Lee Smolin, one of Einsteiniana's highest priests, teaches believers
not to sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity,
relativity, relativity" too loudly:

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. He now believes
that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real
as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The
notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for
Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate
students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...11/bosmo10.xml
"Smolin admits that "we have made no real headway". "We have failed,"
he says. "It has produced a crisis in physics." (...) EINSTEIN MAY
HAVE STARTED THE ROT."

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "Special relativity was the result of 10 years of
intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong
within two years of publishing it."

Within two years of publishing it? 1907? What did Einstein realize in
1907? John Norton explains:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...UP_TimesNR.pdf
John Norton: "Already in 1907, a mere two years after the completion
of the special theory, he [Einstein] had concluded that the speed of
light is variable in the presence of a gravitational field."

Variable? Shock! Horror! Help! Help! Here comes Stephen Hawking who is
the Albert Einstein of our generation and therefore immeasurably
cleverer than Lee Smolin and John Norton:

http://205.188.238.109/time/time100/...of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as
the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower,
and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that
its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments
failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion
through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments
was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case
Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always
traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were
moving."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?...64&It emid=66
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 6:
"Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how
it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles,
one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that
cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really
consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newton's theory of
gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired
upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will
eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward
at a constant speed...)"

Recomforted by Stephen Hawking's teaching, believers restart singing
"Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity,
relativity" as loudly as they can.

Pentcho Valev