Reply To: All expense paid trip to Stockholm at some future date?

[AaronB]

This map of galactic magnetic fields shows the prevalence of magnetic fields in interstellar space. Magnetic fields cause the polarity of light to align with the fields. This is called the Faraday effect. The polarity of light is the axis of the angular momentum of the photon. It is my opinion that it takes energy to change that polarity, just like it takes energy to change the axis of a spinning bicycle tire. Since the speed of light is fixed in a certain medium, the only way for a photon to lose energy is in its frequency, or the speed of its spin. Since a photon is essentially massless, it would only lose a tiny bit of energy when its axis of rotation was changed, so it would only experience a tiny redshift with each change. However, a photon traveling for billions of years through many different intergalactic magnetic fields would, it seems to me, experience a significant amount of redshift that would be roughly linear with the distance traveled, depending on the number of magnetic fields it encountered along the way. If this hasn’t been proposed before, we can call it Faraday redshifting. It avoids the scattering problems of other tired light proposals. What do you think?