Acceleration in a Relative Universe

Note: The reasoning in this blog post is flawed.

A better way to view acceleration and blue shift is explained in Energy as Size and Mirror Moving Through Space.

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Energy was of no help when it came to understanding the way neutrinos and photons relate to space and time. However, when it comes to acceleration, energy is the way to go.

Let us consider a spaceship accelerating through space. The inhabitants of the spaceship are unaware of anything unusual going on inside the ship. But when they look out of the spaceship they notice something interesting.

Light coming from objects to the front of the spaceship blue-shifts. Light coming from behind red-shifts.

This means that there is more energy in the photons coming from the front of the space ship than the light coming from behind.

If the spaceship is externally powered by a source that can be considered stationary relative to the reference frame, the photons reaching the spaceship from this source, placed behind the spaceship, will become increasingly red-shifted. At the same time, random low energy photons hitting the spaceship from the front will become increasingly energetic.

The energy transferred to the spaceship from behind starts tending towards zero while the energy of even the most innocent of photons hitting the spaceship from the front becomes super-energetic.

It is therefore impossible to accelerate a spaceship all the way up to the speed of light.

There is no way around this. Rocket fuel provided by the spaceship itself will not be much more effective. As soon as it is dumped out at the back and ignited, the fuel source is traveling slower than the spaceship. It may still be traveling very close to the same speed as the spaceship, but its effectiveness will diminish as the spaceship accelerates.

Furthermore, the torrent of energetic photons from the front will be such that if the spaceship was to stop pouring out rocket fuel to its back, the spaceship would in fact be slowed down.

The tendency of any reference frame is to make everything inside of it stand still relative to everything else.

This is not noticeable at modest speeds, but as is the case with the spaceship, anything moving contrary to the reference frame will have energetic blue-shifted photons hitting it from the front and red-shifted weakling photons hitting it from behind. Given enough time, photons will slow down any object moving contrary to the general reference frame.

Complete rest of an object is obtained when the energy of photons hitting it is equal on all sides.