Gamma-Ray Bursts: Sans Second Postulate

In 1950, Albert Einstein intimated to Robert Shankland that in the years prior to 1905 he had considered using an emission theory [similar to that which Swiss Physicist Walter Ritz propounded in 1908.] In Ritz's theory the velocity of light with respect to an observer is c + v, where c is the velocity of light with respect to its source, and v is the relative velocity between the source and the observer. Einstein abandoned the c+v approach because he could think of no form of differential equation that could have solutions representing waves whose velocity depended [in part] on the motion of the source. For binary stars the c + v approach would predict "observed" phase relations for light arriving from different parts of a given component's orbit, such that the observed light would be, according to Einstein, all badly "mixed up" and might even "back up on itself." In 1913, the Dutch astronomer, Willem de Sitter, urged abandonment of Ritz's c + v relativity by showing that binary stars failed to provide evidence of the "mixed up" light phasing. (Apparent departures from Keplerian motion, including seeing the same star on opposite sides of its orbit at the same time [at the appropriate observer distance] were predicted by Ritz's c +v relativity.) In 1987, Vladimir Sekerin, at Tomsk University, announced that de Sitter failed to address the fact that for the observer-distances required to produce the star-in-two-places-at-once phenomenon, the angular diameter of the binary component's orbit (from the observer's viewpoint) would be too small for our atmospherically limited earth-borne "seeing" to resolve the images. In essence, de Sitter did not "de throne" Ritz. Sekerin then showed how de Sitter's binary star scenario could be interpreted as evidence "for" the Ritzian theory. (Two images briefly on top of one another will be briefly twice as bright as a single image.) He used de Sitter's equations to analog compute light curves of a number of different kinds variable stars starting with Cepheid variables. The author cleared up a critical flaw in Sekerin's reasoning regarding the computed value of the periodic spectral variations involved, and created software simulations of binary star orbits which produce the light curves and spectral variations predicted by the Ritzian theory. (Constant speed-of-light simulations do not produce the variations.) A limited number of these simulations including some for various kinds of Gamma-Ray Bursts (GRBs) are to be shown as part of this presentation. High-resolution spectral studies of variable stars, including GRBs, may eventually help us decide whether or not Ritz was as wrong as is currently generally thought. Further information on this topic is available at: http://www.shadetreephysics.com/binaries.htm