🚀 go-pugleaf

Up until recently Einsteinians did not care at all about Einstein's
1954 confession:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

Now Einsteinians feel that the "ha ha ha" attitude is getting
dangerous and are even trying to discuss the fatal (according to
Einstein's confession) field concept of light:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=nonlocality-from-newton
This story is a supplement to the story "Was Einstein Wrong?: A
Quantum Threat to Special Relativity" By Rivka Galchen and David Z
Albert
"And here was the beautiful turn. Maxwell tried to look for a minimal
modification of his theory that would resolve this paradox, and what
he arrived at was the discovery that there can be interestingly
evolving electric and magnetic fields even in the complete absence of
charged particles—so called charge-free solutions. (This discovery
must have felt like discovering, say, that there can be completely
disembodied toothaches.) The particleless fields (it turned out) could
push one another around, and their subsequent chain of oscillations
would propagate through space at a particular velocity, a velocity
that just happened to correspond to the then very recently measured
speed of light. This "coincidence" was astonishing. Light was
something that physicists had imagined they would get around to
sometime in the relatively distant future, it was something understood
virtually not at all. But then, suddenly, they not only knew what
light was, but the necessity of its existence had been deduced as a
matter of logic. A marvel."

Of course, clever Einsteinians have been hinting at the solution to
the problem all along:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/Einstein/Einstein_pdf/Einstein_eloge.pdf
Louis de Broglie: "Tout d'abord toute idée de "grain" se trouvait
expulsée de la théorie de la Lumière : celle-ci prenait la forme d'une
"théorie du champ" où le rayonnement était représenté par une
répartition continue dans l'espace de grandeurs évoluant continûment
au cours du temps sans qu'il fût possible de distinguer, dans les
domaines spatiaux au sein desquels évoluait le champ lumineux, de très
petites régions singulières où le champ serait très fortement
concentré et qui fournirait une image du type corpusculaire. Ce
caractère à la fois continu et ondulatoire de la lumière se trouvait
prendre une forme très précise dans la théorie de Maxwell où le champ
lumineux venait se confondre avec un certain type de champ
électromagnétique."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully
relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field
transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying
Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an
emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived.
There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to
classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a
light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves
past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v
and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining
characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the
emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an
emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to
be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state
in the present. AS LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY LIGHT,
ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of
objections would render an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com