🚀 go-pugleaf

http://www.rightsidenews.com/200904304606/energy-and-environment/ravage-science-ravage-america.html
"Even the best of science "total stories" are theories still waiting
to be replaced or altered massively, even repudiated: like Newton's
theory of universal gravitation, and Darwin's theory of evolution, and
Einstein's special theory of relativity. Everyone's welcome to try to
kill them - by the strict rules, that is; not by politico-
journalistic, statistical-shake-and-bake gunplay....Scientists modify
existing theories and then destroy parts of them, without reducing the
whole."

Clearly not just "everyone" is welcome to try to kill special
relativity: those who do not know how to "modify existing theories and
then destroy parts of them, without reducing the whole", that is,
those who do not know how to get rid of Einstein's 1905 false light
postulate without abandoning time dilation, length contraction,
Minkowski spacetime and similar idiocies, are not welcome at all. For
the moment only Paul Davies, Sir Martin Rees, Stephen Hawking, Neil
Turok, Lee Smolin and Joao Magueijo are welcome to try to kill special
relativity because only they know how to do so "without reducing the
whole":

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5538
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the
rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are
actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book,
Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as
even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is
Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same -
186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists....What he, Hawking and others such as
Neil Turok, professor of maths and physics at Cambridge, are now
looking at is the idea that our universe is just one of an infinite
number of universes, with different laws of nature operating in each."

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered
Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his
own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's
insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative
motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same,
no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences
of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-
legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are
relative, not absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS
OF INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS
WRONG WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT."

http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Searching_for_the_Golden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the
speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates
special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at
a constant speed for all observers..."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E7D8143FF932A05751C1A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
"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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com