WHAT HAPPENS TO FALSE THEORIES?

W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London,
1981, p. 14:
"...all physical theories in the past have had their heyday and have
eventually been rejected as false. Indeed, there is inductive support
for a pessimistic induction: any theory will be discovered to be false
within, say 200 years of being propounded. (...) Indeed the evidence
might even be held to support the conclusion that no theory that will
ever be discovered by the human race is strictly speaking true. (...)
The rationalist (who is a realist) is likely to respond by positing an
interim goal for the scientific enterprise. This is the goal of
getting nearer the truth. In this case the inductive argument outlined
above is accepted but its sting is removed. For accepting that
argument is compatible with maintaining that CURRENT THEORIES, while
strictly speaking false, ARE GETTING NEARER THE TRUTH."

The pessimistic induction is a very popular concept but it is
incompatible with deductivism. Consider Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-
of-light postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is
always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

By a (special relativity) theory I shall mean the deductive closure of
the postulate, that is, the set of all its consequences deduced
validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If
the light postulate is true, then all its consequences are true, and
IN THIS SENSE the theory is absolutely true.

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is false, then
its antithesis, the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory
of light and showing how the speed of light varies with v, the speed
of the emitter relative to the observer, is true. Accordingly,
Newton's emission theory of light, considered as a deductive closure
of the equation c'=c+v, is absolutely true in the sense defined
above.

This only-two-alternatives conclusion can easily be arrived at on
close inspection of the Michelson-Morley experiment:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the
importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even
though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the
experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation,
has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with
Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late
19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light
predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised
the greatest theoretician of the day."

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."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"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."

Einsteiniana's priests know that Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-
light postulate is false but, instead of adopting the only reasonable
alternative - the true equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission
theory of light, they seem to look for a "less false" replacement of
the postulate:

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "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."

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."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...705.4507v1.pdf
Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat: "The question is then: If Lorentz
invariance is broken, what happens to the speed of light? Given that
Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of
observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the
speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles
must be violated."

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/sc...-relative.html
"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."

False theories die but, contrary to the pessimistic induction's
prophecies, no "less false" theories replace them. Rather, their
incorruptible corpses continue to grow and in the end become an
essential feature of our civilization. Disappearance of the false
theory's corpse would imply disappearance of the civilization itself.

