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Old 25-04-2010, 03:35 PM
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sjastro
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What I found interesting about the article http://www.extinctionshift.com/SignificantFindings.htm is the misinterpretation of GR by attempting to explain it from a "plasma physics" perspective.

The author uses Gauss' law of gravity (which is the gravity variant of Gauss' general laws for electromagnetism) to explain the bending of light.
In essence a particle is deflected in a gravitational field by a force exerted on the particle much like a charged particle is deflected in an external electric field.
There is one little problem however, photons have no mass. Hence a photon cannot be deflected by applying Gauss' law of gravity irrespective of how close the photon is to the source.
In GR the bending of light is through the scalar gravitational potentials of the field (space-time curvature) instead of the vector gravitational field itself as is implied through Gauss' law.

Then there is the argument that the lack of evidence of gravitational lensing around the supermassive black hole Sagattarius A* supports the view that there is an inconsistancy between lensing and GR.
From a GR persepctive there is no such problem.
For a photon to be observed it needs to be beyond the event horizon of the black hole.
The radius of the event horizon is directly proportional to the mass of the black hole. For a supermassive black hole of several million solar masses such as Sagittarius A*, the event horizon is so far away from the centre of the black hole that space-time is quite flat in the vicinity of the horizon. Hence the bending of light even grazing the horizon may not be apparent.

Regards

Steven
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