Tim,

...

I think the reflected beam has the same wavelength as the incident beam.

Photons hitting a surface most definitely do not "lose some energy" and get "re-emitted." There are some very particular configurations that can act as wavelength doublers, but this is a particular, and hard to set up, configuration.

Photons hitting a mirror either are re-emitted with the same energy as before or interact via the photoelectric effect and are thermalized (converted to phonons).

That colors are preserved in mirrors, absent tints (special absorbers), is a Physics 1 clue that mirrors do not downshift photon energies!.

The reason for the weak statement "I think" is that I imagine you might make an argument that the momentum transfer from the photon to the "mirror" results in a very small doppler shift...I'm just not positive about it at the smallest level of interaction.

I think Choate is much like this tech of mine: lacking a solid grounding and overly reliant on his own private notions of what "mass" and "energy" and "group velocity" and so on are. All the best cranks view the world this way.

I don't know Choate's educational background, but I would not be at all surprised if he is self-taught and moved into computers out of some technician training school.

I've reached the same conclusion. I've known some very bright people who lacked access to a formal education. The results were some startling levels of understanding mixed right in with some mind blowing misconceptions and some outright gaps. Mike