EINSTEINIANA CAN DO WITHOUT CONSTANT SPEED OF LIGHT

On the one hand, the constancy of the speed of light is gloriously
confirmed by the Michelson-Morley experiment and is so "woven into the
very fabric of physics" that "to "vary" the speed of light is not even
a swear word: it is simply not present in the vocabulary of physics".
On the other hand, the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms
variability of the speed of light as predicted by Newton's emission
theory of light and therefore Einsteiniana simply does not need
Einstein's 1905 false light postulate: even if "light in vacuum does
not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform",
Einstein's special relativity "would be unaffected". Both informations
make believers sing "Divine Einstein" and go into convulsions:

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! (...) What Einstein realized was that if c
did not change, then something else had to give. That something was
the idea of universal and unchanging space and time. This is deeply,
maddeningly counterintuitive. In our everyday lives, space and time
are perceived as rigid and universal. Instead, Einstein conceived of
space and time - space-time - as a thing that could flex and change,
expanding and shrinking according to the relative motions of the
observer and the thing observed. The only aspect of the universe that
didn't change was the speed of light. And ever since, the constancy of
the speed of light has been woven into the very fabric of physics,
into the way physics equations are written, even into the notation
used. Nowadays, to "vary" the speed of light is not even a swear word:
It is simply not present in the vocabulary of physics. Hundreds of
experiments have verified this basic tenet, and the theory of
relativity has become central to our understanding of how the universe
works."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?...64&It emid=66
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."

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.physorg.com/news111075100.html
"Further, Einstein based his theories on the assumption that the speed
of light, c, is constant, and used gedanken ("thought") experiments
involving light rays to reach his conclusions. Now Joel Gannett, a
Senior Scientist in the Applied Research Area of Telcordia
Technologies in Red Bank, New Jersey, has found that Einstein didn't
have to do the work the hard way. A researcher in optical networking
technologies, Gannett has shown that the Lorentz transformations and
velocity addition law can be derived without assuming the constancy of
the speed of light, without thought experiments, and without calculus.
In this case, Einsteinian relativity could have been discovered
several centuries before Einstein."

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...elativity.html
WHY EINSTEIN WAS WRONG ABOUT RELATIVITY
29 October 2008, NEW SCIENTIST
"Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as
things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that
even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all
follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always
travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell
Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York,
begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of
researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with
light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it
not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory
for it." (...) "Galileo's thoughts are almost 400 years old," he says.
"But they're still extraordinarily potent. They're enough on their own
to give Einstein's relativity, without any additional
knowledge." (...) This was a problem if Maxwell's theory, like all
good physical theories, was to follow Galileo's rule and apply for
everyone. If we do not know who measures the speed of light in the
equations, how can we modify them to apply from other perspectives?
Einstein's workaround was that we don't have to. Faced with the
success of Maxwell's theory, he simply added a second assumption to
Galileo's first: that, relative to any observer, light always travels
at the same speed. This "second postulate" is the source of all
Einstein's eccentric physics of shrinking space and haywire clocks.
And with a little further thought, it leads to the equivalence of mass
and energy embodied in the iconic equation E = mc2. The argument is
not about the physics, which countless experiments have confirmed. It
is about whether we can reach the same conclusions without hoisting
light onto its highly irregular pedestal. (...) But in fact, says
Feigenbaum, both Galileo and Einstein missed a surprising subtlety in
the maths - one that renders Einstein's second postulate superfluous.
(...) The result turns the historical logic of Einstein's relativity
on its head. Those contortions of space and time that Einstein derived
from the properties of light actually emerge from even more basic,
purely mathematical considerations. Light's special position in
relativity is a historical accident. (...) The idea that Einstein's
relativity has nothing to do with light could actually come in rather
handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty shock if anyone were ever
to prove that photons, the particles of light, have mass. We know that
the photon's mass is very small - less than 10-49 grams. A photon with
any mass at all would imply that our understanding of electricity and
magnetism is wrong, and that electric charge might not be conserved.
That would be problem enough, but a massive photon would also spell
deep trouble for the second postulate, as a photon with mass would not
necessarily always travel at the same speed. Feigenbaum's work shows
how, contrary to many physicists' beliefs, this need not be a problem
for relativity."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent en évidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procédures opérationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La théorie elle-même en serait-elle
invalidée ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus économiques. En vérité, le premier postulat suffit, à la
condition de l'exploiter à fond."

http://www.physics.princeton.edu/~mc..._44_271_76.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands
as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time
arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of
the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way
the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all
its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
velocity."

http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Rela.../dp/9810238886
Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the
long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a
relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of
light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity.
This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery
of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman,
Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.ph...1ebdf49c012de2
Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a
nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant
speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both
Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains
of applicability would be reduced)."

Pentcho Valev