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THE OLD RAT SENTENCED TO DEATH:

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://roychristopher.com/joao-magueijo-frontier-cosmology
"Likewise, Joao Magueijo has radical ideas, but his ideas intend to
turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Magueijo is trying to pick
apart one of Einstein's most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the
speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/
second) is familiar to anyone who is remotely acquainted with modern
physics. It is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has,
or ever will travel faster than light. Magueijo doesn't buy it. His
VSL (Varying Speed of Light) presupposes a speed of light that can be
energy or time-space dependent. Before you declare that he's out of
his mind, understand that this man received his doctorate from
Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and
is currently a professor at Imperial College, London."

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."

http://www.sciscoop.com/2008/10
"Does the apparently constant speed of light change over the vast
stretches of the universe? Would our understanding of black holes,
ancient supernovae, dark matter, dark energy, the origins of the
universe and its ultimate fate be different if the speed of light were
not constant?.....Couldn't it be that the supposed vacuum of space is
acting as an interstellar medium to lower the speed of light like some
cosmic swimming pool? If so, wouldn't a stick plunged into the pool
appear bent as the light is refracted and won't that affect all our
observations about the universe. I asked theoretical physicist Leonard
Susskind, author of The Black Hole War, recently reviewed in Science
Books to explain this apparent anomaly....."You are entirely right,"
he told me, "there are all sorts of effects on the propagation of
light that astronomers and astrophysicists must account for. The point
of course is that they (not me) do take these effects into account and
correct for them." "In a way this work is very heroic but unheralded,"
adds Susskind, "An immense amount of extremely brilliant analysis has
gone into the detailed corrections that are needed to eliminate these
'spurious' effects so that people like me can just say 'light travels
with the speed of light.' So, there you have it. My concern about
cosmic swimming pools and bent sticks does indeed apply, but
physicists have taken the deviations into account so that other
physicists, such as Susskind, who once proved Stephen Hawking wrong,
can battle their way to a better understanding of the universe."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

ALWAYS REPRIEVING THE OLD RAT:

http://www.amazon.com/Petit-Prince-French-Language/dp/0156013983
"Hem! Hem! dit le roi, je crois bien que sur ma planète il y a quelque
part un vieux rat. Je l'entends la nuit. Tu pourras juger ce vieux
rat. Tu le condamneras à mort de temps en temps. Ainsi sa vie dépendra
de ta justice. Mais tu le gracieras chaque fois pour l'économiser. Il
n'y en a qu'un."

http://www.amazon.com/Little-Prince-Antoine-Saint-Exup%C3%A9ry/dp/0156012197
"Hum! Hum!" said the king. "I have good reason to believe that
somewhere on my planet there is an old rat. I hear him at night. You
can judge this old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to
death. Thus his life will depend on your justice. But you will pardon
him on each occasion; for he must be treated thriftily. He is the only
one we have."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com