Einsteinium's Lunacy-3

[The World]

Einsteinium's Lunacy-3

After 100 years of fierce worship of Einstein's 1905 false constant-
speed-of-light postulate, Einsteiniana's priests ultimately destroy
scientific rationality by informing believers 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" and that "WE NEED TO DROP A POSTULATE, PERHAPS THE CONSTANCY
OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT":
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5538
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c"
here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"
http://www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have
committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a
variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I
hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for
10
years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're
productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if
you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to
me
face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not
an
angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I
may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why
should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of
light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems
in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that
relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some
point...
http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten
By Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
The Sunday Times - London
"A group of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the
rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are
actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book,
Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as
even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is
Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same -
186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe.
Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/science/e-and-mc2-equality-it-seems...
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that
speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word "relative."......"Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive
for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "WE NEED TO
DROP A POSTULATE, PERHAPS THE CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT."
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie 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 lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. 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 ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus économiques. En vérité, le premier postulat suffit, à la
condition de l'exploiter à fond."
http://www.hep.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/mechanics/levy-leblon...
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 relalivity. It would,
however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the
invariance
of the photon velocity."
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c01...
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://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoreti...
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://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-w...
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity
29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST
"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
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://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/msg/44d3ebf3b94d89ad
Tom Roberts, Aug 16, 2010: "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://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.1234v1.pdf
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. (...) We can make a few guesses. There is a
"villain" in the story, who, of course, is Newton."
The scientific rationality is so devastated (theoretical physics is
virtually dead) that Einsteiniana's priests find it safe to describe
the aftermath of their centenary activity:
http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/rose_sci_2/physics_ideology_2....
Ideology of/in Contemporary Physics
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
"In this way, major advances ...

Pentcho Valev