🚀 go-pugleaf

On Jan 12, 1:14 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
> "Even if Joao Magueijo had not advocated castrating an editor at a
> prestigious science journal, and even if he hadn't suggested that
> rival physicists, ostensibly brilliant like Magueijo, were just
> posers--in short, even if Magueijo were a less colorful rebel, his
> ideas would have attracted attention. After all, he is taking on
> Einstein, and ever since we placed Einstein on a pedestal, we have
> been titillated by the idea of knocking him off. Magazine editors know
> that putting the antic-haired genius on the cover, perhaps over the
> words Faster Than the Speed of Light --the somewhat misleading title
> of Magueijo's recent book--all but guarantees sales. And yet Magueijo,
> a physicist at Imperial College, London, is for real, and he is not
> alone. As we near the end of our first century in a relative universe,
> challenges to Einstein's theory are in the air. They are respectful
> challenges; even Magueijo isn't proposing to throw relativity out the
> window, any more than Einstein junked Newton. "We get E-mail and
> letters all the time from amateurs who think they have found a mistake
> in Einstein's theory," says Lee Smolin, a physicist at the Perimeter
> Institute in Waterloo, Ontario. "That's not what is going on here." If
> relativity is wrong, it is wrong by such tiny amounts or in such
> particular circumstances that you have to go to great lengths to find
> the error......They may have to bend his best-known principle: the one
> that says the speed of light is an absolute, always and everywhere the
> same, and faster than anything else.....Second, he said that c, the
> speed of light, will appear exactly the same to every observer, in
> every frame of reference. A century later, that second postulate still
> defies common sense. It says that if you're driving down the highway
> at a quarter the speed of light, you'll still see the photons from
> your headlights racing ahead of you at light speed--not three-quarters
> light speed. If I'm coming from the opposite direction at half light
> speed, I'll still see your photons approaching at c--not 1.5 times
> c......It might be a relief to learn that physicists were talking
> about chucking this deeply strange theory. But just as Einstein made
> only minute corrections to Newton in everyday life--to really feel the
> effects of special relativity, you have to move at a large fraction of
> light speed--the proposed changes to relativity would have only
> subtle, hard-to-detect effects. Yet the stakes are big......Physicists
> are taking many paths to this "quantum gravity" grail, but in all of
> them spacetime itself, instead of being continuous, is made of quantum
> bits.....That minimum length comes at a cost, however: The speed of
> light would no longer be a constant."
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pva...@yahoo.com

Boy, all this is sure complicated.