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Comment by scruple | Hacker News Reader

What happened to the calories that you burned while writing this comment?

That’s a nonsense reply.

Those calories are known to dissipate via motion, light, and heat.

By contrast, the energy lost to expansion is simply lost, not emitted by the traveling photon through some mechanism. There is no conservation of energy in such a system, so it’s completely unlike the case of burning calories.

Should I add a /s?

It doesn't seem to make any sense as sarcasm either, so while you're free to do that you'd be better off explaining.

Why does it have to make any more sense than the original question? I didn't mean anything by it, it was flippant. And all the same, I have a hard time understanding what could otherwise be meant by the GP question. I heard that question in high school physics. It doesn't have an answer today (nor did it in 1998 when I took high school physics) that I'm aware of (which admittedly doesn't mean much). But, it especially doesn't have an answer today (or, in 2013, since that's when the OP article was written) if our notion of what happens to red-shifted photons and their energy depends on the expansion of the universe.

Maybe you'd like to postulate a theory to the original question with your own energy expenditure instead of deriding me for mine?

If you think there's something wrong with his question, this is the kind of place where you formulate that in a clear way, instead of dismissing it flippantly.

The question is why the red shift happens, and the proposed answer is that the photons were actually emitted with less energy.

It's not a nonsense question. You shouldn't treat it like one. And your weird sarcastic question is just off-topic, not nonsense, so it's very confusing as a counter to begin with.

Well, in my defense, I never intended it as a counter. Like I explained, I was being flippant. I responded with nonsense to something that I originally perceived as being nonsense. I can accept that I was wrong. And, absolutely, in retrospect, at the very least, it was all in bad taste.

> The question is why the red shift happens, and the proposed answer is that the photons were actually emitted with less energy.

I didn't get that from TFA or the GP question at all. What are you basing that on? What am I missing? A more careful reading?

isn't /s a reddit thing, and a really annoying one at that?

Sure, yes, this was all in bad taste. I accept that. My apologies.

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