Perhaps the silence will be broken by the end of September when
Einsteiniana's bosses will have to decide how to fill the empty space
beyond Einstein:
http://www.beyond-einstein-2008.de/
Some of the bosses are considering very carefully Einstein's 1909 idea
that Newton's emission theory of light should be resurrected:
http://www.astrofind.net/documents/t...radiation..php
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation by Albert Einstein
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. The
purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show
that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of
light is imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up
light no longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather
as independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in
Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed
our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the
state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity
like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory
of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from
the emitting to the absorbing object."
If the other bosses don't mind, John Stachel and Jean Eisenstaedt will
resurrect Newton's emission theory of light immediately - they believe
it is compatible with Einstein's idiocies and is even "infinitely more
interesting - and more usefull pedagogically" than them:
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/...relativity.htm
This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, "'What Song the Syrens Sang':
How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel,
Einstein from "B" to "Z".
"This was itself a daring step, since these methods had been developed
to help understand the behavior of ordinary matter while Einstein was
applying them to the apparently quite different field of
electromagnetic radiation. The "revolutionary" conclusion to which he
came was that, in certain respects, electromagnetic radiation behaved
more like a collection of particles than like a wave. He announced
this result in a paper published in 1905, three months before his SRT
paper. The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of particles
had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity into the
middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission theory" of
light, a phrase I shall use.....Giving up the ether concept allowed
Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an
independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is
radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of
light.".....An emission theory is perfectly compatible with the
relativity principle. Thus, the M-M experiment presented no problem;
nor is stellar abberration difficult to explain on this
basis......This does not imply that Lorentz's equations are adequate
to explain all the features of light, of course. Einstein already knew
they did not always correctly do so-in particular in the processes of
its emission, absorption and its behavior in black body radiation.
Indeed, his new velocity addition law is also compatible with an
emission theory of light, just because the speed of light compounded
with any lesser velocity still yields the same value. If we model a
beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can still
be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed
the view that an adequate future theory of light would have to be some
sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories......The resulting
theory did not force him to choose between wave and emission theories
of light, but rather led him to look forward to a synthesis of the
two."
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i6272.html
John Stachel: "Not only is the theory [of relativity] compatible with
an emission theory of radiation, since it implies that the velocity of
light is always the same relative to its source; the theory also
requires that radiation transfer mass between an emitter and an
absorber, reinforcing Einstein's light quantum hypothesis that
radiation manifests a particulate structure under certain
circumstances."
http://ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/...40/pgs/4_5.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "Il n'y a alors aucune raison théorique à ce que la
vitesse de la lumière ne dépende pas de la vitesse de sa source ainsi
que de celle de l'observateur terrestre ; plus clairement encore, il
n'y a pas de raison, dans le cadre de la logique des Principia de
Newton, pour que la lumière se comporte autrement - quant à sa
trajectoire - qu'une particule matérielle. Il n'y a pas non plus de
raison pour que la lumière ne soit pas sensible à la gravitation.
Bref, pourquoi ne pas appliquer à la lumière toute la théorie
newtonienne ? C'est en fait ce que font plusieurs astronomes,
opticiens, philosophes de la nature à la fin du XVIIIème siècle. Les
résultats sont étonnants... et aujourd'hui nouveaux.....Pourtant, au
plan des structures physiques, l'optique relativiste des corps en
mouvement de cette fin du XVIIIème est infiniment plus intéressante -
et plus utile pédagogiquement - que le long cheminement qu'a imposé
l'éther."
Pentcho Valev