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Old February 21st 16, 07:31 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Einstein's Special Relativity: The Root of All Evil

Poincaré and Ritz would have saved physics from Einstein but both died prematurely:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/su...r/poincare.htm
Henri Poincaré: "Lorentz could have accounted for the facts by supposing that the velocity of light is greater in the direction of the earth's motion [c'=c+v : the emission theory's postulate!] than in the perpendicular direction. He preferred to admit that the velocity is the same in the two directions, but that bodies are smaller in the former than in the latter."

http://ritz-btr.narod.ru/martinez2004pip6.pdf
"In sum, Einstein rejected the emission hypothesis prior to 1905 not because of any direct empirical evidence against it, but because it seemed to involve too many theoretical and mathematical complications. By contrast, Ritz was impressed by the lack of empirical evidence against the emission hypothesis, and he was not deterred by the mathematical difficulties it involved. It seemed to Ritz far more reasonable to assume, in the interest of the "economy" of scientific concepts, that the speed of light depends on the speed of its source, like any other projectile, rather than to assume or believe, with Einstein, that its speed is independent of the motion of its source even though it is not a wave in a medium; that nothing can go faster than light; that the length and mass of any body varies with its velocity; that there exist no rigid bodies; that duration and simultaneity are relative concepts; that the basic parallelogram law for the addition of velocities is not exactly valid; and so forth. Ritz commented that "it is a curious thing, worthy of remark, that only a few years ago one would have thought it sufficient to refute a theory to show that it entails even one or another of these consequences..." (...) Two months after Ritz's death, in September 1909, his exchange with Einstein barely echoed at a meeting of the Deutsche Naturforscher und Ärtze in Salzburg, where Einstein delivered a lecture elaborating his views on the radiation problem but made no explicit reference to Ritz's views. Two years later, however, in November 1911, Paul Ehrenfest wrote a paper comparing Einstein's views on light propagation with those of Ritz. Ehrenfest noted that although both approaches involved a particulate description of light, Ritz's theory constituted a "real" emission theory (in the Newtonian sense), while Einstein's was more akin to the ether conception since it postulated that the velocity of light is independent of the velocity of its source. (...) Ritz's emission theory garnered hardly any supporters, at least none who would develop it or express support for it in print. As noted above, in 1911, two years after Ritz's death, Ehrenfest wrote a paper contrasting Ritz's and Einstein's theories, to which Einstein responded in several letters, trying in vain to convince him that the emission hypothesis should be rejected. Then Ehrenfest became Lorentz's successor at Leiden, and in his inaugural lecture in December 1912, he argued dramatically for the need to decide between Lorentz's and Einstein's theories, on the one hand, and Ritz's on the other. After 1913, however, Ehrenfest no longer advocated Ritz's theory. Ehrenfest and Ritz had been close friends since their student days, Ehrenfest having admired Ritz immensely as his superior in physics and mathematics; but following Ritz's death, Einstein came to play that role, as he and Ehrenfest became close friends."

Pentcho Valev