POSTSCIENTISM: EDUCATORS CORRECT THEMSELVES

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.u...ode=404936&c=2
"In most accounts of the history of physics during 1880 to 1920,
Einstein's genius casts such a long shadow that the achievements of
his contemporaries are hidden and, as a result, the history is
oversimplified. For example, the undergraduate curriculum's
introduction to Einstein's special theory of relativity typically
selects the Albert Michelson-Edward Morley experiment of 1887 as the
crucial pathfinder that led Einstein to his 1905 paper on special
relativity. That experiment produced a null result in the quest to
detect Earth's motion through the ether, the medium thought to be
responsible for the propagation of light. Pedagogically, it makes
sense for instructors to use this elegant experiment as the guiding
light for Einstein, but he never saw it that way...In Einstein's
Generation, Richard Staley carefully constructs a true history of
classical physics in these critical four decades. He begins with a new
examination of the careers of Michelson and Einstein..."

This Richard Staley seems to be unhappy with what "later writers" (see
below) have done. He may also have understood the hints made by
Einstein himself in 1909 and later by Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein's
apostle:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "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......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://www.astrofind.net/documents/t...-radiation.php
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation by Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein 1909: "A large body of facts shows undeniably that
light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by
Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For
this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of
theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be
considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories. The
purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show
that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of
light is imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up
light no longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather
as independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in
Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed
our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the
state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity
like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory
of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from
the emitting to the absorbing object."

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