Great Minds in Einstein Cult

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Einsteinians are practitioners of doublethink - they both worship and reject some concept so that the gullible world can come to the conclusion that in science concepts and their negations harmoniously coexist. The champion is undoubtedly Steven Jonathan Carlip, professor of physics at the University of California, Davis. Carlip is a practitioner of triple- and even quadruplethink. A synopsis of his teaching: The speed of light is constant by definition. Einstein said the speed of light is variable in a gravitational field - an interpretation which is perfectly valid and makes good physical sense - but later the speed of light in general relativity became constant. So constant that "it does not even make any sense to say that it varies". Finally, in a gravitational field, light falls with twice the acceleration of ordinary falling matter:

Steve Carlip: "Is c, the speed of light in vacuum, constant? At the 1983 Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures, the following SI (Systeme International) definition of the metre was adopted: The metre is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. This defines the speed of light in vacuum to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s. This provides a very short answer to the question "Is c constant": Yes, c is constant by definition! [...] Einstein went on to discover a more general theory of relativity which explained gravity in terms of curved spacetime, and he talked about the speed of light changing in this new theory. In the 1920 book "Relativity: the special and general theory" he wrote: "...according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity [...] cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position." Since Einstein talks of velocity (a vector quantity: speed with direction) rather than speed alone, it is not clear that he meant the speed will change, but the reference to special relativity suggests that he did mean so. This interpretation is perfectly valid and makes good physical sense, but a more modern interpretation is that the speed of light is constant in general relativity. [...] Finally, we come to the conclusion that the speed of light is not only observed to be constant; in the light of well tested theories of physics, it does not even make any sense to say that it varies." http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html

Steve Carlip: "It is well known that the deflection of light is twice that predicted by Newtonian theory; in this sense, at least, light falls with twice the acceleration of ordinary "slow" matter." https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/9909014v1.pdf

Carlip's most recent interaction with the gullible world:

Steven Carlip, « Why We Need Quantum Gravity and Why We Don't Have It » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiystrENoeU&t=3175s

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Great minds sing in praise of Einstein's fundamental idiocy - "The speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer" (Lisa Randall, mezzo-soprano, sings that the fundamental idiocy is "a monumental shift in how we see the world"):

Lisa Randall, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene: "Light travels at the same speed no matter how you look at it. No matter how I move relative to you light travels at the same speed. No matter who is doing the measurement and no matter what direction you are moving the speed of light is the same. The speed of light is the same no matter what direction or how fast... As you travel faster time slows down. Everything slows down. Everything slows down. Time slows down when you move. Time passes at a different rate. Clocks run slow. It's a monumental shift in how we see the world. It's a beautiful piece of science. It's a beautifully elegant theory. It's a beautiful piece of science. It's a beautiful piece..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuxFXHircaI

Einstein knew that "The speed of light is independent of the motion of the observer" is nonsense but introduced it nevertheless:

John Stachel: "But this seems to be nonsense. How can it happen that the speed of light relative to an observer cannot be increased or decreased if that observer moves towards or away from a light beam? Einstein states that he wrestled with this problem over a lengthy period of time, to the point of despair." http://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm

Einstein's fundamental idiocy killed physics but brought so much money and glory to Einsteinians that they are not sorry for the death of science.

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Great minds reject Einstein's spacetime but worship the underlying premise, Einstein's false constant-speed-of-light postulate. They also worship the ripples in spacetime discovered by LIGO conspirators:

Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:09): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE

Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, "Everyone in string theory is convinced...that spacetime is doomed. But we don't know what it's replaced by." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563

What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..." https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25477

"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage. Horava, who is at the University of California, Berkeley, wants to rip this fabric apart and set time and space free from one another in order to come up with a unified theory that reconciles the disparate worlds of quantum mechanics and gravity - one the most pressing challenges to modern physics." https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721-200-rethinking-einstein-the-end-of-space-time/

"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin." http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/10/time-reborn-farewell-reality-review

