Philip Ball: The Trouble With Scientists

Philip Ball: "A common response to this situation is to argue that, even if individual scientists might fool themselves, others have no hesitation in critiquing their ideas or their results, and so it all comes out in the wash: Science as a communal activity is self-correcting." http://nautil.us/issue/54/the-unspok...-scientists-rp

My comment in Nautilus:

There are extreme cases where such self-correction is unthinkable. If false tenets have become an integral part of the very spirit of our civilization, criticizing them is just meaningless - such tenets will stay alive and kicking until the civilization dies. As the following quotations show, Einstein's constant-speed-of-light postulate is one of those tenets:

"The speaker Joao Magueijo, is a Reader in Theoretical Physics at Imperial College, London and author of Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation. He opened by explaining how Einstein's theory of relativity is the foundation of every other theory in modern physics and that the assumption that the speed of light is constant is the foundation of that theory. Thus a constant speed of light is embedded in all of modern physics and to propose a varying speed of light (VSL) is worse than swearing! It is like proposing a language without vowels." http://www.thegreatdebate..org.uk/VSLRevPrnt.html

"...Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/sc...-relative.html

"But the researchers said they spent a lot of time working on a theory that wouldn't destabilise our understanding of physics. "The whole of physics is predicated on the constancy of the speed of light," Joao Magueijo told Motherboard. "So we had to find ways to change the speed of light without wrecking the whole thing too much." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...ht-discovered/

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/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257

Pentcho Valev