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http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the speed of light
varies with the gravitational potential:

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae13.cfm
"So, it is absolutely true that the speed of light is not constant in
a gravitational field [which, by the equivalence principle, applies as
well to accelerating (non-inertial) frames of reference]. If this were
not so, there would be no bending of light by the gravitational field
of stars....Indeed, this is exactly how Einstein did the calculation
in: 'On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,'
Annalen der Physik, 35, 1911. which predated the full formal
development of general relativity by about four years. This paper is
widely available in English. You can find a copy beginning on page 99
of the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity.' You will find in
section 3 of that paper, Einstein's derivation of the (variable) speed
of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is,
c' = c0 ( 1 + V / c^2 )
where V is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the
speed of light c0 is measured."

http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from:
http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/einstein-papers/1911_35_898-908.pdf
). It predated the full formal development of general relativity by
about four years. You can find an English translation of this paper in
the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity' beginning on page 99; you
will find in section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the
variable speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The
result is: c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential
relative to the point where the speed of light co is measured......You
can find a more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from
the full theory of general relativity in the weak field
approximation....For the 1955 results but not in coordinates see page
93, eqn (6.28): c(r)=[1+2phi(r)/c^2]c. Namely the 1955 approximation
shows a variation in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911."

Yet some Einsteinians regard "The speed of light varies with the
gravitational potential" as a dangerous thought and stop short, as
though by instinct, at the treshold of it:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, "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://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_gr.html
"Is light affected by gravity? If so, how can the speed of light be
constant? Wouldn't the light coming off of the Sun be slower than the
light we make here? If not, why doesn't light escape a black hole?
Yes, light is affected by gravity, but not in its speed. General
Relativity (our best guess as to how the Universe works) gives two
effects of gravity on light. It can bend light (which includes effects
such as gravitational lensing), and it can change the energy of light.
But it changes the energy by shifting the frequency of the light
(gravitational redshift) not by changing light speed. Gravity bends
light by warping space so that what the light beam sees as "straight"
is not straight to an outside observer. The speed of light is still
constant." Dr. Eric Christian

Clever Einsteinians do not regard "The speed of light varies with the
gravitational potential" as a dangerous thought but they always stop
short, as though by instinct, at the treshold of an extremely
dangerous thought which is a corollary of "The speed of light varies
with the gravitational potential":

The extremely dangerous thought: "Practically no light in the universe
travels at the constant speed c=299792km/s; one reason is that there
is always some gravitational potential difference between the point of
emission and the point of reception (observation)".

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com