Do Physicists Know That the Speed of Light Is Variable?

Physicists do know that the speed of light is variable, not constant, but they also know that abandoning the falsehood would be suicidal. So Joao Magueijo wants to free science from the false constancy of the speed of light but ... there is a problem:

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

"...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

"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

"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/

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In a world different from Einstein's schizophrenic world, logic forbids the combination "true premise, wrong consequence". In Einstein's schizophrenic world logic doesn't work of course so theoreticians in this world reject the consequence, Einstein's idiotic relative time (spacetime), but worship the underlying premise, Einstein's false constant-speed-of-light postulate:

http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/20...rs-of-gravity/
"Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26563
Nobel Laureate David Gross observed, "Everyone in string theory is convinced...that spacetime is doomed. But we don't know what it's replaced by."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE
Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:09): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... [...] The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...me-from-space/
"Splitting Time from Space - New Quantum Theory Topples Einstein's Spacetime. Buzz about a quantum gravity theory that sends space and time back to their Newtonian roots."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. It was a speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is right, it may be no more than a mirage."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...wards-in-time/
"[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. [...] Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - 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.newscientist.com/article/mg22029410.900
New Scientist: "Saving time: Physics killed it. Do we need it back? [...] Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century."

https://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-C.../dp/B00AEGQPFE
"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.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"...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."

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?"

Theoreticians in Einstein's schizophrenic world:

http://render.fineartamerica.com/ima...david-mack.jpg

Pentcho Valev

Experiments have unequivocally proven that both subluminal motion of light in a vacuum and superluminal motion are possible but the scientific community cannot react properly because Einsteinians bombard it with contradictory and confusing explanations, often involving "group velocity" and "phase velocity". The experimentalists themselves have to include such explanations in their articles - otherwise there would be no publication. Yet even "group velocity" and "phase velocity" turn out to be insufficiently confusing and Einsteinians resort to the ultimate weapon - the speed of some mysterious entity called "information" - as if Einstein had based his 1905 second postulate on the speed of information, not on the speed of light. This speed always gloriously conforms to Divine Albert's Divine Theory:

http://science.sciencemag.org/conten...5956/1074.full
Robert W. Boyd, Daniel J. Gauthier, Controlling the Velocity of Light Pulses: "So why do laboratory results of fast light not necessitate the superluminal transfer of information? It is believed that the explanation lies in the distinction between Vg [group velocity] and the information velocity. The group velocity can take on any value. However, the information velocity can never exceed c and, according to many models, is always equal to c."

If it were not for the schizophrenic and confusing atmosphere created by Einsteinians, the inconstancy of the speed of light would be an obvious experimental fact:

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."

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://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2796
"Speed of light broken with basic lab kit. Electric signals can be transmitted at least four times faster than the speed of light using only basic equipment that would be found in virtually any college science department. Scientists have sent light signals at faster-than-light speeds over the distances of a few metres for the last two decades - but only with the aid of complicated, expensive equipment. Now physicists at Middle Tennessee State University have broken that speed limit over distances of nearly 120 metres, using off-the-shelf equipment costing just $500. [...] While the peak moves faster than light speed, the total energy of the pulse does not. This means Einstein's relativity is preserved, so do not expect super-fast starships or time machines anytime soon."

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-ltt081905.php
"Light that travels... faster than light! [...] This is exactly what the EPFL team has demonstrated. Using their Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) method, the group was able to slow a light signal down by a factor of 3.6, creating a sort of temporary "optical memory." They were also able to create extreme conditions in which the light signal travelled faster than 300 million meters a second. And even though this seems to violate all sorts of cherished physical assumptions, Einstein needn't move over - relativity isn't called into question, because only a portion of the signal is affected."

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Light...d-267499.shtml
"Light Pulses That Travel Faster Than Light Created [...] The technique developed at NIST is called four-wave mixing, and it works by altering some parts of each individual light pulse. This makes the light move forward faster than it normally would when traveling through a vacuum. [...] The physicists explain that the new research does not violate Albert Einstein's theory on general relativity - which states that the speed of light in a vacuum is the fastest achievable in the Universe. They say that a sort of loophole exists in this theory. By careful tuning of the light source and advanced calculations, it is possible to nudge portions of the light pulses so that they arrive at their destination ahead or behind the main pulse. [...] With four-wave mixing, the NIST investigators produced laser pulses that arrived at their destination a full 50 nanoseconds faster than photons traveling through a vacuum."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ted-glass.html
"Light hits near infinite speed in silver-coated glass. A nano-sized bar of glass encased in silver allows visible light to pass through at near infinite speed. The technique may spur advances in optical computing. [...] In a vacuum the refractive index is 1, and the speed of light cannot break Einstein's universal limit of 300,000 kilometres per second. Normal materials have positive indexes, and they transmit at the speed of light in a vacuum divided by their refractive index. Ordinary glass, for instance, has an index of about 1.5, so light moves through it at about 200,000 kilometres per second. The new material contains a nano-scale structure that guides light waves through the metal-coated glass. It is the first with a refractive index below 0.1, which means that light passes through it at almost infinite speed, says Albert Polman at the FOM Institute AMOLF in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. But the speed of light has not, technically, been broken. The wave is moving quickly, but its "group velocity" the speed at which information is travelling is near zero."

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