Special Relativity's Days Are Numbered Aren't They?

A decade ago Joao Magueijo and Lee Smolin discovered that Einstein's special relativity is "the root of all the evil" in physics and that the ultimate culprit is Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

Smolin is still fighting special relativity but apparently without questioning the postulates anymore. He has restored the sane Newtonian concept of time at the expense of spoiling the concept of space - at least the article quoted below suggests so:

http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/03...3fP/story.html
"Time doesn't exist? Across great distances, there is no such thing as innately simul*taneous events, such as turning off the stars at once, *except as events communicate with each other slowly across space, at the speed of light. Moreover, different observers experience things happening in different time order, depending on the observer's own velocity. Time itself proved to depend on your viewpoint. It was a hard idea to swallow. A lot of people in the early 1900s thought that relativity would spell the death of certainty, science, morals, and every*thing else. Worse was to come. In discovering the interrelationship of space with time, Einstein found no place left for the queer, indefinable thing called "the present." He was stuck with a picture of the universe as a permanent, eternal, changeless block of four-dimensional "spacetime," with past, present, and future all there at once, in a static, changeless whole. Picture a book, in which the story is all there at once from start to finish. Or a DVD sitting on a shelf, containing the whole movie. This is for real. Modern physics can locate no such thing as "the present." The book of time is not open to a particular page that some unseen mechanism is turning. The DVD on the shelf is just a DVD; it has no laser readout gizmo playing a particular part of the movie right now. No readout device exists. So science is utterly stymied by a simple question: Why do we think it's March 2013 right now, instead of, say, August 2005? What makes one of those two feel immediate to us, and the other not? Some physicists have decided that they must accept the block-universe picture at face value; that the flowing present is some kind of illusion of the human brain, and that all cosmic history exists at once, eternal. Einstein saw no way around it. He urged friends to find comfort in this realization when their loved ones died. Now this idea is coming *under a serious challenge from today's physics frontier. Theorist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics argues, in a book to be published next month titled Time Reborn, that the passage of time is the actual fundamental reality, and that physics' picture of invariant space is the thing that needs to turn weird *instead."

Note that special relativity's absurd concept of time "is coming *under a serious challenge from today's physics frontier". Special relativity's days are numbered aren't they?

Pentcho Valev

From now on, the most embarrassing question will be:

Why has the absurdity of special relativity not been noticed earler?

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78: "The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of professional discourse."

Pentcho Valev

Einstein had convinced himself special relativity was wrong within two years of publishing it:

http://discovermagazine.com/2004/sep...ns-lonely-path
Lee Smolin: "Quantum mechanics 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 always be 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. He rejected his own theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as others in the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it."

"Within two years of publishing" special relativity Einstein realized the speed of light varies with the gravitational potential:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...UP_TimesNR.pdf
John Norton: "Already in 1907, a mere two years after the completion of the special theory, he [Einstein] had concluded that the speed of light is variable in the presence of a gravitational field."

It is easy to show that, if the speed of light varies with the gravitational potential, then, relative to the observer, it varies with the speed of the observer:

The top of a tower of height h shoots a bullet downwards with initial speed u. As the bullet reaches the ground, its speed (relative to the ground) is:

u' = u(1 + gh/u^2)

The top of a tower of height h emits a light pulse downwards with initial speed c. As the pulse reaches the ground, its speed (relative to the ground) is:

c' = c(1 + gh/c^2)

Einsteinians admit the validity of and sometimes even deduce the above result:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixhczNygcWo
"The light is perceived to be falling in a gravitational field just like a mechanical object would. (...) The change in speed of light with change in height is dc/dh=g/c."

Integrating dc/dh=g/c gives:

c' = c(1 + gh/c^2)

Equivalently, in gravitation-free space where a rocket of length h accelerates with acceleration g, a light signal emitted by the front end will be perceived by an observer at the back end to have a speed:

c' = c(1 + gh/c^2) = c + v

where v is the speed the observer has at the moment of reception of the light relative to the emitter at the moment of emission. Clearly, the speed of light varies with the speed of the observer, in violation of special relativity.

Pentcho Valev