🚀 go-pugleaf

On 6 Nov, 19:39, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm
> This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, "'What Song the Syrens Sang':
> How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel,
> Einstein from "B" to "Z".
> "This was itself a daring step, since these methods had been developed
> to help understand the behavior of ordinary matter while Einstein was
> applying them to the apparently quite different field of
> electromagnetic radiation. The "revolutionary" conclusion to which he
> came was that, in certain respects, electromagnetic radiation behaved
> more like a collection of particles than like a wave. He announced
> this result in a paper published in 1905, three months before his SRT
> paper. The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of particles
> had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity into the
> middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission theory" of
> light, a phrase I shall use.....Giving up the ether concept allowed
> Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an
> independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is
> radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of
> light.".....An emission theory is perfectly compatible with the
> relativity principle. Thus, the M-M experiment presented no problem;
> nor is stellar abberration difficult to explain on this
> basis......This does not imply that Lorentz's equations are adequate
> to explain all the features of light, of course. Einstein already knew
> they did not always correctly do so-in particular in the processes of
> its emission, absorption and its behavior in black body radiation.
> Indeed, his new velocity addition law is also compatible with an
> emission theory of light, just because the speed of light compounded
> with any lesser velocity still yields the same value. If we model a
> beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can still
> be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed
> the view that an adequate future theory of light would have to be some
> sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories......The resulting
> theory did not force him to choose between wave and emission theories
> of light, but rather led him to look forward to a synthesis of the
> two. This synthesis was finally achieved, over twenty years later, in
> the quantum theory of fields, to the satisfaction of most physicists,
> but ironically, never to that of Einstein."
>
> This was written 24 years ago, and nobody in Einstein zombie world
> seems to have noticed so far the (implicit) idiotic mixture of
> Einstein's light postulate (c'=c) and the variable-speed-of-light
> equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light. It is as
> if Big Brother had found it suitable to declare both 2+2=5 and 2+2=4
> true:
>
> http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/ George Orwell "1984":
> "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and
> you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make
> that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.
> Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of
> external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy
> of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that
> they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be
> right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or
> that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If
> both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if
> the mind itself is controllable what then?"

A group of criminals defend Divine Albert's Divine Theory by teaching
that, even if "light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed
of the Lorentz transform", special relativity "would be unaffected".
This is equivalent to:

Two and two make five, but even if two and two made four, Big
Brother's Absolute Truth remains Absolute:

http://www.physorg.com/news111075100.html
"Further, Einstein based his theories on the assumption that the speed
of light, c, is constant, and used gedanken ("thought") experiments
involving light rays to reach his conclusions. Now Joel Gannett, a
Senior Scientist in the Applied Research Area of Telcordia
Technologies in Red Bank, New Jersey, has found that Einstein didn't
have to do the work the hard way. A researcher in optical networking
technologies, Gannett has shown that the Lorentz transformations and
velocity addition law can be derived without assuming the constancy of
the speed of light, without thought experiments, and without calculus.
In this case, Einsteinian relativity could have been discovered
several centuries before Einstein."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/onemorederivation.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands
as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time
arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of
the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way
the validity of the special relalivity. It would, however, nullify all
its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
velocity."

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_frm/thread/8034dc146100e32c?
Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a
nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant
speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both
Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains
of applicability would be reduced)."

http://www.worldscibooks.com/physics/4114.html
Jong-Ping Hsu: "....unexpected affirmative answer to the long-standing
question of whether it is possible to construct a relativity theory
without postulating the constancy of the speed of light and retaining
only the first postulate of special relativity. This question was
discussed in the early years following the discovery of special
relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman, Kunz, Comstock
and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."

Pentcho Valev