🚀 go-pugleaf

Are both Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, and
Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott sillier than Lee
Smolin, another Albert Einstein of our generation:

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9
Lee Smolin, another Albert Einstein of our generation: "Newton's
theory predicts that light goes in straight lines and therefore if the
star passes behind the sun, we can't see it. Einstein's theory
predicts that light is bent...."

On Aug 25 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> Who is sillier: Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our
> generation, or Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
> Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, "A Brief
> History of Time", Chapter 6:
> "Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how
> it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles,
> one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that
> cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really
> consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of
> gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired
> upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will
> eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward
> at a constant speed...)"
>
> http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8572
> Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott: "Although black
> holes lie at the frontier of astronomy, the idea such objects might
> exist stretches back more than 200 years. In the late 1700s, British
> professor John Michell and French astronomer and mathematician Pierre
> Simon, Marquis de Laplace, advanced the idea of what Laplace called
> "dark bodies." Using Newton's concepts of light and gravity, they
> reasoned that the gravitational pull of a massive star could grow
> large enough to prevent light from escaping. Unfortunately, Newton's
> theory could not describe what happens when gravity grows that strong.
> Enter Albert Einstein. In 1916, his general theory of relativity put
> black holes on a firm footing."
>
> http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
> Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation: "Interestingly
> enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper in 1799 on how some stars could
> have a gravitational field so strong that light could not escape, but
> would be dragged back onto the star. He even calculated that a star of
> the same density as the Sun, but two hundred and fifty times the size,
> would have this property. But although Laplace may not have realised
> it, the same idea had been put forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge
> man, John Mitchell, in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of
> the Royal Society. Both Mitchell and Laplace thought of light as
> consisting of particles, rather like cannon balls, that could be
> slowed down by gravity, and made to fall back on the star. But a
> famous experiment, carried out by two Americans, Michelson and Morley
> in 1887, showed that light always travelled at a speed of one hundred
> and eighty six thousand miles a second, no matter where it came from.
> How then could gravity slow down light, and make it fall back."