Related papers: Can an observer really catch up with light
Significant absorption of radiation is usually accompanied by refraction. This is not the case for $\gamma$ rays travelling cosmic distances. We show that the real and imaginary parts of the refraction index are indeed commensurable, as…
The magnification effect due to gravitational lensing enhances the chances of detecting moderate-redshift ($z \sim 1$) sources in very-high-energy (VHE; $E > 100$ GeV) $\gamma$-rays by ground-based Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope…
The present work shows that through a suitable change of variables relativistic dynamics can be mapped to light propagation in a non-homogeneous medium. A particle's trajectory through the modified space-time is thus formally equivalent to…
It is well-known that observability (and, by duality, controllability) of the elliptic wave equation, i.e., with a Riemannian Laplacian, in time $T_0$ is almost equivalent to the Geometric Control Condition (GCC), which stipulates that any…
``One could imagine that as a result of enormously extended astronomical experience, the entire universe consists of countless identical copies of our Milky Way, that the infinite space can be partitioned into cubes each containing an…
We consider the motion of small bodies in general relativity. The key result captures a sense in which such bodies follow timelike geodesics (or, in the case of charged bodies, Lorentz-force curves). This result clarifies the relationship…
The Raychaudhuri equation for a geodesic congruence in the presence of a zero-point length has been investigated. This is directly related to the small-scale structure of spacetime and possibly captures some quantum gravity effects. The…
The shortening of bodies in the direction of motion, Lorentz contraction, follows from the solution of Maxwell's equations. Moving light clocks will tick slower than those at rest because the speed of light does not depend on a source of…
An optical approach begins by interpreting the gravitational redshift resulting to a change in the relative velocity of light due to the medium of propagation in the gravitational field. The discussion continues by pointing out an agreement…
Although special relativity limits the actual velocity of a particle to $c$, the velocity of light, the observed velocity need not be the same as the actual velocity as the observer is only aware of the position of a particle at the time in…
It has been argued that the energy content in time varying spacetimes can be obtained by using the approximate Lie symmetries of the geodesics equations in that spacetime. When applied to cylindrical gravitational waves, it gives a…
The so-called principle of relativity is able to fix a general coordinate transformation which differs from the standard Lorentzian form only by an unknown speed which cannot in principle be identified with the light speed. Based on a…
In a recent paper (Vigoureux et al. Int. J. Theor. Phys. 47:928, 2007) it has been suggested that the velocity of light and the expansion of the universe are two aspects of one single concept connecting space and time in the expanding…
Several conceptual aspects of quantum gravity are studied on the example of the homogeneous isotropic LQC model. In particular: $(i)$ The proper time of the co-moving observers is showed to be a quantum operator {and} a quantum spacetime…
Trajectories of light rays in a static spacetime are described by unparametrised geodesics of the Riemannian optical metric associated with the Lorentzian spacetime metric. We investigate the uniqueness of this structure and demonstrate…
A major recent evelopment in observational cosmology has been an accurate measurement of the luminosity distance-redshift relation out to redshifts z=0.8 from Type Ia supernova standard candles. The results have been argued as evidence for…
The cosmological constant $\Lambda$ used to be a freedom in Einstein's theory of general relativity, where one had a proclivity to set it to zero purely for convenience. The signs of $\Lambda$ or $\Lambda$ being zero would describe…
In homogeneous cosmological models the wavelength $\lambda$ of a photon exchanged between two fundamental observers changes in proportion to expansion of the space $D$ between them, so $\Delta\log(\lambda / D) = 0$. This is exactly the same…
The main argument that Universe is currently expanding is observed redshift increase by distance. However, this conclusion may not be correct, because cosmological redshift depends only on the scaling factors, the change in the size of the…
The established way of looking at special relativity is based on Einstein postulates: the principle of relativity and the constancy of the velocity of light. In the most general geometric approach to the theory of special relativity, the…