Special Relativity: the Root of All the Evil

[Pentcho Valev]

In 2001 Lee Smolin and Joao Magueijo discovered that Einstein's special relativity is the root of all the evil, and promptly informed the scientific community about that (Magueijo's book became a bestseller):

"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." Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250 http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257

Special relativity can only be "the root of all the evil" if a postulate is false (logic forbids the combination "true postulates, evil theory"), and Smolin and Magueijo informed the scientific community about the falsehood as well:

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, 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/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/0618551050

"...Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/science/e-and-mc2-equality-it-seems-is-relative.html

A recent reminder:

Joao Magueijo, Niayesh Afshordi, Stephon Alexander: "So we have broken fundamentally this Lorentz invariance which equates space and time [...] It is the other postulate of relativity, that of constancy of c, that has to give way..." https://youtu.be/kbHBBtsrU1g?t=1431

So the scientific community has known the truth about Einstein and his relativity theory for at least 20 years. No reaction of course - in post-truth science truth is immaterial. Still many Einsteinians silently leave Einstein's sinking ship and promptly become experts in quantum mechanics, AI, philosophy, consciousness, biology, meaning of life, climate science, COVID-19, anything:

https://c6.quickcachr.fotos.sapo.pt/i/Bb713bb56/15112108_dBrrH.png

If there is a next, Einstein-free version of fundamental physics, Einstein's 1905 nonsensical axiom

"The speed of light is constant"

will be replaced with the correct and easily justifiable axiom

"The wavelength of light is constant (for a given emitter)".

I have developed the idea in a series of tweets here: https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

Pentcho Valev

[Pentcho Valev]

The following quotations lead to the conclusion that Einstein killed physics by abandoning the variable speed of light posited by Newton's theory and "borrowing" the false constancy of the speed of light posited by the ether field theory:

John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted. [...] If an emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state in the present. As long as Einstein expected a viable theory of light, electricity and magnetism to be a field theory, these sorts of objections would render an emission theory of light inadmissible." http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.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." John Stachel, Einstein from 'B' to 'Z', p. 151 https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-B-Z-John-Stachel/dp/0817641432

"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://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0101/0101109.pdf

"Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/

Albert Einstein: "I introduced the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light, which I borrowed from H. A. Lorentz's theory of the stationary luminiferous ether..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory

See more here: https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

Pentcho Valev