🚀 go-pugleaf

Revolutions in Einsteiniana involve two campaigns (often occurring
simultaneously):

Campaign 1: An extremely heretical claim, usually challenging
Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, is advanced and even
experimentally confirmed. Selected "mavericks" in Einsteiniana extract
maximum career and money from it:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.800-13-more-things-magic-results.html
"In 2005, researchers at the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope on La Palma in
the Canary Islands were studying gamma-ray bursts emitted by the black
hole in the centre of the Markarian 501 galaxy, half a billion light
years away. The burst's high-energy gamma rays arrived at the
telescope 4 minutes later than the lower-energy rays. Both parts of
the spectrum should have been emitted at the same time. So is the time
lag due to the high-energy radiation travelling slower through space?
That wouldn't make sense: it would contravene one of the central
tenets of special relativity. According to Einstein, all
electromagnetic radiation always travels through vacuum at the cosmic
speed limit – the speed of light. The energy of the radiation should
be absolutely irrelevant."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another
possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved,
but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so
as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most
shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real
possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without
violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years
ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I
did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial
College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept
coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all
seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it
was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they
had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how
Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special
relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy."

Campaign 2: The extremely heretical claim is useless and even harmful
(in terms of career and money) for other Einsteinians so it is slowly
but surely undermined, with "Einstein is still right" as the final
conclusion. The selected "mavericks" gradually abandon their heresy
but career and money gained in the process remain:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/10/29/a-gamma-ray-race-through-the-fabric-of-space-time-proves-einstein-right/
"New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into
orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert
Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good. (...) But the study
of the Fermi Telescope’s results, published in Nature, declares that
since all the gamma rays arrived within nine-tenths of a second apart,
they must have all traveled at almost exactly the same speed. (...)
Physicists working with the Fermi Telescope will keep looking for new
evidence. But for now, says study coauthor Peter F. Michelson, "I take
it as a confirmation that Einstein is still right" [The New York
Times]."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com