🚀 go-pugleaf

Pentcho Valev wrote:
>http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5538
>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://smashingtelly.com/2009/01/16/einsteins-biggest-blunder/
>"The theory of Relativity might be more usefully called the theory of
>the constancy of the speed of light. So what if the speed of light
>wasn’t constant?"
>
>http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E7D8143FF932A05751C1A
>9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
>"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
>clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
>particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
>same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
>of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
>consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
>all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
>up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
>using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
>restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
>''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
>light.''
>
>"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'm wondering just how many physicists take Hawking seriously these 
days.

  "Hawking advocates what he calls top-down cosmology, in which observers 
are creating the universe and its entire history right now. If we in 
some sense create the universe, it is not surprising that the universe 
is well suited to us". New Scientist - Ref our bio-friendly universe

There is a hope that physics will get too silly even for physicists. 
When that happens they will discover that they have no critical criteria 
by which they can reject *anything*.

Other science has discipline whereby a theory is rejected when it no 
longer makes sense in terms of tangible reality. Physics has decided it 
cannot be wrong so it must be nature which is weird. Once you accept 
that nature is weird then you cannot reject something on the grounds 
that "....while nature is weird it cannot be *that* weird". Whether or 
not a concept is taken seriously depends not on the merits of the idea 
but on the status of the physicist putting it forward.

There is a hope that physicists will become too embarrassed by their own 
high priests and want to do something about it. When they do they will 
have to re-impose discipline by formulating a strict set of rules and 
totally rebuilding physics according to those rules. Essentially if you 
want to remove from physics things which are silly you have first to 
define 'silly'.

>Joao Magueijo, PLUS VITE QUE LA LUMIERE, Dunod, 2003, pp. 298-299:
>"La racine du mal etait clairement la relativite restreinte. Tous ces
>paradoxes resultaient d'effets bien connus comme la contraction des
>longueurs, la dilatation du temps, ou E=mc^2, tous des predictions
>directes de la relativite restreinte. (...) La consequence en etait
>inevitable: pour edifier une theorie coherente de la gravite
>quantique, quelle qu'elle soit, nous [Joao Magueijo et Lee Smolin]
>devions commencer par abandonner la relativite restreinte. (...) Mais,
>comme nous l'avons vu, celle-ci repose sur deux principes
>independants. Le premier est la relativite du mouvement, le second la
>constance de la vitesse de la lumiere. Une des solutions possibles a
>notre probleme pouvait etre d'abandonner la relativite du mouvement.
>(...) C'est une possibilite bien sur, mais nous avons choisi
>l'alternative evidente: preserver la relativite du mouvement, mais
>admettre qu'a de tres hautes energies, la vitesse de la lumiere ne
>soit plus constante."
>
>Needless to say, Joao Magueijo, Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, Martin Rees,
>Stephen Hawking etc. did not drop Einstein's 1905 false light
>postulate in the end, at least not officially. But they extracted
>maximum career and money from this particular heresy and then left the
>sinking ship. The world will never again be interested in whether or
>not the postulate is false. Accordingly, people are free to sing or
>not to sing "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity"
>and "Divine Einstein":
>
>"YES WE ALL BELIEVE IN RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY"
>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
>
>"DIVINE EINSTEIN"
>(No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein not Maxwell, Curie, or B-o-o-
>ohr!)
>http://www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/divine.htm
>
>Pentcho Valev
>pvalev@yahoo.com

-- 
John Kennaugh
"Conformity may even bring you a university chair, but all advance comes
from non conformity. If there had been no troublemakers, no dissenters,
we should still be living in caves" - A J P Taylor