How Physics Students Are Brainwashed

"Perhaps the best known example of a debunked 'theory' among physics students is the aether, once thought to be the medium which light propagated through. This theory seemed logical in the late 1800s with the newly developed understanding that light was an electromagnetic wave and the prior knowledge that all other waves propagate through a medium. The aether was famously disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0f2df5e83afa9

An experiment does not disprove a theory as a whole - it disproves a tenet of the theory, and if the tenet is crucial, the theory is abandoned. Which tenet of the ether theory did the Michelson-Morley experiment disprove? The independence of the speed of light from the speed of the light source of course - that was the tenet Michelson and Morley used in their calculations.

The tenet was crucial, the ether theory was rightly abandoned, but Einstein adopted the disproved tenet as his 1905 second ("light") postulate:

"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

Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous." https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-It.../dp/0486406768

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The common-sense argument that needs radical brainwashing is this:

The observer starts moving towards the light source. The pulses or wavecrests start hitting him more frequently - the frequency he measures increases - which means that the speed of the pulses or wavecrests relative to the observer increases as well, in violation of Einstein's relativity.

The argument is obviously valid. There is a counterargument saying that the motion of the observer somehow decreases the distance between pulses (wavecrests) and so their speed relative to the observer remains constant, but this counterargument is so idiotic that only a few of the silliest Einsteinians advance it in forums like sci.physics.relativity. Not-so-silly Einsteinians don't discuss the physical picture and just try to block any thought of speed of light relative to differently moving observers:

Joe Wolfe: "At this stage, many of my students say things like "The invariance of the speed of light among observers is impossible" or "I can't understand it". Well, it's not impossible. It's even more than possible, it is true. This is something that has been extensively measured, and many refinements to the Michelson and Morley experiment, and complementary experiments have confirmed this invariance to very great precision. As to understanding it, there isn't really much to understand. However surprising and weird it may be, it is the case. It's the law in our universe. The fact of the invariance of c doesn't take much understanding." http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au/einstei...eird_logic.htm

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Richard Feynman mercilessly brainwashing his students/readers:

Richard Feynman: "Now if all moving clocks run slower, if no way of measuring time gives anything but a slower rate, we shall just have to say, in a certain sense, that time itself appears to be slower in a space ship. All the phenomena there - the man's pulse rate, his thought processes, the time he takes to light a cigar, how long it takes to grow up and get old - all these things must be slowed down in the same proportion, because he cannot tell he is moving." http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_15.html

Is it true that "no way of measuring time gives anything but a slower rate"? Of course not - according to special relativity, measurements performed by the traveler himself give a FASTER rate:

David Morin, Introduction to Classical Mechanics With Problems and Solutions, Chapter 11, p. 14: "Twin A stays on the earth, while twin B flies quickly to a distant star and back. [...] For the entire outward and return parts of the trip, B does observe A's clock running slow..." http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf

"The situation is that a man sets off in a rocket travelling at high speed away from Earth, whilst his twin brother stays on Earth. [...] ...the twin in the spaceship considers himself to be the stationary twin, and therefore as he looks back towards Earth he sees his brother ageing more slowly than himself." http://topquark.hubpages.com/hub/Twin-Paradox

Who taught Richard Feynman to brainwash so efficiently? His teacher Albert Einstein of course, the genius of brainwashing. This particular lie ("moving clocks run slower"), which is non sequitur in special relativity, was devised in 1905:

Albert Einstein, On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, 1905: "From this there ensues the following peculiar consequence. If at the points A and B of K there are stationary clocks which, viewed in the stationary system, are synchronous; and if the clock at A is moved with the velocity v along the line AB to B, then on its arrival at B the two clocks no longer synchronize, but the clock moved from A to B lags behind the other which has remained at B by tv^2/2c^2 (up to magnitudes of fourth and higher order), t being the time occupied in the journey from A to B." http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/

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Nobody in the history of science has been able to brainwash as radically as Einstein:

Albert Einstein: "Now let us suppose that our railway carriage is again travelling along the railway lines with the velocity v, and that its direction is the same as that of the ray of light, but its velocity of course much less. Let us inquire about the velocity of propagation of the ray of light relative to the carriage. It is obvious that we can here apply the consideration of the previous section, since the ray of light plays the part of the man walking along relatively to the carriage. The velocity W of the man relative to the embankment is here replaced by the velocity of light relative to the embankment. w is the required velocity of light with respect to the carriage, and we have w = c - v. The velocity of propagation of a ray of light relative to the carriage thus comes out smaller than c. But this result comes into conflict with the principle of relativity set forth in Section V." http://www.bartleby.com/173/7.html

Does w = c - v come into conflict with the principle of relativity? It doesn't of course and this is more than obvious.

Feynman teaches exactly the same lie - he suggests that "c-u" comes into conflict with the principle of relativity - but in a less blatant manner:

Richard Feynman: "Suppose we are riding in a car that is going at a speed u, and light from the rear is going past the car with speed c. Differentiating the first equation in (15.2) gives dx'/dt=dx/dt-u, which means that according to the Galilean transformation the apparent speed of the passing light, as we measure it in the car, should not be c but should be c-u. For instance, if the car is going 100,000 mi/sec, and the light is going 186,000 mi/sec, then apparently the light going past the car should go 86,000 mi/sec. In any case, by measuring the speed of the light going past the car (if the Galilean transformation is correct for light), one could determine the speed of the car. A number of experiments based on this general idea were performed to determine the velocity of the earth, but they all failed - they gave no velocity at all."
http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_15.html

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