INTELLIGENT DIALOGUES IN EINSTEINIANA

An intelligent dialogue in English:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pLCOizNSLI
"Prof Max Tegmark and Prof Brian Cox dicuss the fact that without the minus sign in spacetime, there would be no point in having a brain."

A slightly more intelligent dialogue in French:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eN4DthXDu68
"Vidéo que j'ai fait pour un exposé en physique générale... c'est CON, et c'était mon but!"

Pentcho Valev

Incredibly intelligent Einsteinians teach deep truths:

http://faculty.ucmerced.edu/dkiley/P...avRedshift.pdf
"The frequency depends on the acceleration, which we have chosen to be a = g, the acceleration due to gravity on Earth. If we ignore the derivation of this equation, and just look at the result, then we would be led to believe that a beam of light just traveling upwards in a gravitational field would lose frequency! This is, in fact, completely true. Light is affected by gravity, and as light tries to escape from a gravitational field it experiences a redshift, causing its frequency to decrease (hence becoming redder). We can think of this in another (classical) way. When we throw a ball up into the air, it slows down, using it's kinetic energy to do work against the force of gravity. Light has to do work against gravity, too, but it can't change it speed. Therefore it has to lose energy, not by losing speed, but by losing frequency, since the energy of light depends on its frequency.. This follows directly from Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which says that acceleration and gravity are equivalent."

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-mc2-S.../dp/0306817586
Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?), Brian Cox, Jeff Forshaw, p. 236: "If the light falls in strict accord with the principle of equivalence, then, as it falls, its energy should increase by exactly the same fraction that it increases for any other thing we could imagine dropping. We need to know what happens to the light as it gains energy. In other words, what can Pound and Rebka expect to see at the bottom of their laboratory when the dropped light arrives? There is only one way for the light to increase its energy. We know that it cannot speed up, because it is already traveling at the universal speed limit, but it can increase its frequency."

Pentcho Valev

An unbelievably intelligent Einsteinian makes career and money by praising Newton's emission theory of light (which says that the speed of light depends on the speed of the light source):

http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/wtundw...WR_2006_10.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "At the end of the 18th century, a natural extension of Newton's dynamics to light was developed but immediately forgotten. A body of works completed the Principia with a relativistic optics of moving bodies, the discovery of the Doppler-Fizeau effect some sixty years before Doppler, and many other effects and ideas which represent a fascinating preamble to Einstein relativities. It was simply supposed that 'a body-light', as Newton named it, was subject to the whole dynamics of the Principia in much the same way as were material particles; thus it was subject to the Galilean relativity and its velocity was supposed to be variable. Of course it was subject to the short range 'refringent' force of the corpuscular theory of light --which is part of the Principia-- but also to the long range force of gravitation which induces Newton's theory of gravitation. The fact that the 'mass' of a corpuscle of light was not known did not constitute a problem since it does not appear in the Newtonian (or Einsteinian) equations of motion. It was precisely what John Michell (1724-1793), Robert Blair (1748-1828), Johann G. von Soldner (1776-1833) and François Arago (1786-1853) were to do at the end of the 18th century and the beginning the 19th century in the context of Newton's dynamics. Actually this 'completed' Newtonian theory of light and material corpuscle seems to have been implicitly accepted at the time. In such a Newtonian context, not only Soldner's calculation of the deviation of light in a gravitational field was understood, but also dark bodies (cousins of black holes). A natural (Galilean and thus relativistic) optics of moving bodies was also developed which easily explained aberration and implied as well the essence of what we call today the Doppler effect. Moreover, at the same time the structure of -- but also the questions raised by-- the Michelson experiment was understood. Most of this corpus has long been forgotten. The Michell-Blair-Arago effect, prior to Doppler's effect, is entirely unknown to physicists and historians. As to the influence of gravitation on light, the story was very superficially known but had never been studied in any detail. Moreover, the existence of a theory dealing with light, relativity and gravitation, embedded in Newton's Principia was completely ignored by physicists and by historians as well. But it was a simple and natural way to deal with the question of light, relativity (and gravitation) in a Newtonian context."