Pentcho Valev

The growing corpse of false science embarrasses even Einsteiniana's
priests:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/oth...deology_2.html
Ideology of/in Contemporary Physics, Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond
"In this way, major advances in modern physics, especially in
relativity and quantum mechanics, have paradoxically fed an intensely
irrational current. One knows the popular expression for scepticism
and unconcern: 'everything is relative . . . as Einstein said' (and
this is not so harmless as one would believe). At a seemingly more
elaborate level, the mad attempts of Bergson to criticise and
reinstate the theory of relativity within his own philosophy, even if
they took place fifty years ago, still give evidence of a serious
crisis in the relations between science and philosophy. (...) As far
as the theories of relativity or quantum physics are concerned, the
last fifty years have hardly witnessed any major evolution in their
mode of presentation. Most handbooks are surprisingly similar,
repeating indefinitely the same schemes of inner organisation. As a
general rule, a historical or rather chronological introduction - of
dubious accuracy - is followed by some philosophical reflections in
which traditional dogmas are enunciated under a much more schematic
and poorer form than that of their creators. Having fulfilled this
first task, the author then approaches the 'strictly scientific'
content of the book. It consists, in general, of purely theoretical,
exaggeratedly formalistic accounts, from which references to real
experiments steadily vanish. Not a single impression is left of the
real procedures of scientific activity, of the dialectic between
theory and practice, heuristic models and formalism, axioms and
history. Modern physics appears as a collection of mathematical
formulae, whose only justification is that 'they work'. Moreover, the
'examples' used to 'concretise' the knowledge are often totally
unreal, and actually have the effect of making it even more abstract.
Such is the case when the explanation of special relativity is based
on the consideration of the entirely fictitious spatial and temporal
behaviour of clocks and trains (today sometimes one speaks of
rockets . . . it sounds better . . . but it is as stupid!). This kind
of science fiction (which is not even funny) is the more dangerous as
erases the existence of a large experimental practice, where the
theory of relativity is embodied in the study of high-energy
particles, involving hundreds of scientific workers, thousands of tons
of steel and millions of dollars. (...) This teaching situation, even
if it appears unhealthy and harmful with regard to the simple aims of
training and teaching (transmission of knowledge), is however in
perfect ideological harmony with the general context of modern
physics. A closed arduous, forbidding education, which stresses
technical manipulation more than conceptual understanding, in which
neither past difficulties nor future problems in the search for
knowledge appear, perfectly fulfils two essential roles: to promote
hierarchisation and the 'elite' spirit on behalf of a science shown as
being intrinsically difficult, to be within the reach of only a few
privileged individuals; and to impose a purely operational technical
concept of knowledge, far from a true conceptual understanding, which
would necessarily be critical and thus would reveal the limits of this
knowledge. This is why discussions about educational problems take on
the form of ideological struggle. It is also why, because of the
essentially political nature of the resistance to change in this
field, no reformist illusions should be entertained as to the
possibility of any major successes, as long as such a struggle only
relies on the internal critique of scientific workers and teachers,
remaining within the framework of an unchanged technical and social
division of labour. (...) The very availability of an essay as this
reflects the existence of a deep ideological crisis in the scientific
milieu. This crisis is particularly obvious in the field of physics.
It is expressed, on the one hand, by a lack of motivation on the part
of many young research workers, and, on the other hand, by the efforts
of readjustment and self-justification on the part of the
establishment. It is characterised by a serious loss of credibility in
traditional values, which before had made it possible for research
workers to create acceptable self-images. (...) Average scientists do
not even control the meaning of their own work. Very often, they are
obscure labourers in theoretical computation or experimentation; they
only have a very narrow perspective of the global process to which
their work is related. Confined to a limited subject, in a specialised
field, their competence is extremely restricted. It is only necessary
to listen to the complaints of the previous generations' scientists on
the disappearance of 'general culture' in science. In fact, the case
of physics is eloquent on the subject. One can say that, until the
beginning of this century, the knowledge of an average physicist had
progressed in a cumulative way, including progressively the whole of
previous discovery. The training of physicists demanded an almost
universal knowledge in the various spheres of physics. The arrival of
'modern' physics has brought about not only the parcelling of fields
of knowledge, but also the abandonment of whole areas. I have already
said that important sections of nineteenthcentury physics are today
excluded from the scientific knowledge of many physicists. Therefore
the fields of competence are not only getting narrower, but some of
them are practically vanishing altogether. If physicists no longer
know about physics, a fortiori they know nothing about science! The
idea of a 'scientific culture', of a 'scientific method', of a
'scientific spirit', which were common to all scientists and used to
give them a large capacity for the rational understanding of all
reality, have turned into huge practical jokes. True, some scientists
have access to a global vision of their field or even of the social
organisation of science and social ties, but that tends to depend
solely on the position of power they occupy. The others, massively,
are dispossessed of all mastery over their activity. They have no
control, no understanding of its direction."

Pentcho Valev

Corpses of false science characterized as "a dismal swamp of
obscurity", "a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt
from the madness of crowds", "a red herring" and "an ideology":

