http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/tho...%20science.pdf
W.H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, 1981, p. 80: "...anomalies arising in the application of the theory are not taken as refuting these postulates. The tension generated by anomalies is to be eased through the modification of either auxiliary hypotheses, observational hypotheses or hypotheses specifying initial conditions. Guidance on what is to be done in the face of anomalies is provided by the positive heuristic of the programme, which: "consists of a partially articulated set of suggestions or hints on how to change, develop the 'refutable variants' of the research programme, how to modify, sophisticate, the 'refutable' protective belt.To see what Lakatos has in mind we need to remember the point made in the last chapter that no theory on its own ever gives rise to predictions of a testable sort. A theory itself is a set of general postulates together with their deductive consequences, and to obtain a testable prediction about a system we need to feed in both statements of the initial conditions of the system and auxiliary hypotheses. This means that what faces the 'tribunal of experience' (in Quine's phrase) is the theory plus what will be called the theory's auxiliary belt (hereafter cited as TAB). When an entrenched theory, T1, faces an anomaly, when, that is, the theory plus the auxiliary belt, A1,1, seems to be falsified by an experiment, the most reasonable thing to do may well be to modify something in the protective belt, changing it to A1,2."

The false assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter belonged to the "hard core" of both the ether theory and special relativity. In order to camouflage and preserve the falsehood, Fitzgerald, Lorentz and Einstein built a "protective belt" referred to by Banesh Hoffmann as "contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations":

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "There are various remarks to be made about this second principle. For instance, if it is so obvious, how could it turn out to be part of a revolution - especially when the first principle is also a natural one? Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous."

Pentcho Valev