Thank you alexander for the way you worded that. You accomplished what I myself had trouble doing. This is such a difficult subject to explain precisely.

Peter, your view is correct, but i find it disturbing that astrophysicists are unable to give a competent explanation for this phenomenon.
It's a tad bit unbelievable and an embarassment to physics, that actual physicists fell short of such a simple explanation.

It's as simple as this.....the path that light travels is along linear geodesics. (A geodesic is the shortest path between two points along a curved manifold....such as spacetime). So the light itself doesn't curve; it behaves as it should...and takes the allotted path. What does the curving is the actual beam of light, which consists of a countless number of "light particles" streaming forward from the source. Each takes its own individual path in what you referred to as a "straight-line", but each path is such that every particle is emitted at a different angle, at a slightly different time. The net effect is that the beam is smeared out over 360 degrees, and appears to spiral. But the fact is, we see the light that was emitted when the source faced us; not the light from behind it or off to one side. So it is like a light house beacon that took many miles to travel....while in the mean time many rotations have occured. If you were to slow down the spinning, the spiral would appear less severely curved, but none the less does not effect the path light takes once emitted. No light curved, and no speed barriers are broken. The curving of the beam can almost be called an optical illusion, except for the fact that you could never observe the spiral; therefore it cannot appear as an illusion.

• That probably was not astrophysicist. - alexander - August 31, 2001 - 03:15 UTC
  • Probably was not - petersand - August 31, 2001 - 20:44 UTC