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "Snow stands up for the view that exact science is, in its
own right, an essential part of civilisation, and should not merely be
valued for its technological applications. Anyone who does not know
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and is proud of it too, exposes
oneself as a Philistine. Snow's plea will strike a chord with every
physicist who has ever attended a birthday party. But his call for
cultural recognition creates obligations too. Before one can claim
that acquaintance with the Second Law is as indispensable to a
cultural education as Macbeth or Hamlet, it should obviously be clear
what this law states. This question is surprisingly difficult. 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.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
Peter Hayes: "In the interwar period there was a significant school of
thought that repudiated Einstein's theory of relativity on the grounds
that it contained elementary inconsistencies. Some of these critics
held extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic views, and this has tended to
discredit their technical objections to relativity as being
scientifically shallow. This paper investigates an alternative
possibility: that the critics were right and that the success of
Einstein's theory in overcoming them was due to its strengths as an
ideology rather than as a science. The clock paradox illustrates how
relativity theory does indeed contain inconsistencies that make it
scientifically problematic. These same inconsistencies, however, make
the theory ideologically powerful. The implications of this argument
are examined with respect to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper's accounts of
the philosophy of science. (...) The prediction that clocks will move
at different rates is particularly well known, and the problem of
explaining how this can be so without violating the principle of
relativity is particularly obvious. The clock paradox, however, is
only one of a number of simple objections that have been raised to
different aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity. (Much of this
criticism is quite apart from and often predates the apparent
contradiction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics.) It is
rare to find any attempt at a detailed rebuttal of these criticisms by
professional physicists. However, physicists do sometimes give a
general response to criticisms that relativity theory is syncretic by
asserting that Einstein is logically consistent, but that to explain
why is so difficult that critics lack the capacity to understand the
argument. In this way, the handy claim that there are unspecified,
highly complex resolutions of simple apparent inconsistencies in the
theory can be linked to the charge that antirelativists have only a
shallow understanding of the matter, probably gleaned from misleading
popular accounts of the theory. (...) The argument for complexity
reverses the scientific preference for simplicity. Faced with obvious
inconsistencies, the simple response is to conclude that Einstein's
claims for the explanatory scope of the special and general theory are
overstated. To conclude instead that that relativity theory is right
for reasons that are highly complex is to replace Occam's razor with a
potato masher. (...) The defence of complexity implies that the novice
wishing to enter the profession of theoretical physics must accept
relativity on faith. It implicitly concedes that, without an
understanding of relativity theory's higher complexities, it appears
illogical, which means that popular "explanations" of relativity are
necessarily misleading. But given Einstein's fame, physicists do not
approach the theory for the first time once they have developed their
expertise. Rather, they are exposed to and probably examined on
popular explanations of relativity in their early training. How are
youngsters new to the discipline meant to respond to these accounts?
Are they misled by false explanations and only later inculcated with
true ones? What happens to those who are not misled? Are they supposed
to accept relativity merely on the grounds of authority? The argument
of complexity suggests that to pass the first steps necessary to join
the physics profession, students must either be willing to suspend
disbelief and go along with a theory that appears illogical; or fail
to notice the apparent inconsistencies in the theory; or notice the
inconsistencies and maintain a guilty silence in the belief that this
merely shows that they are unable to understand the theory. 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. (...) The argument that Einstein fomented an
ideological rather than a scientific revolution helps to explain of
one of the features of this revolution that puzzled Kuhn: despite the
apparent scope of the general theory, very little has come out of it.
Viewing relativity theory as an ideology also helps to account for
Poppers doubts over whether special theory can be retained, given
experimental results in quantum mechanics and Einsteins questionable
approach to defining simultaneity. Both Kuhn and Popper have looked to
the other branch of the theory - Popper to the general and Kuhn to the
special - to try and retain their view of Einstein as a revolutionary
scientist. According to the view proposed here, this only indicates
how special and general theories function together as an ideology, as
when one side of the theory is called into question, the other can be
called upon to rescue it. The triumph of relativity theory represents
the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics bur also
in the philosophy of science. These conclusions are of considerable
interest to both theoretical physics and to social epistemology. It
would, however, be naïve to think that theoretical physicists will
take the slightest notice of them."

Pentcho Valev

Naturally, dead science cannot be aware of its own death so the
scientific community, or what is referred to as "scientific
community", will continue to sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all
believe in relativity, relativity, relativity" forever. Still from
time to time single scientists or journalists, without being able to
stop or even slow down the death trend, do refer to symptoms of dead
science:

http://arc-tv.com/the-crisis-in-physics-and-its-cause/
"However, for the past century, theoretical physicists have been
sending a different message. They have rejected causality in favor of
chance, logic in favor of contradictions, and reality in favor of
fantasy. The science of physics is now riddled with claims that are as
absurd as those of any religious cult."

http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2...b635950366.txt
"Mead's book on "Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism" forecasts
that we will look back on the last 70 years as a kind of Dark Age for
physics. Certainly there has been little significant progress and
major institutions like the American Physical Society have become so
ossified that anyone questioning their dogma is simply told "this is
the consensus view so you must be wrong." No effort is made to provide
a scientific response showing an actual reason why. This is evident in
global warming climate disruption as well as particle physics."

http://www.thenation.com/article/lab...tific-research
"The most striking thing about the way we talk about science these
days is just how little we talk about it at all. No large fundamental
question focuses our attention on the adventure of discovery; no grand
public project stirs our reflection on the perils of technological
control. Nothing for decades has approached the imaginative impact of
relativity or the double helix, the moon landing or the bomb."

