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http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/13-e-nste-n

On Feb 28, 9:12 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Sixth Next Einstein Ed Witten deeply understands how Einstein
> camouflaged the falsehood of his 1905 light postulate:
>
> http://www.claymath.org/Popular_Lectures/Edward_Witten/
> Ed Witten: "I've tried to illustrate this by this little magic square
> where in the upper left I draw a picture that's meant to symbolize a
> conception based on Einstein's special relativity, dating to the early
> 20th century, of a massless particle traveling at the speed of light
> in spacetime. In the picture, space runs horizontally, time runs
> vertically, and the massless particle travels at a 45 degree angle
> which is meant to illustrate propagation at the speed of light. Now
> this is a very naive idea, and Einstein elaborated it into the
> nonlinear wave equations for which he's really famous \ the Einstein
> equations which assert that the Ricci tensor of spacetime is zero.
> These equations encode Einstein's amazingly profound mathematical
> insight describing just how the curvature of the universe leads to
> gravitation. So Einstein gave one profound generalization of the naive
> idea of a light ray in spacetime...."

This sixth new Einstein seems to be something very very special:

http://www.yogacara.net/node/21042
"Edward Witten, who is probably one of the smartest people on Earth
and quite possibly the world's greatest living theoretical physicist."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,994019,00.html
"Albert Einstein labored unsuccessfully for decades to create a theory
that would merge relativity and quantum physics into one tidy
mathematical package. But where Einstein failed, physicists may
finally be on the verge of success, largely thanks to Edward Witten,
generally considered the greatest theoretical physicist in the world.
"Ed is unique," says John Schwarz, a theorist at Caltech, "the kind of
person who comes along once a century."

Yet the greatest theoretical physicist (a string theorist!?!?) has a
problem:

http://www.sns.ias.edu/~witten/papers/mmm.pdf
Ed Witten the Greatest: "But the deeper part of quantum theory is the
quantum theory of fields, which arises when one tries to combine
quantum mechanics with special relativity (the precursor of general
relativity, in which the speed of light is the same in every inertial
frame but spacetime is still flat and given ab initio). This much more
difficult theory, developed from the late 1920s to the present,
encompasses most of what we know of the laws of physics, except
gravity."

In fact, the problem of Ed Witten the Greatest was solved by Albert
Einstein himself in 1907, as two of Ed Witten the Greatest's criminal
brothers have discovered:

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm Lee Smolin: "Quantum
theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have
appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of
relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's insight that the
laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the
speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the
source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory
are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-legendary
relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not
absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS OF
INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS WRONG
WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/OntologyOUP_TimesNR.pdf "What Can
We Learn about the Ontology of Space and Time from the Theory of
Relativity?", John D. Norton: "In general relativity there is no
comparable sense of the constancy of the speed of light. The constancy
of the speed of light is a consequence of the perfect homogeneity of
spacetime presumed in special relativity. There is a special velocity
at each event; homogeneity forces it to be the same velocity
everywhere. We lose that homogeneity in the transition to general
relativity and with it we lose the constancy of the speed of light.
Such was Einstein's conclusion at the earliest moments of his
preparation for general relativity. ALREADY IN 1907, A MERE TWO YEARS
AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE SPECIAL THEORY, HE HAD CONCLUDED THAT THE
SPEED OF LIGHT IS VARIABLE IN THE PRESENCE OF A GRAVITATIONAL FIELD."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com