BURNING QUESTIONS IN DIVINE ALBERT'S WORLD

http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2013/013823...oning-einstein
University of California, Santa Barbara: "Could Einstein's theory of relativity be wrong? That's among the burning questions being asked by theoretical physicists today."

High priests in Einsteiniana know that, as long as Einstein's 1905 postulates are believed to be both true, Einstein simply cannot be proved wrong. Whatever errors he may have committed at later stages, they are insignificant - the groundbreaking miracles such as relativity of simultaneity, time dilation, length contraction, travel into the future etc. remain valid.

Hence the rallying cry in Einsteiniana:

"Brothers Einsteinians, "Einstein is wrong" is nice and profitable as long as you don't question the fundamental falsehood, Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate!"

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Cr.../dp/0547511728
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
Philip Ball: "Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.independent.com/news/2013...7/time-reborn/
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me.
LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality.
QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here?
LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.

Pentcho Valev

The rallying cry in Einsteiniana ten years ago:

"Brothers Einsteinians, "The speed of light is variable" is nice and profitable as long as you don't claim it varies with the speed of the emitter or observer. Let it vary in any other way - with time, energy, frequency or whatever you like. Write your bestsellers, Brothers Einsteinians - glory and money are waiting for you!"

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://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, 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.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.fqxi.org/data/articles/Se...lden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at a constant speed for all observers..."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smol...n03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved, but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy."

Pentcho Valev