The speed of the light barrier broken- pro or con

On Nov 24, 5:12*pm, Tom Roberts wrote in
sci.physics.relativity:
On 11/24/11 11/24/11 * 7:23 AM, bbwilliams wrote:

Peer review is very important.

Yes.

The unfortunate thing is that peer reviews are
organized by journals. Journals are concerned with profit, not science. I know,
I have had many many rejections of my work based not on the fact that the work
was improper, or that the results were wrong. In stead, the only reason is that
it is not mainstream and therefor not published because the EDITORs do not think
it important.

This is complete bull****. Non-mainstream papers get published all the time in
the primary physics literature. But they are written by people who understand
physics. The complaint you make is from people who DON'T understand physics, and
who make very elementary errors in their writing -- their papers are rejected
for being nonsense or including elementary errors, not for being non-mainstream.
A primary purpose of peer review is to save time for the bulk of the community
by having a few reviewers prevent nonsense and errors from entering the journal.
Moreover, there are journals who specialize in non-mainstream papers, and whose
standards are quite relaxed (but, of course, most physicists don't bother to
read them, and they routinely publish papers with elementary errors) -- these
are referable, and their papers are not "unpublished evidence".

* * * * This newsgroup is a good example -- it is 99% junk and nonsense.

Then it is so nice that 1% does make sense, especially Honest Roberts'
deep insights. For instance: Even if "light in vacuum does not travel
at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform", Divine Albert's
Divine Special Relativity "would be unaffected" (on reading this, Paul
Draper fiercely sings "Divine Einstein", tumbles to the floor, starts
tearing his clothes and goes into convulsions):

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."

Pentcho Valev