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow: "Einstein restored faith in the unintelligibility of
science. Everyone knew that Einstein had done something important in
1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody could tell you exactly what
it was. When Einstein was interviewed for a Dutch newspaper in 1921,
he attributed his mass appeal to the mystery of his work for the
ordinary person: Does it make a silly impression on me, here and
yonder, about my theories of which they cannot understand a word? I
think it is funny and also interesting to observe. I am sure that it
is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to them...it
impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of the mysterious."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...nd-relativism/
Washington Times: "A frequently heard statement of cultural relativism
goes like this: "If it feels right for you, it's OK. Who is to say
you're wrong?" One individual's experience is as "valid" as another's.
There is no "preferred" or higher vantage point from which to judge
these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of
the beholder. The "I" indeed is the "ultimate measure." The special
theory of relativity imposes on the physical world a claim that is
very similar to the one made by relativism. (...) So how come the
speed of light always stays the same? Einstein argued that when the
observer moves relative to an object, distance and time always adjust
themselves just enough to preserve light speed as a constant. Speed is
distance divided by time. So, Einstein argued, length contracts and
time dilates to just the extent needed to keep the speed of light ever
the same. Space and time are the alpha and omega of the physical
world. They are the stage within which everything happens. But if they
must trim and tarry whenever the observer moves, that puts "the
observer" in the driver's seat. Reality becomes observer-dependent.
Again, then, we find that the "I" is the ultimate measure. Pondering
this in Prague in the 1950s, Beckmann could not accept it. The
observer's function is to observe, he said, not to affect what's out
there. Relativity meant that two and two didn't quite add up any more
and elevated science into a priesthood of obscurity. Common sense
could no longer be trusted."

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As
the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are
"riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes
that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an
elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this
confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6
of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854
(Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of
obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the
writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and
Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the
(thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational
Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

http://www.i-sem.net/press/jmll_isem_palermo.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond: "La science souffre d'une forte perte de
crédit, au sens propre comme au sens figuré : son soutien politique et
économique, comme sa réputation intellectuelle et culturelle
connaissent une crise grave. (...) Mais le plus grave peut-être dans
la déculturation de la science se situe à l'extérieur de la recherche
scientifique, à l'interface entre le milieu scientifique proprement
dit et la société au sens large."

http://www.archipope.net/article-12278372-6.html
"Nous nous trouvons dans une période de mutation extrêmement profonde.
Nous sommes en effet à la fin de la science telle que l'Occident l'a
connue », tel est constat actuel que dresse Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond,
physicien théoricien, épistémologue et directeur des collections
scientifiques des Editions du Seuil."

http://archives.lesechos.fr/archives...077-80-ECH.htm
"Physicien au CEA, professeur et auteur, Etienne Klein s'inquiète des
relations de plus en plus conflictuelles entre la science et la
société. (...) « Je me demande si nous aurons encore des physiciens
dans trente ou quarante ans », remarque ce touche-à-tout aux multiples
centres d'intérêt : la constitution de la matière, le temps, les
relations entre science et philosophie. (...) Etienne Klein n'est pas
optimiste. Selon lui, il se pourrait bien que l'idée de progrès soit
tout bonnement « en train de mourir sous nos yeux »."

http://mneaquitaine.wordpress.com/20...scientifiques/
"L'Occident face à la crise des vocations scientifiques. Le mal
s'accroît, mais le diagnostic s'affine. Les pays développés, qui
souffrent, sans exception, d'une désaffection des jeunes pour les
filières scientifiques, pointent du doigt la façon dont les sciences
sont aujourd'hui enseignées. Trop de théorie, pas assez de pratique ;
des enseignements qui n'invitent pas au questionnement... (...) ...les
sciences physiques, grandes victimes de ce rejet collectif des jeunes
Européens, dégringolent (- 5,5 %)."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education
Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method
is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes
all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew
"belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture
of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all,
curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that
it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and
it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion
of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for
the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes
this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any
hope for UK? I am really not sure."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616
"Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of
"Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them.
Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian
statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged
to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate
stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to
the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of
these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress."

http://school.maths.uwa.edu.au/~mike/Trouble.doc
Mike Alder: "It is easy to see the consequences of the takeover by the
bureaucrats. Bureaucrats favour uniformity, it simplifies their lives.
They want rules to follow. They prefer the dead to the living. They
have taken over religions, the universities and now they are taking
over Science. And they are killing it in the process. The forms and
rituals remain, but the spirit is dead. The cold frozen corpse is so
much more appealing to the bureaucratic mind-set than the living
spirit of the quest for insight. Bureaucracies put a premium on the
old being in charge, which puts a stop to innovation. Something
perhaps will remain, but it will no longer attract the best minds.
This, essentially, is the Smolin position. He gives details and
examples of the death of Physics, although he, being American, is
optimistic that it can be reversed. I am not. (...) Developing ideas
and applying them is done by a certain kind of temperament in a
certain kind of setting, one where there is a good deal of personal
freedom and a willingness to take risks. No doubt we still have the
people. But the setting is gone and will not come back. Science is a
product of the renaissance and an entrepreneurial spirit. It will not
survive the triumph of bureacracy. Despite having the infrastructure,
China never developed Science. And soon the West won't have it
either."

