FUNDAMENTAL LIES IN PHYSICS EDUCATION

[Pentcho Valev]

FUNDAMENTAL LIE 1: According to Maxwell's theory, the speed of light is independent of the motion of both the source and the observer:

http://www.physics.fsu.edu/courses/Summer12/PHY2054C/lect15-ch27__2.pdf
"He [Maxwell] also showed the speed of light is independent of the motion of both the source and the observer."

http://www.lecture-notes.co.uk/susskind/special-relativity/lecture-1/principles-of-special-relativity/
Leonard Susskind: "One of the predictions of Maxwell's equations is that the velocity of electromagnetic waves, or light, is always measured to have the same value, regardless of the frame in which it is measured."

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-mc2-Should-Care/dp/0306817586
Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?), Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw, p. 91: "...Maxwell's brilliant synthesis of the experimental results of Faraday and others strongly suggested that the speed of light should be the same for all observers."

THE TRUTH: According to Maxwell's theory, the speed of light as measured by the observer varies with the speed of the observer:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
JOHN NORTON: "Finally, in an apparent eagerness to provide a seamless account, an author may end up misstating the physics. Kaku (2004, p. 45) relates how Einstein found that his aversion to frozen light was vindicated when he later learned Maxwell's theory." MICHIO KAKU: "When Einstein finally learned Maxwell's equations, he could answer the question that was continually on his mind. As he suspected, he found that there were no solutions of Maxwell's equations in which light was frozen in time. But then he discovered more. To his surprise, he found that in Maxwell's theory, light beams always traveled at the same velocity, no matter how fast you moved." JOHN NORTON AGAIN: "This is supposedly what Einstein learned as a student at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he completed his studies in 1900, well before the formulation of the special theory of relativity. Yet the results described are precisely what is not to be found in the ether based Maxwell theory Einstein would then have learned. That theory allows light to slow and be frozen in the frame of reference of a sufficiently rapidly moving observer."

http://culturesciencesphysique.ens-lyon.fr/XML/db/csphysique/metadata/LOM_CSP_relat.xml
Gabrielle Bonnet, École Normale Supérieure de Lyon: "Les équations de Maxwell font en particulier intervenir une constante, c, qui est la vitesse de la lumière dans le vide. Par un changement de référentiel classique, si c est la vitesse de la lumière dans le vide dans un premier référentiel, et si on se place désormais dans un nouveau référentiel en translation par rapport au premier à la vitesse constante v, la lumière devrait désormais aller à la vitesse c-v si elle se déplace dans la direction et le sens de v, et à la vitesse c+v si elle se déplace dans le sens contraire."

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking: "Maxwell's theory predicted that radio or light waves should travel at a certain fixed speed. But Newton's theory had got rid of the idea of absolute rest, so if light was supposed to travel at a fixed speed, one would have to say what that fixed speed was to be measured relative to. It was therefore suggested that there was a substance called the "ether" that was present everywhere, even in "empty" space. Light waves should travel through the ether as sound waves travel through air, and their speed should therefore be relative to the ether. Different observers, moving relative to the ether, would see light coming toward them at different speeds, but light's speed relative to the ether would remain fixed."

FUNDAMENTAL LIE 2: The Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light is independent of the motion of both the source and the observer:

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Faster Than the Speed of Light, Joao Magueijo: "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!"

http://www.pourlascience.fr/ewb_pages/f/fiche-article-la-disparition-du-temps-en-relativite-26042.php
Marc Lachièze-Rey: "Mais au cours du XIXe siècle, diverses expériences, et notamment celle de Michelson et Morley, ont convaincu les physiciens que la vitesse de la lumière dans le vide est invariante. En particulier, la vitesse de la lumière ne s'ajoute ni ne se retranche à celle de sa source si celle-ci est en mouvement."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,993018,00.html
Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower, and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving."

THE TRUTH: Originally (prior to advancing the ad hoc length contraction hypothesis) the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally showed that the speed of light varies as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
Relativity and Its Roots, Banesh Hoffmann: "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."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation, has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late 19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised the greatest theoretician of the day."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that 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. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com

[Pentcho Valev]

FUNDAMENTAL LIE 3: As light falls, "its energy should increase by exactly the same fraction that it increases for any other thing we could imagine dropping" but its speed should remain constant:

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-mc2-Should-Care/dp/0306817586
Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?), Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw, p. 236: "If the light falls in strict accord with the principle of equivalence, then, as it falls, its energy should increase by exactly the same fraction that it increases for any other thing we could imagine dropping. We need to know what happens to the light as it gains energy. In other words, what can Pound and Rebka expect to see at the bottom of their laboratory when the dropped light arrives? There is only one way for the light to increase its energy. We know that it cannot speed up, because it is already traveling at the universal speed limit, but it can increase its frequency."

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Chapter 6: "In fact, it is not really consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newton's theory of gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward at a constant speed...)"

THE TRUTH: As light falls, its speed should increase by exactly the same fraction that it increases for any other thing we could imagine dropping:

http://www.einstein-online.info/spotlights/redshift_white_dwarfs
Albert Einstein Institute: "One of the three classical tests for general relativity is the gravitational redshift of light or other forms of electromagnetic radiation. However, in contrast to the other two tests - the gravitational deflection of light and the relativistic perihelion shift -, you do not need general relativity to derive the correct prediction for the gravitational redshift. A combination of Newtonian gravity, a particle theory of light, and the weak equivalence principle (gravitating mass equals inertial mass) suffices."

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/hsr1000/lecturenotes12_02.pdf
Harvey Reall, University of Cambridge: "...light falls in the gravitational field in exactly the same way as a massive test particle."

http://www.wfu.edu/~brehme/space.htm
Robert W. Brehme: "Light falls in a gravitational field just as do material objects."

http://sethi.lamar.edu/bahrim-cristian/Courses/PHYS4480/4480-PROBLEMS/optics-gravit-lens_PPT.pdf
Dr. Cristian Bahrim: "If we accept the principle of equivalence, we must also accept that light falls in a gravitational field with the same acceleration as material bodies."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixhczNygcWo
"Relativity 3 - gravity and light"

Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com