Hubble Redshift = Slowed Light
"Shine a light through a piece of glass, a swimming pool or any other medium and it slows down ever so slightly, it's why a plunged part way into the surface of a pool appears to be bent. So, what about the space in between those distant astronomical objects and our earthly telescopes? COULDN'T IT BE THAT THE SUPPOSED VACUUM OF SPACE IS ACTING AS AN INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM TO LOWER THE SPEED OF LIGHT like some cosmic swimming pool?"
"No one can escape friction, not even in a vacuum. On earth, we're slowed down by the muck of the everyday world. Matter slows us down, rubbing against us and taking away our speed and power. Gravel, air, even slip-n-slides, exert some friction on us. This frictional force runs counter to our motion, and it can't be escaped anywhere on earth. Eventually, inevitably, it will slow us to a stop. Ah, but in space all the rules are different. In a vacuum, with no matter to rub up against like a strangers on the bus, we could move forever. If we started in a spin, we'd never stop unless we had a collision with some kind of asteroid. It turns out, that even in the vacuum of space, we'd get dragged back. The vacuum isn't as entirely devoid of matter as most people make it out to be. It's only devoid of permanent matter. In a vacuum, tiny, temporary, particles pop in and out of existence all the time. (...) If a particle hits a spinning object in the direction of its spin, a part of its momentum may be transfered to the object. If, however, a particle hits a spinning object counter to its direction, more of its momentum will be transferred to the spinning object. If particles moving counter to the object's motion hit with more force than particles moving with the object, the object will eventually stop moving. Not even in space is motion preservered."
If vacuum friction as described above is a fact, the following hypothesis is more than hypothesis - it can be regarded as a valid consequence of this fact:
HYPOTHESIS: As the photon travels through space (in a STATIC universe), it bumps into vacuum particles and as a result loses speed in much the same way that a golf ball loses speed due to the resistance of the air.
On this hypothesis the resistive force (Fr) is proportional to the the velocity of the photon (V):
Fr = - KV
That is, the speed of light decreases with time in accordance with the equation:
dV/dt = - K'V
Clearly, at the end of a very long journey of photons (coming from a very distant object), the contribution to the redshift is much smaller than the contribution at the beginning of the journey. Light coming from nearer objects is less subject to this difference, that is, the increase of the redshift with distance is closer to LINEAR for short distances. For distant light sources we have:
f' = f(exp(-kt))
where f is the original and f' the measured (redshifted) frequency. (The analogy with the golf ball requires that it be assumed that the speed of light and the frequency vary while the wavelength remains unchanged.) For short distances the following approximations can be made:
f' = f(exp(-kt)) ~ f(1-kt) ~ f - kd/L
where d is the distance between the light source and the observer and L is the wavelength. The equation f'=f-kd/L is only valid for short distances and corresponds to the Hubble law whereas the equation f'=f(exp(-kt)), by showing that later contributions to the redshift are smaller than earlier ones, provides an alternative explanation, within the framework of a STATIC universe, of the observations that brought the 2011 Nobel Prize for Physics to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. The analogy with the golf ball suggests that, at the end of a very long journey (in a STATIC universe), photons redshift much less vigorously than at the beginning.
Pentcho Valev