🚀 go-pugleaf

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. (...) And
if we do arrive at such a unified theory, will it invalidate the
efforts of Newton and Einstein – or all of the modern physicists who
have tried to explain the inexplicable? Not a bit of it. Scientists
know that they can never reach finality. Cynics said that Einstein
might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure
of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society

This seems to be the real beginning of the shock and horror announced
a few years ago:

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."

I think Einstein should have gone fishing even before 1920 since, as I
explain below, "deductive theories are either absolutely true or
absolutely false". Unlike today's Einsteinians Einstein knew this
quite well:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

On Aug 19 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as
> verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all
> theories in the past proved partially false so present and future
> theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive
> method. 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.
>
> 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.
> Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
> antithesis 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 are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either
> absolutely true or absolutely false.