🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 6, 9:34 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://philipball.blogspot.com/2007/09/arthur-eddington-was-innocent-this-is.html
> "With the technology then available, measuring the bending of
> starlight was very challenging. And contrary to popular belief,
> Newtonian physics did not predict that light would remain undeflected
> - Einstein himself pointed out in 1911 that Newtonian gravity should
> cause some deviation too. So the matter was not that of an all-or-
> nothing shift in stars' positions, but hinged on the exact numbers."
>
> However Budding Young Einsteins are taught in a different way:
>
> http://pirsa.org/speaker/Lee_Smolin
> Lee Smolin - ISSYP Keynote Session
> Speaker(s): Lee Smolin
> Abstract:
> Date: 01/08/2007 - 1:00 pm
>
> http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9
> Lee Smolin: "Newton's theory predicts that light goes in straight
> lines and therefore if the star passes behind the sun, we can't see
> it. Einstein's theory predicts that light is bent...."

That is a mystery. Lee Smolin is silly but by no means cretin. All
criminal Einsteinians know that Newton's corpuscular model of light
does imply bending caused by a gravitational field, and some even
teach so. Perhaps we deal with absolute dishonesty in all such cases:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html
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. This was impossible, according to the
then accepted ideas of space and time. But in 1915, Einstein put
forward his revolutionary General Theory of Relativity."

Again, Stephen Hawking is silly but by no means cretin. Even Einstein
zombies now know that the Michelson-Morley experiment shows the speed
of light is variable, in accordance with 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."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" by Banesh Hoffmann, Chapter 5.
(I do not have the text in English so I am giving it in French)
Banesh Hoffmann, "La relativite, histoire d'une grande idee", Pour la
Science, Paris, 1999, p. 112:
"De plus, si l'on admet que la lumiere est constituee de particules,
comme Einstein l'avait suggere dans son premier article, 13 semaines
plus tot, le second principe parait absurde: une pierre jetee d'un
train qui roule tres vite fait bien plus de degats que si on la jette
d'un train a l'arret. Or, d'apres Einstein, la vitesse d'une certaine
particule ne serait pas independante du mouvement du corps qui l'emet!
Si nous considerons que la lumiere est composee de particules qui
obeissent aux lois de Newton, ces particules se conformeront a la
relativite newtonienne. Dans ce cas, il n'est pas necessaire de
recourir a la contraction des longueurs, au temps local ou a la
transformation de Lorentz pour expliquer l'echec de l'experience de
Michelson-Morley. Einstein, comme nous l'avons vu, resista cependant a
la tentation d'expliquer ces echecs a l'aide des idees newtoniennes,
simples et familieres. Il introduisit son second postulat, plus ou
moins evident lorsqu'on pensait en termes d'ondes dans l'ether."

Translation from French: "Moreover, if one admits that light consists
of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his first paper, 13 weeks
earlier, the second principle seems absurd: a stone thrown from a fast-
moving train causes much more damage than one thrown from a train at
rest. Now, according to Einstein, the speed of a particle would not be
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body! If we
consider light as composed of particles that obey Newton's laws, those
particles would conform to Newtonian relativity. In this case, it is
not necessary to resort to length contration, local time and Lorentz
transformations in explaining the negative result of the Michelson-
Morley experiment. Einstein however, as we have seen, resisted the
temptation to explain the negative result in terms of Newton's ideas,
simple and familiar. He introduced his second postulate, more or less
evident as one thinks in terms of waves in aether."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com