THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT AS NIGHTMARE

The following confession is staggering:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that contradicts the light postulate."

That is, the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms a theory that contradicts Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, Einstein teaches the truth (according to Stachel and Norton), Einstein's followers "almost universally" teach the blatant lie. What kind of world is that?

The nightmare (for Einstein's followers) is that, in the absence of idiotic additional (ad hoc) hypotheses such as length contraction, the Michelson-Morley experiment does indeed refute the assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the light source:

http://www.marxists.org/reference/su...r/poincare.htm
Henri Poincaré: "Lorentz could have accounted for the facts by supposing that the velocity of light is greater in the direction of the earth's motion than in the perpendicular direction. He preferred to admit that the velocity is the same in the two directions, but that bodies are smaller in the former than in the latter."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots", Banesh Hoffmann, 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."

Pentcho Valev