SCIENCE IN A MESS

http://worldsciencefestival.com/events/salon_time
"Refining Einstein: New Theories of Time. The quest to unify Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics is forcing scientists to reevaluate everything..."

Not everything. Special relativity and especially the fundamental truth in Divine Albert's world - Einstein's 1905 false light postulate - should not be reevaluated. (In Big Brother's world the fundamental truth is 2+2=5.) Einsteinians used to question the fundamental truth but then decided not to saw off the bough they were sitting on:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ma...einsteinwrong/
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.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy): "Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and physicists who have come together to reassess the contemporary paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity, and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativity's relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics, and physics. (...) Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."

http://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/cover
"Was Einstein Wrong? What if Einstein was wrong? The day João Magueijo began to doubt Albert Einstein started inauspiciously. It was a rainy winter morning in 1995 at Cambridge University, where Magueijo was a research fellow in theoretical physics. He was tramping across a sodden soccer field, suffering from a hangover and mumbling to himself, when out of the gray a heretical idea brought him to a full stop: What if Einstein was wrong? What if, rather than being forever constant, the speed of light could change? Magueijo stood there in the downpour. What would that mean?"

http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten: "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://roychristopher.com/joao-mague...tier-cosmology
"Likewise, Joao Magueijo has radical ideas, but his ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Magueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein's most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×10^6 meters/second) is familiar to anyone who is remotely acquainted with modern physics. It is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light. Magueijo doesn't buy it. His VSL (Varying Speed of Light) presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent. Before you declare that he's out of his mind, understand that this man received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
"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.."

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_...an_barbour.pdf
Aspects of Time, Julian Barbour, Warwick, August 24th 2011: "Was Spacetime Glorious Historical Accident? (...) ABSOLUTE SIMULTANEITY RESTORED!"

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/sep...ns-lonely-path
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.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

Pentcho Valev