I have not had a chance to look over the arguments against the Setterfield Hypothesis. Somewhere, I read that the Setterfield hypothesis would have objects appearing twice in the night time sky. This is the kind of thing that I would read for fun if I ever get the time and the energy. However, this is not the kind of thing that is expected of your average stand up philosopher. We, and by we I mean I, are allowed to just play with the ideas while the physicists get to play with their expensive toys.

What if the speed of light is uniformly slowing down? I would like to have the expensive tools to play with, yet, the fact that I have no professional status to lose allows me the option of saying that the Emperor is naked as a jaybird and that might be a good look for him. So I am thinking only about the effects of a slowdown in the speed of light on the stream of photons by which we see a distant object. My pondering does not involve anything as fancy as fatigue in the fabric of the universe causing the waves of light to propagate at slower rates. As you know, I am not big on the idea of absorption and retransmission as a method of light propagation through space.

If a superconductor can conduct electricity without energy loss, then why could it not also be true that some molecules can conduct light which is just energy? My thinking is that, if the speed of light through a material drops below the speed of light in a vacuum, then the photons revert from their particulate state to their wave state and the wave state could pass through an object without being consumed by it. Some frequencies would be stripped out, but the light itself would not have to be changed in any way more than velocity. So light can move through space without a physical transmission medium aside from its own photon state.

Photon waves should be stretched by the deceleration. Two points on the wave that were one second apart have to stretch in order to remain in their own state when those points are two seconds apart. Draw six waves in your computer drawing program. These six waves represent one second of time. If light was traveling half as fast, then the distance traveled by light in the same second would be half as long. The frequency of those photons has just been cut in half to 3. Lower frequencies are toward the red end of the spectrum.

Cutting the speed of light in half is only an example. I think of it in terms of a movie that was filmed at 60 frames per second but is being shown at 45 frames per second. Since television is about 30 frames per second, you would not notice any jumpiness in the motion. The motion would be distorted with objects moving slightly slower. We usually see this as an object appearing heavier than it is.

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