OFFICIAL MAVERICKS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM

The following "mavericks" are allowed to say anything since they know
where to stop (other mavericks are cranks, crackpots, trolls etc. by
definition):

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2...usd-professor/
"Clean-cut and middle-aged, a tenured professor at a conservative
Catholic university, Sheehan is hardly a rebel. Yet for years, he and
a few other physicists have been pressing peers to re-examine the
Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most celebrated and cherished
tenets of physics. (...) But Sheehan suggests big things are possible
if even the tiniest of violations can be proven, and ultimately
exploited in an economically feasible way. For example, it might
become possible to convert ambient heat into an infinite energy
source, he said."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "The Second Law made its appearance in physics around
1850, but a half century later it was already surrounded by so much
confusion that the British Association for the Advancement of Science
decided to appoint a special committee with the task of providing
clarity about the meaning of this law. However, its final report
(Bryan 1891) did not settle the issue. Half a century later, the
physicist/philosopher Bridgman still complained that there are almost
as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions
of it (Bridgman 1941, p. 116). And even today, the Second Law remains
so obscure that it continues to attract new efforts at clarification.
A recent example is the work of Lieb and Yngvason (1999)......The
historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study
of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period
1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as
'a dismal swamp of obscurity' (1980, p. 6) and 'a prime example to
show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds' (ibid.
p. 8).......Clausius' verbal statement of the second law makes no
sense.... All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition ; a century of
philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment ; a
century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from
the unclean.....Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to
follow the argument Clausius offers....and seven times has it blanked
and gravelled me.... I cannot explain what I cannot
understand.....This summary leads to the question whether it is
fruitful to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of
the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the
unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the
strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that
Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion
about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the
thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING."

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=5538
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
light.''

Consider the official maverick Joao Magueijo for instance. He wants to
drop Einstein's 1905 false light postulate but then stops and the
postulate remains intact: Joao simply believes or is forced to believe
that the false postulate was gloriously confirmed by the Michelson-
Morley experiment:

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every
definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D.
at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at
St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly
held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a
lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States)
at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster
than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the
missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its
speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus
that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to
light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what
the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the
case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that
if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to
each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree
on the same apparent speed!"

Knowing where to stop is called by George Orwell "crimestop":

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev