What does it mean for the speed of light to be constant?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Irlq3TFr8Q
Brian Greene: What does it mean for the speed of light to be constant?

The speed of light can only be constant if the motion of the observer (Gracy in the video) changes the wavelength of the incoming light in the following idiotic way:

http://lewebpedagogique.com/physique...8doppler_p.gif

Needless to say, any wavelength (of light, sound, water waves etc.) is independent of the speed of the observer. The unavoidable conclusion is that the speed of light relative to the observer does vary with the speed of the observer, in violation of Einstein's relativity.

Pentcho Valev

In order for the speed of light to appear to be constant (and Einsteinians to safely sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity"), two idiocies should be regarded as facts:

1. The motion of the observer miraculously changes the wavelength of the incoming light. (This idiocy was discussed in my previous posting.)

2. The wavefronts bunch up (the wavelength decreases) in front of a light source which starts moving towards the observer:

http://www.einstein-online.info/imag...ler_static.gif (stationary source)

http://www.einstein-online.info/imag...ource_blue.gif (moving source)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4OnBYrbCjY
"The Doppler Effect: what does motion do to waves?"

http://www.fisica.net/relatividade/s...ry_of_time.pdf
Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 3: "Now imagine a source of light at a constant distance from us, such as a star, emitting waves of light at a constant wavelength. Obviously the wavelength of the waves we receive will be the same as the wavelength at which they are emitted (the gravitational field of the galaxy will not be large enough to have a significant effect). Suppose now that the source starts moving toward us. When the source emits the next wave crest it will be nearer to us, so the distance between wave crests will be smaller than when the star was stationary."

For waves other than light waves the moving source does indeed emit shorter wavelength, and the reason is that the speed of the waves relative to the source decreases when the source starts moving. The shortening is measurable in the frame of the source - the wavelength is measured to be λ when the source is stationary, and then it is measured to be λ' (λλ') when the source is moving.

For light waves this is obviously not the case - the speed of the light relative to the source does not change when the source starts moving. In the frame of the source the wavelength is measured to be λ when the source is stationary, and then it is measured to be λ again when the source starts moving, which means that the wavefronts DO NOT BUNCH UP in front of the moving source.

Conclusion: The moving light source does not emit shorter wavelength. Rather, it emits faster light. If the source starts moving towards the stationary observer with speed v, the speed of the light relative to the observer shifts from c to c'=c+v, as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light and in violation of Einstein's relativity. Accordingly, the frequency measured by the stationary observer shifts from f=c/λ to f'=c'/λ.

Pentcho Valev

Experiments have unequivocally shown that the speed of light is not constant:

http://phys.org/news/2016-03-optical-slower.html
"Researchers at the University of Ottawa observed that twisted light in a vacuum travels slower than the universal physical constant established as the speed of light by Einstein's theory of relativity. [...] In The Optical Society's journal for high impact research, Optica, the researchers report that twisted light pulses in a vacuum travel up to 0.1 percent slower than the speed of light, which is 299,792,458 meters per second. [...] If it's possible to slow the speed of light by altering its structure, it may also be possible to speed up light. The researchers are now planning to use FROG to measure other types of structured light that their calculations have predicted may travel around 1 femtosecond faster than the speed of light in a vacuum."

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6224/857
"Spatially structured photons that travel in free space slower than the speed of light" Science 20 Feb 2015: Vol. 347, Issue 6224, pp. 857-860

http://rt.com/news/225879-light-speed-slow-photons/
"Physicists manage to slow down light inside vacuum [...] ...even now the light is no longer in the mask, it's just the propagating in free space - the speed is still slow. [...] "This finding shows unambiguously that the propagation of light can be slowed below the commonly accepted figure of 299,792,458 metres per second, even when travelling in air or vacuum," co-author Romero explains in the University of Glasgow press release."

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2015.../1191422035480
"The speed of light is a limit, not a constant - that's what researchers in Glasgow, Scotland, say. A group of them just proved that light can be slowed down, permanently."

http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story...ut-touching-it
"Although the maximum speed of light is a cosmological constant - made famous by Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and E=mc^2 - it can, in fact, be slowed down: that's what optics do."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxJ7_tbbIsg
"Glasgow researchers slow the speed of light"

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/faster-t...peed-of-light/
"For generations, physicists believed there is nothing faster than light moving through a vacuum -- a speed of 186,000 miles per second. But in an experiment in Princeton, N.J., physicists sent a pulse of laser light through cesium vapor so quickly that it left the chamber before it had even finished entering. The pulse traveled 310 times the distance it would have covered if the chamber had contained a vacuum. Researchers say it is the most convincing demonstration yet that the speed of light -- supposedly an ironclad rule of nature -- can be pushed beyond known boundaries, at least under certain laboratory circumstances. [...] The results of the work by Wang, Alexander Kuzmich and Arthur Dogariu were published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature."

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal.../406277a0.html
Nature 406, 277-279 (20 July 2000): "...a light pulse propagating through the atomic vapour cell appears at the exit side so much earlier than if it had propagated the same distance in a vacuum that the peak of the pulse appears to leave the cell before entering it."

So the inconstancy of the speed of light has been abundantly proved but Einsteinians don't even think of it:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

http://happynicetimepeople.com/wp-co...peed-limit.jpg

Pentcho Valev

An extremely dangerous argument (Einsteinians are careless sometimes):

http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswi...perience-time/
"If all we did was adhere to the Newtonian definition of time - with the notion that time was an absolute quantity - this would be true for absolutely anything in the Universe: everyone, everywhere would experience time passing at the same rate in all circumstances. But if this were the case, the speed of light couldn't be a constant."

Here is where the danger comes from:

https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/re...essons-quantum
Perimeter Institute: "Quantum mechanics has one thing, time, which is absolute. But general relativity tells us that space and time are both dynamical so there is a big contradiction there. So the question is, can quantum gravity be formulated in a context where quantum mechanics still has absolute time?"

http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0610057.pdf
"One one hand, time in quantum mechanics is a Newtonian time, i.e., an absolute time. In fact, the two main methods of quantization, namely, canonical quantization method due to Dirac and Feynman's path integral method are based on classical constraints which become operators annihilating the physical states, and on the sum over all possible classical trajectories, respectively. Therefore, both quantization methods rely on the Newton global and absolute time. [...] The transition to (special) relativistic quantum field theories can be realized by replacing the unique absolute Newtonian time by a set of timelike parameters associated to the naturally distinguished family of relativistic inertial frames."

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/509316/
"In quantum mechanics, time is absolute. The parameter occurring in the Schrödinger equation has been directly inherited from Newtonian mechanics and is not turned into an operator. In quantum field theory, time by itself is no longer absolute, but the four-dimensional spacetime is; it constitutes the fixed background structure on which the dynamical fields act. GR is of a very different nature. According to the Einstein equations (2), spacetime is dynamical, acting in a complicated manner with energy momentum of matter and with itself. The concepts of time (spacetime) in quantum theory and GR are thus drastically different and cannot both be fundamentally true.."

Pentcho Valev