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Old December 25th 13, 05:50 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SILLY OR DISHONEST EINSTEINIANS ?

Silly Einsteinians are straightforward: they fly towards the spotlight at 0..75c and believe that the light somehow hits them in the faces at c, not 1.75c. They also believe that this was a prediction of Maxwell's 19th century electromagnetic theory. Needless to say, silly Einsteinians teach their beliefs to gullible audiences:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mpw68rvF4pc

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-mc2-S.../dp/0306817586
Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?), Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw, p. 91: "...Maxwell's brilliant synthesis of the experimental results of Faraday and others strongly suggested that the speed of light should be the same for all observers."

http://www.lecture-notes.co.uk/sussk...al-relativity/
Leonard Susskind: "One of the predictions of Maxwell's equations is that the velocity of electromagnetic waves, or light, is always measured to have the same value, regardless of the frame in which it is measured."

http://www.planetastronomy.com/speci...20mars2005.htm
Françoise Balibar: "Maxwell rentre en scène : il pense que la lumière se propage dans un milieu matériel baptisé éther, ce qui est une erreur, mais il pense aussi que la lumière est un champ électromagnétique, ça c'est révolutionnaire. Il met au point ses célèbres équations dans lesquelles la vitesse de la lumière est la même dans l'éther (référentiel absolu) et dans tout autre référentiel en translation uniforme."

http://sfloccari.lycee-berthelot.fr/...relativit_.pdf
Françoise Balibar: "En effet, lors d'un changement de référentiel à un autre en translation uniforme par rapport à lui, la vitesse de la lumière (appelée ici c) ne devient pas c+V; elle reste c. Cette circonstance, résultat obligé de la théorie de la lumière développée au milieu du XIXè siècle par Maxwell...."

Clever Einsteinians are different. They are dishonest but their dishonesty often takes the form of doublethink, which means that sometimes they are able to tell the truth - to draw it "back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed":

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. (...) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane.."

An example of subtle doublethink:

John Norton teaches that, according to Maxwell's theory, the speed of light relative to the observer varies with the speed of the observer, and rebukes Michio Kaku for teaching otherwise:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
John Norton: "Finally, in an apparent eagerness to provide a seamless account, an author may end up misstating the physics. Kaku (2004, p. 45) relates how Einstein found that his aversion to frozen light was vindicated when he later learned Maxwell's theory." MICHIO KAKU: "When Einstein finally learned Maxwell's equations, he could answer the question that was continually on his mind. As he suspected, he found that there were no solutions of Maxwell's equations in which light was frozen in time. But then he discovered more. To his surprise, he found that in Maxwell's theory, light beams always traveled at the same velocity, no matter how fast you moved." JOHN NORTON AGAIN: "This is supposedly what Einstein learned as a student at the Zurich Polytechnic, where he completed his studies in 1900, well before the formulation of the special theory of relativity. Yet the results described are precisely what is not to be found in the ether based Maxwell theory Einstein would then have learned. That theory allows light to slow and be frozen in the frame of reference of a sufficiently rapidly moving observer."

John Norton teaches that the speed of light relative to the observer does not vary with the speed of the observer. He explains that this invariance is the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate and that Einstein took the idea from... Maxwell's theory:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...les/index.html
John Norton: "Why Einstein should believe the light postulate is a little harder to see. We would expect that a light signal would slow down relative to us if we chase after it. The light postulate says no. No matter how fast an inertial observer is traveling in pursuit of the light signal, that observer will always find the light signal to be traveling at the same speed, c. The principal reason for Einstein's acceptance of the light postulate was his lengthy study of electrodynamics, the theory of electric and magnetic fields. The theory was the most advanced physics of the time. Some 50 years before, Maxwell had shown that light was merely a ripple propagating in an electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory predicted that the speed of the ripple was a quite definite number: c."

Pentcho Valev