🚀 go-pugleaf

Einsteiniana's revolutions are simultaneously devolutions (in any
case, new money-spinners):

http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/06-discover-interview-roger-penrose-says-physics-is-wrong-string-theory-quantum-mechanics
"Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum
Mechanics (...) And he wrote a series of incredibly readable, best-
selling science books to boot. And yet the 78-year-old Penrose—now an
emeritus professor at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford—
seems to live the humble life of a researcher just getting started in
his career. (...)
I understand you are setting out this critique of quantum mechanics in
your new book.
Roger Penrose: "The book is called Fashion, Faith and Fantasy in the
New Physics of the Universe. Each of those words stands for a major
theoretical physics idea. The fashion is string theory; the fantasy
has to do with various cosmological schemes, mainly inflationary
cosmology [which suggests that the universe inflated exponentially
within a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang]. Big fish,
those things are. It’s almost sacrilegious to attack them. And the
other one, even more sacrilegious, is quantum mechanics at all levels—
so that’s the faith. People somehow got the view that you really can’t
question it."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....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."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/10/12/a-new-challenge-to-einstein/
"So here is a new such test, courtesy of Rachel Bean of Cornell. She
combines a suite of cosmological data, especially measurements of weak
gravitational lensing from the Hubble Space Telescope, to see whether
GR correctly describes the behavior of large-scale structure in the
universe. And the surprising thing is it doesnt. At the 98% confidence
level, Rachel finds that general relativity is inconsistent with the
data. I'm not sure why we haven't been reading about this in the
science media or even on other blogs it's certainly a newsworthy
result. Admittedly, the smart money is still that there is some tricky
thing that hasn't yet been noticed and Einstein will eventually come
through the victor, but this is serious work by a respected
cosmologist. Either the result is wrong, and we should be working hard
to find out why, or it's right, and we're on the cusp of a
revolution."

Other recent revolutions in Einsteiniana:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have
suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big
issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the
mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is
pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist."

http://www.sciscoop.com/story/2008/10/30/41323/484
"Does the apparently constant speed of light change over the vast
stretches of the universe? Would our understanding of black holes,
ancient supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, the origins of the
universe and its ultimate fate be different if the speed of light were
not constant?.....Couldn't it be that the supposed vacuum of space is
acting as an interstellar medium to lower the speed of light like some
cosmic swimming pool?"

Past revolutions in Einsteiniana:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2003/04/waseinsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the
rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are
actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book,
Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as
even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is
Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same -
186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists."

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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com