"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..." https://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe-ebook/dp/B00AEGQPFE

"[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. [...] Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task." https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22730370-600-why-do-we-move-forwards-in-time/

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Great minds teach that that the speed of light need not be constant - even if it is variable, Divine Albert's Divine Theory remains unaffected:

Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: "Il se pourrait même que de futures mesures mettent en évidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle, du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les procédures opérationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat" deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La théorie elle-même en serait-elle invalidée ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien..." http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf

Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way the validity of the special relalivity. It would, however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon velocity." http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/One_more_derivation.pdf

Sabine Hossenfelder: "If photons had a restmass, special relativity would still be as valid as it's always been. The longer answer is that the invariance of the speed of light features prominently in the popular explanations of special relativity for historic reasons, not for technical reasons. Einstein was lead to special relativity contemplating what it would be like to travel with light, and then tried to find a way to accommodate an observer's motion with the invariance of the speed of light. But the derivation of special relativity is much more general than that, and it is unnecessary to postulate that the speed of light is invariant." http://backreaction.blogspot.bg/2016/05/dear-dr-b-if-photons-have-mass-would.html

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)." http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c012de2

Mitchell J. Feigenbaum: "In this paper, not only do I show that the constant speed of light is unnecessary for the construction of the theories of relativity, but overwhelmingly more, there is no room for it in the theory." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.1234v1.pdf

Tom Roberts: "As I said before, Special Relativity would not be affected by a non-zero photon mass, as Einstein's second postulate is not required in a modern derivation (using group theory one obtains three related theories, two of which are solidly refuted experimentally and the third is SR). So today's foundations of modern physics would not be threatened." http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/msg/44d3ebf3b94d89ad

Mark Buchanan: "...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://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html

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Great minds teach breathtaking logic:

Premise 1: The speed of light is a law of physics (Einstein said so).

Premise 2: The laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame (principle of relativity).

Conclusion: The speed of light is the same in every inertial frame (Einstein's 1905 second postulate is a consequence of the first one).

Leonard Susskind (10:26) : "The principle of relativity is that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame. That principle existed before Einstein. Einstein added one law of physics - the law of physics is that the speed of light is the speed of light, c. If you combine the two things together - that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame, and that it's a law of physics that light moves with certain velocity, you come to the conclusion that light must move with the same velocity in every reference frame. Why? Because the principle of relativity says that the laws of physics are the same in every reference frame, and Einstein announced that it is a law of physics that light moves with a certain velocity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toGH5BdgRZ4

Lubos Motl: "The second postulate of special relativity morally follows from the first one once you promote the value of the speed of light to a law of physics which is what Einstein did. In classical Newtonian mechanics, it was not a law of physics." http://motls.blogspot.com/2006/12/lorentz-violation-and-deformed-special.html

Professor Raymond Flood (5:05): "A consequence of Einstein's principle of relativity is that the speed of light in a vacuum has the same value in two uniformly moving frames of reference." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjRSYv7u3T4

Dave Slaven: "Einstein's first postulate seems perfectly reasonable. And his second postulate follows very reasonably from his first. How strange that the consequences will seem so unreasonable."
http://webs.morningside.edu/slaven/Physics/relativity/relativity3.html

Chad Orzel: "The core idea of Einstein's theory of relativity can fit on a bumper sticker: The Laws Of Physics Do Not Depend On How You're Moving. Absolutely everything else follows from the simple realization that physics must appear exactly the same to person in motion as to a person at rest - the constant speed of light, the slowing of time for moving observers, E=mc2, black holes, even the expanding universe (I've written a whole book about this, explained through imaginary conversations with my dog)."
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2015/05/29/four-reasons-to-not-fear-physics/

Michael Fowler: "Therefore, demanding that the laws of physics are the same in all inertial frames implies that the speed of any light wave, measured in any inertial frame, must be 186,300 miles per second. This then is the entire content of the Theory of Special Relativity: the Laws of Physics are the same in any inertial frame, and, in particular, any measurement of the speed of light in any inertial frame will always give 186,300 miles per second." http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109/lectures/spec_rel.html

