🚀 go-pugleaf

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...."

http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/02/stephen-hawking-and-ed-witten-try-to.html
Motl: "This is the work not only of hostile imbeciles such as Peter
Woit but also of wise but phlegmatic cowards in high-energy physics
who always prefer to stay silent instead of patiently yet
unambiguously explain e.g. why Lee Smolin is a textbook example of a
limited, ignorant, cheesy crackpot."

Motl should not have said that. At least Lee Smolin knows that
Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false and is trying to deal with
the issue whereas Motl's brothers string theorists (Ed Witten, Brian
Greene, Thibault Damour) neither know nor would be able to say
anything if they knew:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another
possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved,
but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so
as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most
shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real
possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without
violating the principle of relativity!"

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/stringtheory.html
Lee Smolin: "So I've said, look, if the speed of light isn't
universal, that disconfirms string theory. But the string theorists
say they could probably invent versions of the theory that work either
way. We'd have to change our notion of what science is to accommodate
this proposition. You just can't do science on that basis."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com