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Old June 11th 10, 07:31 AM posted to sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique,sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default EINSTEINIANS AS MARAUDERS

High priests in Einsteiniana have always known that Einstein's 1905
light postulate is false, that its antithesis given by Newton's
emission theory of light is true and that Einstein's 1954 confession
announcing the death of physics was quite reasonable:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.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.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"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."

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."

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."

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/...40/pgs/4_5.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "Même s'il était conscient de l'intérêt de la
théorie de l'émission, Einstein n'a pas pris le chemin, totalement
oublié, de Michell, de Blair, des Principia en somme. Le contexte de
découverte de la relativité ignorera le XVIIIème siècle et ses racines
historiques plongent au coeur du XIXème siècle. Arago, Fresnel,
Fizeau, Maxwell, Mascart, Michelson, Poincaré, Lorentz en furent les
principaux acteurs et l'optique ondulatoire le cadre dans lequel ces
questions sont posées. 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."

Also, high priests in Einsteiniana have always known that marauding
dead science is without risk: once you are allowed to teach that the
greenness of the crocodile exceeds its length, the statement "The
length of the crocodile exceeds its greenness" is the maximum
opposition you can meet with. So up until recently Divine Albert's
Divine Theory was a huge money-spinner and Einsteinians were free to
maraud without restrictions.

What happened? The opposition based on scientific reasoning is as
impossible as ever but the world no longer cares about Divine Albert's
miracles, just as it no longer cares about Stephen King's horrors (it
still cares about Harry Potter's miracles). In other words, Divine
Albert's Divine Theory is no longer a money-spinner. Accordingly,
Einsteinians are now making their living independently of and even in
opposition to Divine Albert's Divine Theory but occasionally teach
that the greenness of the crocodile exceeds its length, just in case:

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but
until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both,
our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic. (...) I
realized I didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in
these heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions
to work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the
right track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight
less. So, I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/vacuum.html
John Baez, April 5, 2010: "Thanks to the redshifts of distant galaxies
and quasars, we've known for a long time that the universe is
expanding. The new data shows something surprising: this expansion is
speeding up. Ordinary matter can only make the expansion slow down,
since gravity attracts - at least for ordinary matter. What can
possibly make the expansion speed up, then? Well, general relativity
says that if the vacuum has energy density, it must also have
pressure! In fact, it must have a pressure equal to exactly -1 times
its energy density, in units where the speed of light and Newton's
gravitational constant equal 1. Positive energy density makes the
expansion of the universe tend to slow down... but negative pressure
makes the expansion tend to speed up."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...ang/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer
were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now
pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would
mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to
have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."

http://sampit.geol.sc.edu/Doppler.html
"Moving observer: A man is standing on the beach, watching the tide.
The waves are washing into the shore and over his feet with a constant
frequency and wavelength. However, if he begins walking out into the
ocean, the waves will begin hitting him more frequently, leading him
to perceive that the wavelength of the waves has decreased."

Pentcho Valev