http://www.wickedlocal.com/pembroke/...lton-Ratcliffe
Hilton Ratcliffe: "If, as in the case of GTR and later with Big Bang
Theory and Black Hole theory, the protagonists have seductive charisma
(which Einstein, Gamow, and Hawking, respectively, had in abundance)
then the theory, though not the least bit understood, becomes the
darling of the media. GTR and Big Bang Theory are sacrosanct, and it's
most certainly not because they make any sense. In fact, they have
become the measure by which we sanctify nonsense.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20.../22/schools.g2
"But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report
showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at
school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the
past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over
the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics
teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of
physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to
only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain
was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and
Brits made world-class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum
physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now
facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as
pandas, so who cares if we disappear?"

http://blog.reycom.org/archives/109
"La crise des vocations est générale dans toutes les sciences dures.
En témoignent les articles récurrents de revues spécialisés telles que
Physics World, l'excellent journal de l'Institute of Physics, ou la
Recherche qui a longtemps conservé un lien fort avec la recherche
publique menée en France. Elles s'en sont émues parce que c'était à
leurs lecteurs potentiels que cette crise s'attaquait... Le tableau
noir des sciences est peut-être entrain de cesser d'accepter des
marques de craie blanche. Il restera simplement noir. Dans ce paysage
accablant, les journalistes scientifiques peuvent toujours continuer
de ramer comme le faisait la reine Rouge de Lewis Carol, qui courait
simplement pour se maintenir sur place... Le courant de la rivière de
la course à la rentabilité risque de se transformer en rapide,
entrainant tous les coureurs, sans exception, vers le trou noir de
l'oubli!"

Pentcho Valev

At some stage all scientists, both orthodox and dissenters, find
themselves crushed under the ever growing corpse of false science.
This is the era of Postcientism. The only valid principle is: "Nobody
can change anything":

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/bethell4.1.1.html
Tom Bethell: "Einstein postulated - assumed - that the speed of light
is a constant irrespective of the motion, not just of the light
source, but also of the observer. And that "observer" part was very
hard to accept. A sound wave travels at a constant speed in air (of a
given temperature and density) whatever the motion of the sound
source. Sound from an airplane travels forward at a speed that is
unaffected by the speed of the plane. But if you travel toward that
approaching sound wave then you must add your speed to that of the
plane's sound wave if you are to know the speed with which it
approaches you. But Einstein decreed that the simple "addition of
velocities" that applies to sound does not hold true for light. Light
waves approach us at the same speed whether we travel toward or away
from that light beam. It's important to note that Einstein didn't
observe that in any experiment. He postulated it. He said: "Let's
assume it is true."

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of
Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully
powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most
perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-
dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other
processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd
sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns
out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are
differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow
captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage
of time."

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with
the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but
their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time,
so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle.
You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world
might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
NEW SCIENTIST: "Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. IT WAS a
speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was
1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying
to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as
special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster
and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by
itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski
proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent
reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can
be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It
is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is
right, it may be no more than a mirage. (...) Something has to give in
this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the
smart money says that it's relativity that will be the loser."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher
based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is
hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in
physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The
trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with
relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose
geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.ph...s-are-changing
"Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he
at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was
first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture
delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician
Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of
physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the
mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and
it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as
spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for
spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper
about possible grounds for divorce. (...) Physicists of the 21st
century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured
by the spacetime mirage. (...) What he and other pioneers on the
spacetime frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The
approaches of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the
challenges remaining from Einstein's century - such as finding a
harmonious mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum mechanics
the way Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently physicists
have been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what
makes up the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They
remain in the dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives the
universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the
dark energy's existence and intensity have been ambitious but
fruitless. To Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that it's
time for physics to drop old prejudices about how nature's laws ought
to be and search instead for how they really are. And that might mean
razing Minkowski's arena and rebuilding it from a new design. It seems
to me like it's a time in the development of physics, says Albrecht,
where it's time to look at how we think about space and time very
differently."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...al-denial.html
New Scientist, 12 January 2011: "Scepticism towards Einstein's theory
of relativity is not confined to irrational conservatives (13 November
2010, p 48). In his later years, the philosopher Karl Popper became
increasingly troubled by relativity. I argue that, for Popper,
inconsistencies in Einstein's presentation of his theory gave a
rational explanation for persistent opposition to it (Studies in
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol 41, p 354). Popper
himself ended up preferring Hendrik Lorentz's version of relativity,
which retained absolute space and time."

