🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 30 Jan 2008 01:03:23 -0800 (PST), Pentcho Valev
<pvalev@yahoo.com> wrote <in part>:

<snipp>
...

>OK but your "position" should be looked for in the awful mixture of
>irrelevant verbiage and advertisment of your book that you offer. 

Well, if you want to present my views as corresponding to an
unpublished paper that's nine years old, and I've put out an followup
amendment/correction paper and a big book since then, I think I'm
entitled to point out that the book gives a better representation of
those ideas.  

<ad>And it has more pictures. Ten quid GBP, fifteen dollars US,
oversized format, nearly 400 pages, more than 200 illustrations,
available through all good bookshops now.</ad>

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Curved-Spacetime-without-relativity/dp/0955706807

And it has a picture of a frog in it.

Heh! <grins>

>You
>tend to present yourself as a maverick or something like that 

Well, I had to interject when you seemed to be describing me as
apparently "continuing to worship, as fiercely as possible, general
relativity." 
Because actually, I think I may be one of the general theory's most
serious critics. Really. 

I think I've probably identified and described more problems and
potential problems with the structure of Einstein's general theory
than anyone else (or at least, more than anyone else who's prepared to
talk about the subject publicly).  


>must admit that some orthodox Einsteinians discuss the problem
>immeasurably better than you:
>
> 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:

<snipp>

>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

I think Einstein is supposed to have worked on emission theory himself
for a while, but he couldn't find a satisfactory way to reconcile the
idea of emission theory with the idea that lightspeed would be
constant for the observer as well as for the emitting body. 

Lorentz had been framing his equations in terms of wave theory, and
when Einstein produced his electrodynamics paper, he followed
Lorentz's lead. 

=Erk= (Eric Baird)
www.chocolatetreebooks.com