http://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Chang...dp/0817649395/
Einstein and the Changing Worldviews of Physics, Einstein Studies, 2012, Volume 12, Part 1, 23-37, The Newtonian Theory of Light Propagation, Jean Eisenstaedt: "It is generally thought that light propagation cannot be treated in the framework of Newtonian dynamics. However, at the end of the 18th century and in the context of Newton's Principia, several papers, published and unpublished, offered a new and important corpus that represents a detailed application of Newton's dynamics to light. In it, light was treated in precisely the same way as material particles. This most interesting application - foreshadowed by Newton himself in the Principia - constitutes a relativistic optics of moving bodies, of course based on what we nowadays refer to as Galilean relativity, and offers a most instructive Newtonian analogy to Einsteinian special and general relativity (Eisenstaedt, 2005a; 2005b). These several papers, effects, experiments, and interpretations constitute the Newtonian theory of light propagation. I will argue in this paper, however, that this Newtonian theory of light propagation has deep parallels with some elements of 19th century physics (aberration, the Doppler effect) as well as with an important part of 20th century relativity (the optics of moving bodies, the Michelson experiment, the deflection of light in a gravitational field, black holes, the gravitational Doppler effect). (...) Not so surprisingly, neither the possibility of a Newtonian optics of moving bodies nor that of a Newtonian gravitational theory of light has been easily "seen," neither by relativists nor by historians of physics; most probably the "taken-for-granted fact" of the constancy of the velocity of light did not allow thinking in Newtonian terms."

Pentcho Valev

The most intelligent Einsteinians explain to believers that the principle of constancy of the speed of light, true or false, is simply superfluous. Even if light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform, special relativity would be unaffected, Divine Einstein, yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity:

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.ph...1ebdf49c012de2
Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains of applicability would be reduced)."

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.p...d3ebf3b94d89ad
Tom Roberts: "As I said before, Special Relativity would not be affected by a non-zero photon mass, as Einstein's second postulate is not required in a modern derivation (using group theory one obtains three related theories, two of which are solidly refuted experimentally and the third is SR). So today's foundations of modern physics would not be threatened."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...806.1234v1.pdf
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum: "In this paper, not only do I show that the constant speed of light is unnecessary for the construction of the theories of relativity, but overwhelmingly more, there is no room for it in the theory."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...elativity.html
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity, 29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST: "...a photon with mass would not necessarily always travel at the same speed. Feigenbaum's work shows how, contrary to many physicists' beliefs, this need not be a problem for relativity."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: "Il se pourrait même que de futures mesures mettent en évidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle, du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les procédures opérationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat" deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La théorie elle-même en serait-elle invalidée ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien..."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/One_more_derivation.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way the validity of the special relalivity. It would, however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon velocity."

http://www.haverford.edu/physics/songs/divine.htm
DIVINE EINSTEIN: No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein not Maxwell, Curie, or Bohr!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Everything is relative, even simultaneity, and soon Einstein's become a de facto physics deity. 'cos we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity.

Pentcho Valev

Exceptionally intelligent Einsteinians (in Perimeter Institute) compare a photon as it climbs against the Earth's gravitational field and a rock thrown upwards. The conclusion is breathtaking: both the photon and the rock lose energy in exactly the same way but the rock slows down while the photon does not:

http://www.oapt.ca/newsletter/2004-0...Searchable.pdf
Richard Epp: "One may imagine the photon losing energy as it climbs against the Earth's gravitational field much like a rock thrown upward loses kinetic energy as it slows down, the main difference being that the photon does not slow down; it always moves at the speed of light."

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, Chapter 6: "A cannonball fired upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward at a constant speed...."

Pentcho Valev