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http://www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have
committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a
variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I
hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10
years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're
productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if
you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me
face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an
angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I
may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why
should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of
light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems
in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that
relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some
point...

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/31/science/e-and-mc2-equality-it-seems-is-relative.html
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word "relative."......"Perhaps relativity is too restrictive
for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "WE NEED TO
DROP A POSTULATE, PERHAPS THE CONSTANCY OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT."

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every
definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D.
at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at
St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly
held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a
lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States)
at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster
than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the
missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its
speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus
that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to
light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what
the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the
case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that
if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to
each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree
on the same apparent speed! (...) 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.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."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners
of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is
a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the
best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest
from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the
understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the
less sane."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com