🚀 go-pugleaf

On Jun 9, 4:28 am, "Bill Hobba" <rubb...@junk.com> wrote in
sci.physics.relativity:
> Hi All
>
> On a whim I purchased the following book (basically to see what they do in
> an introductory honours mechanics course at Harvard)
> http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Classical-Mechanics-Problems-Solutions/dp/0521876222/
> What a fantastic book.  I have long been a huge fan of Landau - Mechanics
> liking it even over Goldstein which I never really saw the need to actually
> buy.  Morins book is in many ways better.  It includes most of the material
> Landau does and relativity all done at a level that an advanced high school
> student could understand (it explains gauss theorem etc - all you really
> need is introductory calculus).  Even includes the statement and proof of
> Noethers theorem that Landau omits.  The treatment of relativity is just as
> good - it includes a treatment omitting the second postulate which is my
> favourite method.  And for what you get the price is great.  Professors
> could do a lot worse than use this book in any introductory mechanics
> course - even at HS level.
>
> I love it.
>
> Thanks
> Bill

You love it but the text that makes you sing "Yes we all believe in
relativity, relativity, relativity" and go into convulsions is this
one:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
David Morin: "The truth of the speed-of-light postulate cannot be
demonstrated from first principles. No statement with any physical
content in physics (that is, one that isn't purely mathematical, such
as, "two apples plus two apples gives four apples") can be proven. In
the end, we must rely on experiment. And indeed, all the consequences
of the speed-of-light postulate have been verifed countless times
during the past century. As discussed in the previous section, the
most well-known of the early experiments on the speed of light was the
one performed by Michelson and Morley."

And you do hate the following authors don't you:

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://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com