible effect that light traveling in one direction could have on light travelling in another direction?


Imagine some sort of cancellation, or some kind of tax exerted on light travelling in one direction by light travelling in any other direction.


Is this question stupid? ( I have only the knowledge of science that I have persued on my own)


I have always disliked the Big Bang theory, though I have yet to really put my finger on why exactly I dislike it so. I guess I'm prejudiced.

[Starboy]

The red shift is the phenomenon. The Big Bang and inflation is the explanation. Even if the Big Bang explanation is entirely wrong there is still the phenomenon of a red shift in all directions that becomes greater the further you look. You can observe this phenomenon yourself in your own backyard (assuming you have a horizon and reasonably dark skies and the equipment [~$10,000]). It is the discovery of several phenomena that has prompted the Big Bang explanation but you are free to find your own explanations for those phenomena. And who is to say that some future discovery will put the Big Bang explanation out of favor for some other explanation?

Starboy

[SteveA]

The color of light is due to its wavelength. Like waves in the ocean, the further apart the "crests" are, the redder the color. But light also has particle characteristics, and in this scenario, the lower the energy of each "particle"/photon, the redder the color. These are the dual characteristics that no good explanations have been found for.

If an object is on a large planet, or close to a black hole, anywhere there's a large gravitational "hill" it has to climb to escape, it comes out with less energy and is seen as red.

Stars far away from use appear red because we've assumed it was like the sound of a car passing by, as it's moving toward you the sound has a higher pitch but it's lower as it's moving away from you (which is redder, when it comes to light). So the typical view is that if the universe is expanding, the further away a star is, the faster away it's being pushed by this expansion - so far stars look red.

Some things to look at might be - if the universe has expanded, then the energy in it has become more diffused/diluted in space (like background radiation), which could affect a shift in photon energies or their color or alternately you could view the waves as having been stretched out as the space they were in expended too. Though I think wavelength is not as good a way of looking at light as the energy of it, because we only sense the energy, not the distance between crests for most measurement methods - wavelength might not always correlate with energy. If you just looked at energy then, the observation could be along Miltons observation that's there's some form of "friction" that slowly reduces the energy of a photon as it travels through space for a long time.
I'm not sure if this has ever been tried, but since light has energy and energy has mass and mass creates gravity, light creates gravity and we have high powered lasers that could focus a lot of light into a small point. It would be interesting to see if the light particles interact and change characteristics after having been compressed into such a small space - light creating a miniscule black hole that evaporates and emits light delayed and spread out over time, and of different colors (likely lower energy photons) instead of beams traveling straight through it non-interacting.

Alternately, physical constants, like energies in electron shell orbits may have changed over time so that the color of light emitted from certain atoms was truly different in the past. The speed of light itself is changing. There's no reason things like gravitational constants or magnetism couldn't increase or decrease over time as well.