EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...html?full=true
NEW SCIENTIST: Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space
"But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at
the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario,
Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to
take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in
their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein
invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space. (...)
One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma-
ray bursts. If momentum space is curved in a particular way that
mathematicians refer to as "non-metric", then a high-energy photon in
the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than
a lower-energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being
emitted at the same time. Just that phenomenon has already been seen,
starting with some unusual observations made by a telescope in the
Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The
effect has since been confirmed by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space
telescope, which has been collecting light from cosmic explosions
since it launched in 2008. "The Fermi data show that it is an
undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between
arrival time and energy - high-energy photons arrive later than low-
energy photons," says Amelino-Camelia. Still, he is not popping the
champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are
true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to
"unknown properties of the explosions themselves", as Amelino-Camelia
puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts idealise the explosions as
instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While
there is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts
occur in such a way that they emit lower-energy photons a second or
two before higher-energy photons, which would account for the observed
delays. In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from
properties of relative locality, we need a large sample of gamma-ray
bursts taking place at various known distances (arxiv.org/abs/
1103.5626). If the delay is a property of the explosion, its length
will not depend on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it
is a sign of relative locality, it will. Amelino-Camelia and the rest
of Smolin's team are now anxiously awaiting more data from Fermi."

Previous shocks and horrors:

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://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
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."

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 3×106 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.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher
based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is
hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in
physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The
trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with
relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose
geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of
Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully
powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most
perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-
dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other
processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd
sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns
out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are
differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow
captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage
of time."

Pentcho Valev