Did Young Einstein Chase the Light Beam?

Einstein was an extremely talented fraudster - the story he concocted in 1946 is a masterpiece not only of post-truth (Einsteinian) science but also of post-truth cultu

John Norton: "Behind Einstein's Chasing a Light Beam Thought Experiment. These cartoonish impersonations of Einstein's thought experiment are possible because Einstein's account of the thought experiment is brief, cryptic, and puzzling. First, the events recounted happened in late 1895 or early 1896.. Yet Einstein mentions Maxwell's equations, the key equations of nineteenth-century electrodynamics. He did not learn them until his university studies around 1898. Einstein's first report of the thought experiment in his own writings comes in 1946. The thought experiment does not appear in the 1905 special relativity paper, in any later writings prior to 1946, or in his correspondence. Second, unlike the luminous clarity of Einstein's other thought experiments, it is not at all clear how this thought experiment works. In the dominant theories of the late nineteenth century, light propagates as a wave in a medium, the luminiferous ether. It was an entirely uncontroversial result in this theory that, in a frame of reference that moved with the light, the wave would be static. There is no reason for us to be puzzled. We do not see frozen light since we are not moving at the speed of light through the ether." http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...over_final.pdf

John Norton is a special Einsteinian, intelligent, a subtle practitioner of doublethink - for that reason he unexpectedly acts as a truth-teller in some cases. Here are other examples:

John Norton: "That [Maxwell's] theory allows light to slow and be frozen in the frame of reference of a sufficiently rapidly moving observer." http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf

John Norton: "The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf

Ordinary (silly) Einsteinians are unable to practice subtle doublethink - they just blatantly lie:

Walter Isaacson: "Einstein's first great thought experiment came when he was about 16. He had run away from his school in Germany, which he hated because it emphasized rote learning rather than visual imagination, and enrolled in a Swiss village school based on the educational philosophy of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, who believed in encouraging students to visualize concepts. While there, Einstein tried to picture what it would be like to travel so fast that you caught up with a light beam. If he rode alongside it, he later wrote, "I should observe such a beam of light as an electromagnetic field at rest." In other words, the wave would seem stationary. But this was not possible according to Maxwell's equations, which describe the motion and oscillation of electromagnetic fields. The conflict between his thought experiment and Maxwell's equations caused Einstein "psychic tension," he later recalled, and he wandered around nervously, his palms sweating. Some of us can recall what made our palms sweaty as teenagers, and those thoughts didn't involve Maxwell's equations. But that's because we were probably performing less elevated thought experiments." http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/op...eam-rider.html

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