For a few years Joao Magueijo was the brightest star in Einsteiniana.
On the one hand, he taught this:
"You might think that the same should happen to light: Light flashed
from a train should travel faster. However, what the Michelson-Morley
experiments showed was that this was not the case: Light always moves
stubbornly at the same speed."
On the other hand, Magueijo fiercely attacked Einstein's 1905 false
constant-speed-of-light postulate so that the next Great Revolution in
Science (more precisely, the next Great Money-Spinner) seemed to be
just around the corner:
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.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have
committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a
variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I
hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10
years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're
productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if
you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me
face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an
angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I
may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why
should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of
light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems
in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that
relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some
point...
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/sc...-relative.html
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word "relative."......"Perhaps relativity is too restrictive
for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "WE NEED TO
DROP A POSTULATE, PERHAPS THE CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT."
The project of a New Great Money-Spinner was so tempting that the
Royal Society decided to abandon the Old Great Money-Spinner
(established in 1919) and embraced Magueijo's ideas wholeheartedly:
http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten
By Jonathan Leake
Science Editor
The Sunday Times - London
"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. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists."
Then the Royal Society somehow realized that both the Old Great Money-
Spinner and the New Great Money-Spinner are unreliable and started
looking for other Great Money-Spinners - e.g. the science dealing with
universes undergoing accelerating expansion.
The Old 1919 Great Money-Spinner (just for information):
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html
New Scientist: Ode to Albert
"Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light-
bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned
at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's
theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and
the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse
measurements to confirm general relativity."
http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking: "Einsteins prediction of light deflection could not
be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in
progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition,
observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed
deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a
German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of
reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ionic,
therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that
expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were
trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of
knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in
science."
http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar...out-relativity
"The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (youre looking at it
on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington
declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame
and onto coffee mugs. In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged
the results, throwing out photos that showed the wrong outcome. No
wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einsteins death in 1955,
scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in
action."
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Before obtaining the Royal Society fellowship any Einsteinian should
answer a simple question:
"Is it true that the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms Einstein's
1905 false light postulate and refutes the true antithesis given by
Newton's emission theory of light?"
Joao Magueijo said "yes" and was immediately awarded the Royal Society
fellowship:
http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every
definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D.
at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at
St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly
held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a
lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States)
at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster
than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the
missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its
speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus
that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to
light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what
the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the
case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that
if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to
each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree
on the same apparent speed! (...) The rest of my research work was
going well, though, and a year or so later I was overjoyed to find
that I had been awarded a Royal Society fellowship. This fellowship is
the most desirable junior research position available in Britain,
perhaps anywhere. It gives you funding and security for up to ten
years as well as the freedom to do whatever you want and go wherever
you want. At this stage, I decided that I had had enough of Cambridge,
and that it was time to go somewhere different. I have always loved
big cities, so I chose to go to Imperial College, in London, a top
university for theoretical physics."
John Norton was not awarded the Royal Society fellowship:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the
importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even
though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the
experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation,
has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with
Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late
19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light
predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised
the greatest theoretician of the day."
Was Banesh Hofmann, Einstein's apostle, awarded the Royal Society
fellowship? He was so unfaithful:
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"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."
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
Banesh Hoffmann: "In an accelerated sky laboratory, and therefore also
in the corresponding earth laboratory, the frequence of arrival of
light pulses is lower than the ticking rate of the upper clocks EVEN
THOUGH ALL THE CLOCKS GO AT THE SAME RATE. (...) As a result the
experimenter at the ceiling of the sky laboratory will see with his
own eyes that the floor clock is going at a slower rate than the
ceiling clock - EVEN THOUGH, AS I HAVE STRESSED, BOTH ARE GOING AT THE
SAME RATE. (...) THE GRAVITATIONAL RED SHIFT DOES NOT ARISE FROM
CHANGES IN THE INTRINSIC RATES OF CLOCKS. It arises from what befalls
light signals as they traverse space and time in the presence of
gravitation."
Pentcho Valev