Gravitational redshift and the vacuum index of refraction

Abstract

A physical process of the gravitational redshift was described in an earlier paper (Wilhelm & Dwivedi 2014) that did not require any information for the emitting atom neither on the local gravitational potential U nor on the speed of light c. Although it could be shown that the correct energy shift of the emitted photon resulted from energy and momentum conservation principles and the speed of light at the emission site, it was not obvious how this speed is controlled by the gravitational potential. The aim of this paper is to describe a physical process that can accomplish this control. We determine the local speed of light c by deducing a gravitational index of refraction n G as a function of the potential U assuming a specific aether model, in which photons propagate as solitons. Even though an atom cannot locally sense the gravitational potential U (cf. Müller et al. 2010), the gravitational redshift will nevertheless be determined by U (cf. Wolf et al. 2010)mediated by the local speed of light c.

Gravitational matter-antimatter impact interactions

“…This is wrong, (cf., e.g. Okun 2000;Okun, Selivanov & Telegdi 2000;Wilhelm & Dwivedi 2019), and it is thus questionable, whether the statement that energy is not conserved by the "antigravity" theory can be justified by this assumption.…”

Impact Models of Gravitational and Electrostatic Forces

“…A physical process will then be outlined that provides information on the gravitational potential U at the site of a photon emission [95]. This aspect had not been covered in our earlier paper on the gravitational redshift [96].…”

“…The study of the gravitational redshift, predicted for solar radiation by Einstein [109], is still an important subject in modern physics and astrophysics [95,96,[110][111][112][113][114]. This can be exemplified by two conflicting statements.…”

“…Support for the first alternative can be found in many publications [49,88,95,96,109,[115][116][117], but it is, indeed, not obvious how an atom can locally sense the gravitational potential U. Experiments on Earth, in space and in the Sun-Earth system, cf.…”

“…Eq. (95), and consequently the speed of light cU ðÞ at the potential U. This solves the problem formulated in relation to Eq.…”