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> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
> contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
> of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
> must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
> reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
> that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
> would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
> be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
> hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
> the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
> retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
> tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
> fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
> again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
> to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
> account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
> necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
> exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
> tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
> knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
> of the truth."

Einstein's 1905 light postulate is crucially important; if it is
false, Einstein's "whole theory of relativity and theory of gravity is
false". Einstein's 1905 light postulate is superfluous; even if "light
in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz
transform", Einstein's special relativity "would be unaffected":

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "What Einstein realized was that if c did not change,
then something else had to give. That something was the idea of
universal and unchanging space and time. This is deeply, maddeningly
counterintuitive. In our everyday lives, space and time are perceived
as rigid and universal. Instead, Einstein conceived of space and time-
space-time-as a thing that could flex and change, expanding and
shrinking according to the relative motions of the observer and the
thing observed. The only aspect of the universe that didn't change was
the speed of light. And ever since, the constancy of the speed of
light has been woven into the very fabric of physics, into the way
physics equations are written, even into the notation used. Nowadays,
to "vary" the speed of light is not even a swear word: It is simply
not present in the vocabulary of physics. Hundreds of experiments have
verified this basic tenet, and the theory of relativity has become
central to our understanding of how the universe works."

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity
29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST
"Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as
things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that
even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all
follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always
travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell
Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York,
begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of
researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with
light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it
not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory
for it." What's more, Feigenbaum claims in a paper on the arXiv
preprint server that has yet to be peer-reviewed, if only the father
of relativity, Galileo Galilei, had known a little more modern
mathematics back in the 17th century, he could have got as far as
Einstein did  http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1234). "Galileo's thoughts are
almost 400 years old," he says. "But they're still extraordinarily
potent. They're enough on their own to give Einstein's relativity,
without any additional knowledge." (...) This was a problem if
Maxwell's theory, like all good physical theories, was to follow
Galileo's rule and apply for everyone. If we do not know who measures
the speed of light in the equations, how can we modify them to apply
from other perspectives? Einstein's workaround was that we don't have
to. Faced with the success of Maxwell's theory, he simply added a
second assumption to Galileo's first: that, relative to any observer,
light always travels at the same speed. This "second postulate" is the
source of all Einstein's eccentric physics of shrinking space and
haywire clocks. And with a little further thought, it leads to the
equivalence of mass and energy embodied in the iconic equation E =
mc2. The argument is not about the physics, which countless
experiments have confirmed. It is about whether we can reach the same
conclusions without hoisting light onto its highly irregular pedestal.
(...) But in fact, says Feigenbaum, both Galileo and Einstein missed a
surprising subtlety in the maths - one that renders Einstein's second
postulate superfluous. (...) The result turns the historical logic of
Einstein's relativity on its head. Those contortions of space and time
that Einstein derived from the properties of light actually emerge
from even more basic, purely mathematical considerations. Light's
special position in relativity is a historical accident. (...) The
idea that Einstein's relativity has nothing to do with light could
actually come in rather handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty
shock if anyone were ever to prove that photons, the particles of
light, have mass. We know that the photon's mass is very small - less
than 10-49 grams. A photon with any mass at all would imply that our
understanding of electricity and magnetism is wrong, and that electric
charge might not be conserved. That would be problem enough, but a
massive photon would also spell deep trouble for the second postulate,
as a photon with mass would not necessarily always travel at the same
speed. Feigenbaum's work shows how, contrary to many physicists'
beliefs, this need not be a problem for relativity."

http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent enévidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-meme en serait-elle
invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus economiques. En verite, le "premier postulat" suffit, a la
condition de l'exploiter a fond."

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 relativity. It would, however, nullify all
its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
velocity."

http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoretical/dp/9810238886
Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
undergraduate. They lead to an 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."

http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c012de2
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)."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com