Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity Commons™
Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Cosmology, Relativity, and Gravity
The Kinematic Origin Of The Cosmological Redshift, Emory F. Bunn, David W. Hogg
The Kinematic Origin Of The Cosmological Redshift, Emory F. Bunn, David W. Hogg
Physics Faculty Publications
A common belief about big-bang cosmology is that the cosmological redshift cannot be properly viewed as a Doppler shift (that is, as evidence for a recession velocity), but must be viewed in terms of the stretching of space. We argue that, contrary to this view, the most natural interpretation of the redshift is as a Doppler shift, or rather as the accumulation of many infinitesimal Doppler shifts. The stretching-of-space interpretation obscures a central idea of relativity, namely that it is always valid to choose a coordinate system that is locally Minkowskian. We show that an observed frequency shift in any …