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In 1911 Einstein says the analogy between the speed of photons and the
speed of cannonballs is straightforward - the former varies with the
gravitational potential as Newton's emission theory of light predicts.
In the final version of Einstein's general relativity the analogy
remains - both speeds are variable - but the speed of photons is more
variable than the speed of cannonballs.

Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, implicitly
rejects Einstein's general relativity by claiming that there can be no
analogy between photons and cannonballs because the speed of light is
constant in a gravitational field:

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...)"

Hawking goes even further: the speed of light cannot vary with the
gravitational potential because the Michelson-Morley experiment has
proved it is constant:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."

One of Hawking's brothers in Einsteiniana, John Norton, implicitly
contradicts Hawking by teaching that the Michelson-Morley experiment
has confirmed the variability of the speed of light as postulated by
Newton's emission theory of light:

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."

Up until recently Einstein's, Hawking's and Norton's teachings made
the scientific community sing "Divine Einstein" and go into
convulsions. Now that it is evident to everybody that theoretical
physics is dead, the scientific community does not give a sh-t about
any teaching.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com