http://www.oocities.com/rainforest/6039/jd9.html
"An open letter to Professor Stephen Hawking by John Doan, Melbourne,
29 August 97....There's only one thing that I want to raise with you
in this letter, and it's Einstein's second postulate. Why can't you
step out from Einstein's shadow and change relativity, Professor
Hawking? Why should you accept Einstein's second postulate that the
speed of light is absolute, resulting all paradoxes about time
dilation? Why should you accept that c + v = c, in the sense that a
light spent from Earth to a spaceship has to be measured as c
regardless how fast the spaceship is travelling relative to Earth? How
much evidence have you truly seen?....Your students would still keep
asking the same questions your teachers have asked before. Many people
are still confused. Some understand but cannot explain to idiots. Some
don't understand but have stopped asking to stop being called idiots,
too. And why should we deserve this? Why should we waste time
imagining what our world would be like since Einstein said light is
absolute? Why don't we go back and ask what if Einstein is wrong, that
light is not absolute, that in fact c + c = 2c?....I have a dream,
that one day Professor Hawking would write the first non-Einstein
relativity book with an opposite second postulate, and I would be one
of first readers congratulating you for helping me understand
it.....If you say c + c = 2c, you certainly could make more sense than
Einstein's postulate saying c + c = c. Yet where is non-Einstein
relativity? Why can't you invent it, Professor Hawking? What has
stopped you?"

Pentcho Valev

Postscientism: NOBODY CAN CHANGE ANYTHING. In 1954 Divine Albert
became Repentant Albert: he admitted, although in a somewhat enigmatic
way, that the pillar of contemporary physics, his 1905 constant-speed-
of-light postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is
always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

was false:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/ind...ecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "I consider it entirely possible that
physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/
A clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "And then, in June, Einstein
completes special relativity, which adds a twist to the story:
Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special
relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves. Alice's Red
Queen can accept many impossible things before breakfast, but it takes
a supremely confident mind to do so. Einstein, age 26, sees light as
wave and particle, picking the attribute he needs to confront each
problem in turn. Now that's tough."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "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."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/p.../0305457v3.pdf
New varying speed of light theories
Joao Magueijo
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "In sharp contrast, the
constancy of the speed of light has remain sacred, and the term
"heresy" is occasionally used in relation to "varying speed of light
theories". The reason is clear: the constancy of c, unlike the
constancy of G or e, is the pillar of special relativity and thus of
modern physics. Varying c theories are expected to cause much more
structural damage to physics formalism than other varying constant
theories."

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
The farce of physics
Bryan Wallace
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "Einstein's special
relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in
space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern
physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics
becomes an elaborate farce! (...) The speed of light is c+v."

http://www.docstoc.com/docs/50282475...s-dans-loeuvre
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION (Louis de Broglie): "Tout
d'abord toute idée de "grain" se trouvait expulsée de la théorie de la
Lumière : celle-ci prenait la forme d'une "théorie du champ" où le
rayonnement était représenté par une répartition continue dans
l'espace de grandeurs évoluant continûment au cours du temps sans
qu'il fût possible de distinguer, dans les domaines spatiaux au sein
desquels évoluait le champ lumineux, de très petites régions
singulières où le champ serait très fortement concentré et qui
fournirait une image du type corpusculaire. Ce caractère à la fois
continu et ondulatoire de la lumière se trouvait prendre une forme
très précise dans la théorie de Maxwell où le champ lumineux venait se
confondre avec un certain type de champ électromagnétique."

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_De...e_of_Radiation
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation by Albert Einstein, 1909
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: "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://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
Another clue to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION: John Norton: "Einstein
could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics
merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered
the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to
bring it into accord with an emission theory of light, such as Newton
had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these
attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics.
Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to
this kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite
direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c
+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission
theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added vectorially to
the velocity of light emitted. (...) If an emission theory can be
formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine
the future course of processes from their state in the present. AS
LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY LIGHT, ELECTRICITY AND
MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of objections would render
an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE."

More clues to EINSTEIN'S 1954 CONFESSION could be referred to but that
would be pointless. In the era of Postscientism the question:

Is Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate true or false?

is entirely replaced by:

Who cares if Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is true
or false?

Pentcho Valev