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Old December 11th 08, 09:05 AM posted to sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique,sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default GENERAL RELATIVITY WITHOUT SPECIAL RELATIVITY

How fiercely hypnotists force Einstein zombie world to forget
Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...elativity.html
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity
29 October 2008
Mark Buchanan
NEW SCIENTIST
"Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as
things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that
even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all
follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always
travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell
Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York,
begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of
researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with
light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it
not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory
for it." What's more, Feigenbaum claims in a paper on the arXiv
preprint server that has yet to be peer-reviewed, if only the father
of relativity, Galileo Galilei, had known a little more modern
mathematics back in the 17th century, he could have got as far as
Einstein did (http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1234). "Galileo's thoughts are
almost 400 years old," he says. "But they're still extraordinarily
potent. They're enough on their own to give Einstein's relativity,
without any additional knowledge." (...) This was a problem if
Maxwell's theory, like all good physical theories, was to follow
Galileo's rule and apply for everyone. If we do not know who measures
the speed of light in the equations, how can we modify them to apply
from other perspectives? Einstein's workaround was that we don't have
to. Faced with the success of Maxwell's theory, he simply added a
second assumption to Galileo's first: that, relative to any observer,
light always travels at the same speed. 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 result turns the historical logic of
Einstein's relativity on its head. Those contortions of space and time
that Einstein derived from the properties of light actually emerge
from even more basic, purely mathematical considerations. Light's
special position in relativity is a historical accident. (...) 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."

Pentcho Valev