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Originally Posted by Daniel_
The answer is that from the perspective of the bowl, the photon would be massively blue shifted as it came towards the bowl, and then red shifted as is goes away.
Essentially, if you race towards a photon it gets more blue, and if the photon races away from you it gets more red.
Mentally, it feels as if the photon OUGHT to be moving in the same direction as the bowl, at the same speed, and that therefore it ought to "pool" in the bowl.
In truth, because all photons look like they're moving at c regardless of the observer, the difference is expressed in terms of a change of wavelength (i.e. Doppler shifted). The bowl will never quite catch the photons, and taken over an huge timescale, the photons will be almost infinately shifted to the end of the spectrum - becoming gamma radiation.
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Actually, if the bowl is moving at a constant speed, which would be
c from the second reference frame, isn't that the same as having it's own frame of reference moving at 0 with respect to itself? Or at the very least at some arbitrary velocity based on nearby accelerating frames of reference?
Regardless, I am hip to the Doppler-Fizeau effect. And I understand that, from a frame of reference in motion relative to the mirror, the light would appear to shift in one direction or another depending on the angle of incidence and the angle of reflection relative to the observing frame of reference. With that said, if a frame of reference is selected such that the mirror is travelling perpendicular to the angle of observation at the time light hits it, and has a velocity of
c relative to that frame of reference, and if the light hits with and angle of incidence of zero, then the shift should, theoretically, be infinite. At the very least the wavelength would shrink to some incredibly tiny number, Planck's constant, probably.