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LEE SMOLIN: THE MOST HONEST EINSTEINIAN
http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Se...lden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at a constant speed for all observers..." http://edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03...n03_index.html Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized Einstein's general theory of relativity. Because Einstein's special theory is only a kind of approximation to his general theory, we can implement the principles of the latter but find modifications to the former. And this is what seems to be happening! So Gambini, Pullin, and others calculated how light travels in a quantum geometry and found that the theory predicts that the speed of light has a small dependence on energy. Photons of higher energy travel slightly slower than low-energy photons....A very exciting question we are now wrestling with is, How drastically shall we be forced to modify Einstein's special theory of relativity if the predicted effect is observed? The most severe possibility is that the principle of relativity simply fails....But there is another possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved, but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of relativity!" http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm Lee Smolin: "Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now- legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS WRONG WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT." Clearly, Lee Smolin is the most honest Einsteinian. The most dishonest Einsteinians are Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond, Jong-Ping Hsu and Tom Roberts: http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part, nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais, empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de futures mesures mettent enévidence 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 procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat" deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-meme en serait-elle invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer, il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs plus economiques. En verite, le "premier postulat" suffit, a la condition de l'exploiter a fond." http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/onemorederivation.pdf Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon velocity." http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Rela.../dp/9810238886 Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity. This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman, Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers." 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)." Pentcho Valev |
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