MAXIMUM HERESY IN EINSTEINIANA

[Pentcho Valev]

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/gr-qc/pdf/0211/0211021v2.pdf
Julian Barbour: "The greatest need is for an EXPLANATION OF THE HUBBLE RED SHIFT THAT DOES NOT RELY ON EXPANSION OF THE UNIVERSE."

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/earlycareer/events/time/programme/julian_barbour.pdf
Aspects of Time, Julian Barbour, Warwick, August 24th 2011: "Was Spacetime Glorious Historical Accident? (...) ABSOLUTE SIMULTANEITY RESTORED!"

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AAS...21530404H
Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift of Sirius B, Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona: "In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt. Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the "Einstein shift" in Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams' 1925 published results agreed remarkably well with Eddington's estimate. Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of General Relativity (after Mercury's anomalous perihelion advance and the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). IT HAS BEEN KNOWN FOR SOME TIME THAT BOTH EDDINGTON'S ESTIMATE AND ADAMS' MEASUREMENT UNDERESTIMATED THE TRUE SIRIUS B GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT BY A FACTOR OF FOUR."

http://irfu.cea.fr/Phocea/file.php?file=Ast/2774/RELATIVITE-052-456.pdf
Jean-Marc Bonnet Bidaud: "C'est ce qu'aurait dû trouver Adams sur ses plaques s'il n'avait pas été "influencé" par le calcul erroné d'Eddington. L'écart est tellement flagrant que la suspicion de fraude a bien été envisagée."

Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com

[Pentcho Valev]

Ritz was right - the speed of light does depend on the speed of the light source - but, after all, career and money have always come from Divine Albert's Divine Theory, yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity:

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Relativity.html
Alberto Martinez: "Does the speed of light depend on the speed of its source? Before formulating his theory of special relativity, Albert Einstein spent a few years trying to formulate a theory in which the speed of light depends on its source, just like all material projectiles. Likewise, Walter Ritz outlined such a theory, where none of the peculiar effects of Einstein's relativity would hold. By 1913 most physicists abandoned such efforts, accepting the postulate of the constancy of the speed of light. Yet five decades later all the evidence that had been said to prove that the speed of light is independent of its source had been found to be defective."

https://webspace.utexas.edu/aam829/1/m/Relativity_files/RitzEinstein.pdf
Alberto Martinez: "In sum, Einstein rejected the emission hypothesis prior to 1905 not because of any direct empirical evidence against it, but because it seemed to involve too many theoretical and mathematical complications. By contrast, Ritz was impressed by the lack of empirical evidence against the emission hypothesis, and he was not deterred by the mathematical difficulties it involved. It seemed to Ritz far more reasonable to assume, in the interest of the "economy" of scientific concepts, that the speed of light depends on the speed of its source, like any other projectile, rather than to assume or believe, with Einstein, that its speed is independent of the motion of its source even though it is not a wave in a medium; that nothing can go faster than light; that the length and mass of any body varies with its velocity; that there exist no rigid bodies; that duration and simultaneity are relative concepts; that the basic parallelogram law for the addition of velocities is not exactly valid; and so forth. Ritz commented that "it is a curious thing, worthy of remark, that only a few years ago one would have thought it sufficient to refute a theory to show that it entails even one or another of these consequences...."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" by 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.springerlink.com/content/l720v8hv51p290gt/
Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics, Einstein Studies, 2012, Volume 12, Part 1, 23-37, The Newtonian Theory of Light Propagation, Jean Eisenstaedt: "It is generally thought that light propagation cannot be treated in the framework of Newtonian dynamics. However, at the end of the 18th century and in the context of Newton's Principia, several papers, published and unpublished, offered a new and important corpus that represents a detailed application of Newton's dynamics to light. In it, light was treated in precisely the same way as material particles. This most interesting application - foreshadowed by Newton himself in the Principia - constitutes a relativistic optics of moving bodies, of course based on what we nowadays refer to as Galilean relativity, and offers a most instructive Newtonian analogy to Einsteinian special and general relativity (Eisenstaedt, 2005a; 2005b). These several papers, effects, experiments, and interpretations constitute the Newtonian theory of light propagation. I will argue in this paper, however, that this Newtonian theory of light propagation has deep parallels with some elements of 19th century physics (aberration, the Doppler effect) as well as with an important part of 20th century relativity (the optics of moving bodies, the Michelson experiment, the deflection of light in a gravitational field, black holes, the gravitational Doppler effect). (...) A relativistic optics of moving bodies: a corpuscle of light is subject to Galilean kinematics, and thus to its principle of relativity as well as to the corresponding theorem of the addition of velocities. (...) Not so surprisingly, neither the possibility of a Newtonian optics of moving bodies nor that of a Newtonian gravitational theory of light has been easily "seen," neither by relativists nor by historians of physics; most probably the "taken-for-granted fact" of the constancy of the velocity of light did not allow thinking in Newtonian terms."

Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com

[Pentcho Valev]

Albert Einstein, the most radical heretic in Einsteiniana:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Development_of_Our_Views_on_the_Composition_and_Essence_of_Radiation
Albert Einstein (1909): "A large body of facts shows undeniably that light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories."

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/975547d7-2d00-433a-b7e3-4a09145525ca.pdf
Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary physics."

Clues:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0101/0101109.pdf
"The two first articles (January and March) establish clearly a discontinuous structure of matter and light. The standard look of Einstein's SR is, on the contrary, essentially based on the continuous conception of the field."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/
"And then, in June, Einstein completes special relativity, which adds a twist to the story: Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves."

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."

Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com