The case of the Doppler effect for photons revisited

Abstract

A detailed account is presented of the Doppler effect as a photon phenomenon, complementing a recent paper by Giuliani (2013 Eur. J. Phys. 34 1035–47). The essence of Schrödinger's pioneering derivation (1922 Phys. Z. 23 301–3) of a Doppler formula in terms of the corpuscular theory of light, using energy–momentum conservation, is related. Some neglected references that put the whole scene around the Ives–Stilwell experiment into a more precise perspective are highlighted. Atoms as clocks and particle–wave complementarity are also discussed briefly.