Mainstream treatments of freq. shifts for accelerated receivers/emitters
Hi, nakurusil,
nakurusil said:
I would need a pointer to a mainstream treatment of the general relativistic Doppler effect when source and receiver are accelerated wrt each other. Book/paper/wiki . No crank papers , please (i.e. no Apeiron and such). Thank you.
I am not sure I know what you mean by "
general relativistic Doppler effect"; one major point I have tried to emphasize in several threads here is that
this stuff really has nothing to do with general relativity or even curved versus flat spacetime, but rather with the geometry of congruences (especially null congruences), whether in flat or curved spacetimes.
So let me restate the question as: "what are some mainstream treatments of frequency shift phenomena, involving a source and an receiver, when either the source or the receiver (or both) are accelerating"?
Some obvious places to begin are the first edition of Taylor and Wheeler,
Spacetime Physics, or another book which treats the k-calculus (IIRC, there is one by Rindler which does so), then Section 2.8 and Chapter 6 of Misner, Thorne & Wheeler,
Gravitation (MTW) for two scenarios featuring accelerating observers and or sources.
Then you can see "Frame fields in general relativity", "Rindler coordinates", "Born coordinates", "Ehrenfest paradox", "Bell's spaceship paradox" in the versions listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hillman/Archive; these have citations to published review papers where you can find many more references. Books like Nakayama,
Geometry, Topology, and Physics, might be useful in following the first article; there is also some material on frame fields in MTW, and you can find these techniques treated in standard monographs such as Hawking & Ellis,
The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time.
Note well! Wikipedia is inherently unstable, and that articles in this specific area have been dogged in the past year by a single cranky dissident who managed to chase out of WP least one contributor with a Ph.D. in physics, plus myself (Ph.D. in mathematics), who incorrectly maintains in the face of all evidence that the mainstream view is his view. For this reason, current versions of the articles I mentioned may be better than the last ones I contributed to, or they may be much worse, so I recommend that you start with the ones I cited and compare carefully with subsequent editions. To repeat something I find myself saying with distressing frequency at PF:
I will not "discuss" physics with specific cranks or their supporters; it should not be necessary to for me to explain why not and I will not do so. Ultimately, you are on your own in terms of evaluating specific versions of specific WP articles; it will not always be easy to tell simply from obvious clues whether or not the article faithfully and accurately reflects the current scientific mainstream. Ultimately, only someone who has read the literature with adequate insight and understanding may be able to tell.
And don't overlook the obvious: MTW itself has a huge bibliography which you can use to find some older but still important, useful, and relevant papers.
Note well! Everyone should be aware that published papers vary widely in quality; as you yourself obviously already appreciate (good!), some "journals" seem to function as trashcans which collect papers rejected by more rigorous journals. In addition,
while the arXiv is an invaluable resource, it does not yet function as a refereed journal. The "endorsement" system is only analogous to "moderation" in a newsgroup; it cannot and does not prevent cranky eprints from being posted to the arXiv. Thus, the quality of eprints posted there varies even more widely than does the quality of papers in the published literature. So you should be cautious about anything you read outside a highly reputable and widely used textbook such as MTW until you know more.
Unfortunately, I must add a specific caveat. I and others have noticed that the arXiv is particularly uneven in the case of papers on alleged "foundational issues" centering around relativistic physics, and I emphatically intend to include the treatment of accelerated observers as a known "problem area" in the arXiv where eprints have a better than even chance of being partially or completely incorrect. It is crucial to understand that most physicists (at least those who often deal with relativistic physics), upon being asked to pick out the bad eprints, would have little trouble doing so; there is fact wide consensus on right and wrong ways to treat these problems, but a small group of noisy dissidents came sometimes create an incorrect impression which might fool casual observers unfamiliar with standard mathematical techniques. Let there be no mistake: the appropriate mathematical techniques are very well known and widely used outside of these particular problems; the issues in questions come down to computations and there is no ambiguity about the fact that the incorrect claims are in fact mathematically incorrect.
[EDIT: having just noticed another post in this thread, perhaps I should caution against "guessing games" about which specific arXiv eprints I might have in mind. That would be profitless and in self-defense I will not respond to queries of that sort.]
You can also search PF for a recent thread (last two weeks or so) in which I posted some computations of frequency shift phenomena for various pairs of observers, including some accelerating receivers, in the Schwarzschild vacuum solution.