🚀 go-pugleaf

On May 15, 10:37 pm, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On May 16, 5:27 am, Tom Roberts <tjroberts...@sbcglobal.net> wrote in
> sci.physics.relativity:
>
> > You apparently believe that relativity depends on the speed of light
> > being c. While Einstein originally formulated it that way, today we know
> > it is not required.
>
> By "we" you certainly mean Mitchell Feigenbaum, Jean-Marc Levy-
> Leblond, Jong-Ping Hsu, and Honest Tom Roberts. Are there other
> Einsteinians who believe that, even if "light in vacuum does not
> travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform", special
> relativity "would be unaffected":
>
> http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg20026801.500-why-e...
> 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 Levy-Leblond "De la relativite à la chronogeometrie 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 lumiere
> est une consequence de la nullite de la masse du photon. Mais,
> empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
> superieure experimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais etre consideree
> avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait meme que de
> futures mesures mettent en evidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
> du photon ; la lumiere alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
> lumiere", ou, plus precisement, la vitesse de la lumiere, desormais
> 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-Theoreti...
> 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/dc1ebdf49c01...
> 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
> pva...@yahoo.com

Very nice topic.  Too bad the brown-nosed clowns in charge of most
everything could care less.
 ~ BG