Vesselin Petkov: "One of the fundamental facts of modern physics is the constancy of the speed of light. Einstein regarded it as one of the two postulates on which special relativity is based. So far, however, little attention has been paid to the status of this postulate when teaching special relativity. It turns out that the constancy of the speed of light is a direct consequence of the relativity principle, not an independent postulate. To see this let us consider the two postulates of special relativity as formulated by Einstein in his 1905 paper "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies": "the same laws of electrodynamics and optics will be valid for all frames of reference for which the equations of mechanics hold good. We will raise this conjecture (the purport of which will hereafter be called the "Principle of Relativity") to the status of a postulate, and also introduce another postulate, which is only apparently irreconcilable with the former, namely, that light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of the motion of the emitting body". As the principle of relativity states that "the laws of physics are the same in all inertial reference frames" and the constancy of the speed of light means that "the speed of light is the same in all inertial reference frames (regardless of the motion of the source or the observer)" it follow that the second postulate is indeed a consequence of the first - the law describing the propagation of light is the same for all inertial observers." http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9909081

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Great mind Kip Thorne, Nobel prize winner in the post-truth world, teaches that Newton's theory predicts no deflection as starlight passes near the sun. Only Divine Albert's Divine Theory predicts deflection, and in 1919 Sir Arthur brilliantly (and honestly of course) confirmed that prediction:

Kip Thorne: "A second crucial proof of the breakdown in Newtonian gravity was the relativistic bending of light. Einstein's theory predicted that starlight passing near the limb of the sun should be deflected by 1.75 seconds of arc, whereas NEWTON'S LAW PREDICTED NO DEFLECTION. Observations during the 1919 eclipse of the sun in Brazil, carried out by Sir Arthur Eddington and his British colleagues, brilliantly confirmed Einstein's prediction to an accuracy of about 20 percent. This dealt the final death blow to Newton's law and to most other relativistic theories of gravity." http://commons.erau.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3169&context=space-congress-proceedings

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The genius's genius in Einstein cult:

"Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest. The sole physicist ever to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' premier prize, Witten is also known for discovering M-theory, the leading candidate for a unified physical "theory of everything." A genius's genius, Witten is tall and rectangular, with hazy eyes and an air of being only one-quarter tuned in to reality until someone draws him back from more abstract thoughts." https://www.quantamagazine.org/edward-witten-ponders-the-nature-of-reality-20171128/

The genius's genius is unable to understand the Michelson-Morley experiment (or is a blatant liar). In the video below, at 1:17, he teaches that the experiment confirmed the constant (independent of the speed of the source) speed of light posited by the ether theory, and disproved the variable (dependent on the speed of the source) speed of light posited by Newton's emission theory:

Edward Witten on modern physics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnzLpyDsn3M

The Wikipedia author is much cleverer than Witten:

Wikipedia: "Emission theory, also called emitter theory or ballistic theory of light, was a competing theory for the special theory of relativity, explaining the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887. [...] The name most often associated with emission theory is Isaac Newton. In his corpuscular theory Newton visualized light "corpuscles" being thrown off from hot bodies at a nominal speed of c with respect to the emitting object, and obeying the usual laws of Newtonian mechanics, and we then expect light to be moving towards us with a speed that is offset by the speed of the distant emitter (c ± v)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory

The analysis of the above information unavoidably leads to the following conclusion:

In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment UNEQUIVOCALLY confirmed the variable speed of light posited by Newton's emission theory of light and refuted the constant (independent of the speed of the light source) speed of light posited by the ether theory and later adopted by Einstein as his 1905 second postulate.

Banesh Hoffmann, perhaps the most intelligent Einsteinian, says essentially the same:

Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous." https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768

Here is the short truth about the Michelson-Morley experiment:

John Norton: "The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf

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