Light Falls with Twice the Acceleration of Ordinary Matter?
Steve Carlip: "Light falls with twice the acceleration of ordinary matter."
Then the Pound-Rebka experiment refutes Einstein's general relativity and confirms Newton's emission theory of light:
The top of a tower of height h emits light with frequency f, speed c and wavelength L (as measured by the emitter):
f = c/L
An observer on the ground measures the frequency to be f'=f(1+gh/c^2) (the Pound-Rebka experiment), the speed of light to be c' and the wavelength to be L':
f' = c'/L'
The crucial questions are:
c' = ? ; L' = ?
Newton's emission theory of light gives a straightforward answer:
Newton's answer: c' = c(1+gh/c^2) ; L' = L
Einstein's general relativity says that c'=c(1+2gh/c^2) ("Light falls with twice the acceleration of ordinary matter") so we have:
Einstein's answer: c'=c(1+2gh/c^2) ; L' = (c(1+2gh/c^2))/(f(1+gh/c^2))
Obviously, and Einsteinians admit that, Newton's answer is reasonable:
Albert Einstein Institute: "One of the three classical tests for general relativity is the gravitational redshift of light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. However, in contrast to the other two tests - the gravitational deflection of light and the relativistic perihelion shift -, you do not need general relativity to derive the correct prediction for the gravitational redshift. A combination of Newtonian gravity, a particle theory of light, and the weak equivalence principle (gravitating mass equals inertial mass) suffices. (...) The gravitational redshift was first measured on earth in 1960-65 by Pound, Rebka, and Snider at Harvard University..."
Einstein's answer is absurd - the idiotic variation of the wavelength with height has no physical justification.
Desperate Einsteinians may see some hope in the hypothesis that Steve Carlip's statement "Light falls with twice the acceleration of ordinary matter" is a joke, or, equivalently, the hypothesis that general relativity does not predict anything like c'=c(1+2gh/c^2). Here are references for them:
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German. (...) ...you will find in section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the variable speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is: c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light co is measured. (...) You can find a more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from the full theory of general relativity in the weak field approximation. (...) Namely the 1955 approximation shows a variation in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911."
"Specifically, Einstein wrote in 1911 that the speed of light at a place with the gravitational potential phi would be c(1+phi/c^2), where c is the nominal speed of light in the absence of gravity. In geometrical units we define c=1, so Einstein's 1911 formula can be written simply as c'=1+phi. However, this formula for the speed of light (not to mention this whole approach to gravity) turned out to be incorrect, as Einstein realized during the years leading up to 1915 and the completion of the general theory. (...) ...we have c_r =1+2phi, which corresponds to Einstein's 1911 equation, except that we have a factor of 2 instead of 1 on the potential term."
Pentcho Valev
