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From: John Jones on 19 Apr 2010 19:00
Pentcho Valev wrote:
> On the one hand, the constancy of the speed of light is gloriously
> confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment and is so "woven into the
> very fabric of physics" that "to "vary" the speed of light is not even
> a swear word: it is simply not present in the vocabulary of physics".
> On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms
> variability of the speed of light as predicted by Newton's emission
> theory of light and therefore Einsteiniana simply does not need
> Einstein's 1905 false light postulate: even if "light in vacuum does
> not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform",
> Einstein's special relativity "would be unaffected". Both informations
> make believers sing "Divine Einstein" and go into convulsions:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
> Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every
> definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D.
> at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at
> St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly
> held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a
> lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States)
> at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster
> than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the
> missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its
> speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus
> that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to
> light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what
> the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the
> case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that
> if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to
> each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree
> on the same apparent speed! (...) What Einstein realized was that if c
> did not change, then something else had to give. That something was
> the idea of universal and unchanging space and time. This is deeply,
> maddeningly counterintuitive. In our everyday lives, space and time
> are perceived as rigid and universal. Instead, Einstein conceived of
> space and time - space-time - as a thing that could flex and change,
> expanding and shrinking according to the relative motions of the
> observer and the thing observed. The only aspect of the universe that
> didn't change was the speed of light. And ever since, the constancy of
> the speed of light has been woven into the very fabric of physics,
> into the way physics equations are written, even into the notation
> used. Nowadays, to "vary" the speed of light is not even a swear word:
> It is simply not present in the vocabulary of physics. Hundreds of
> experiments have verified this basic tenet, and the theory of
> relativity has become central to our understanding of how the universe
> works."
>
> http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
> Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
> in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
> that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
> He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
> hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
> although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
> forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
> in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
> and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
> cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
> back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
> Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
> travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
> second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
> light, and make it fall back."
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
> John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
> evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
> universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
> relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
> WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
> POSTULATE."
>
> http://www.physorg.com/news111075100.html
> "Further, Einstein based his theories on the assumption that the speed
> of light, c, is constant, and used gedanken ("thought") experiments
> involving light rays to reach his conclusions. Now Joel Gannett, a
> Senior Scientist in the Applied Research Area of Telcordia
> Technologies in Red Bank, New Jersey, has found that Einstein didn't
> have to do the work the hard way. A researcher in optical networking
> technologies, Gannett has shown that the Lorentz transformations and
> velocity addition law can be derived without assuming the constancy of
> the speed of light, without thought experiments, and without calculus.
> In this case, Einsteinian relativity could have been discovered
> several centuries before Einstein."
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html
> WHY EINSTEIN WAS WRONG ABOUT RELATIVITY
> 29 October 2008, NEW SCIENTIST
> "Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as
> things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that
> even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all
> follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always
> travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell
> Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York,
> begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of
> researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with
> light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it
> not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory
> for it." (...) "Galileo's thoughts are almost 400 years old," he says.
> "But they're still extraordinarily potent. They're enough on their own
> to give Einstein's relativity, without any additional
> knowledge." (...) This was a problem if Maxwell's theory, like all
> good physical theories, was to follow Galileo's rule and apply for
> everyone. If we do not know who measures the speed of light in the
> equations, how can we modify them to apply from other perspectives?
> Einstein's workaround was that we don't have to. Faced with the
> success of Maxwell's theory, he simply added a second assumption to
> Galileo's first: that, relative to any observer, light always travels
> at the same speed. This "second postulate" is the source of all
> Einstein's eccentric physics of shrinking space and haywire clocks.
> And with a little further thought, it leads to the equivalence of mass
> and energy embodied in the iconic equation E = mc2. The argument is
> not about the physics, which countless experiments have confirmed. It
> is about whether we can reach the same conclusions without hoisting
> light onto its highly irregular pedestal. (...) But in fact, says
> Feigenbaum, both Galileo and Einstein missed a surprising subtlety in
> the maths - one that renders Einstein's second postulate superfluous.
> (...) The result turns the historical logic of Einstein's relativity
> on its head. Those contortions of space and time that Einstein derived
> from the properties of light actually emerge from even more basic,
> purely mathematical considerations. Light's special position in
> relativity is a historical accident. (...) The idea that Einstein's
> relativity has nothing to do with light could actually come in rather
> handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty shock if anyone were ever
> to prove that photons, the particles of light, have mass. We know that
> the photon's mass is very small - less than 10-49 grams. A photon with
> any mass at all would imply that our understanding of electricity and
> magnetism is wrong, and that electric charge might not be conserved.
> That would be problem enough, but a massive photon would also spell
> deep trouble for the second postulate, as a photon with mass would not
> necessarily always travel at the same speed. Feigenbaum's work shows
> how, contrary to many physicists' beliefs, this need not be a problem
> for relativity."
>
> http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
> Jean-Marc L�vy-Leblond "De la relativit� � la chronog�om�trie ou: Pour
> en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
> nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumi�re
> est une cons�quence de la nullit� de la masse du photon. Mais,
> empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
> sup�rieure exp�rimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais �tre consid�r�e
> avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait m�me que de
> futures mesures mettent en �vidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
> du photon ; la lumi�re alors n'irait plus � la "vitesse de la
> lumi�re", ou, plus pr�cis�ment, la vitesse de la lumi�re, d�sormais
> variable, ne s'identifierait plus � la vitesse limite invariante. Les
> proc�dures op�rationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
> deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La th�orie elle-m�me en serait-elle
> invalid�e ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
> il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
> plus �conomiques. En v�rit�, le premier postulat suffit, � la
> condition de l'exploiter � fond."
>
> http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/mechanics/levy-leblond_ajp_44_271_76.pdf
> Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
> to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
> foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
> these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
> of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands
> as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time
> arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of
> the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way
> the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all
> its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
> velocity."
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoretical/dp/9810238886
> Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
> developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
> undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the
> long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a
> relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of
> light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity.
> This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery
> of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman,
> Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."
>
> http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c012de2
> Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a
> nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant
> speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both
> Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains
> of applicability would be reduced)."
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pvalev(a)yahoo.com
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