🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 2, 12:13 pm, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> 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=9E03E7D8143FF932A05751C1A9649C8B63&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."
>
> 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

Yet the revolution seems to be going on, carried out by philosophers
and somewhat hidden from ordinary scientists:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einstein’s Special Theory
of Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the
contemporary paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great
deal has changed since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory
of Relativity, and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special
Relativity’s relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology,
metaphysics and physics. There is no other book like this available;
hence philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its
epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be
questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com