🚀 go-pugleaf

On Oct 5, 10:44 pm, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Most activity in philosophy of science consists of accounting for or
> explaining major scientific change. Greatly impressed by the universal
> shifting of allegiance from Newtonian to relativistic mechanics, and
> suspecting that there may be some truth in the former, realists
> construe change as a more or less turbulent movement from less truth
> to more truth:
>
> W. H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, Routledge, London,
> 1981, p. 39: "Consequently our final strengthening of realism involves
> adding what I call the thesis of verisimilitude (hereafter cited as
> TV): the historically generated sequence of theories of a mature
> science is a sequence of theories which are improving in regard to how
> approximately true they are."
>
> This construal of scientific change is inconsistent with the deductive
> nature of theories. Deductivism implies that only movements from
> absolutely false to absolutely true and from absolutely true to
> absolutely false are possible. Consider Einstein's 1905 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 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 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the
> equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true.
> This can easily be seen on close inspection of the Michelson-Morley
> experiment:
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/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://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."
>
> Therefore the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
> antithesis, c'=c+v, deduced validly and in the absence of false or
> absurd auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all
> its conclusions are true.
>
> Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content
> and falsity content, largely used in today's philosophy of science,
> are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either absolutely true or
> absolutely false. The transition from Newtonian to relativistic
> mechanics was either a transition from absolutely false to absolutely
> true or a transition from absolutely true to absolutely false.
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pva...@yahoo.com

The antithesis of the light-postulate is not the particle-emission
postulate. This would only be true if light is also ASSUMED to be a
propagating entity (wave or particle). The other alternative is to
assume that EM is an action-at-a-distance phenomenon which is
independent of the velocity of either charged particle.