🚀 go-pugleaf

Einsteiniana's education (compare with Einstein's 1954 prediction
quoted below: "Nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics"):

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/5094243/A-level-physics-students-being-short-changed-at-college.html
"Shortages of specialist physics teachers and the removal of calculus
from A-level syllabuses were combining to leave teenagers with poor
skills, said Gareth Jones, Emeritus Professor of Physics at Imperial
College, London....It is the latest in a series of attacks on school
science lessons. Last week, Ofqual, the examinations regulator, said
GCSEs in the subject had suffered from declining standards in recent
years following the introduction of new-style syllabuses....A-level
physics courses, he said, were increasingly expecting pupils simply to
regurgitate information they had been told, rather than getting them
to use their understanding to reason their way through problems
themselves."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/11/sedgemoresays
"A FAREWELL TO PHYSICS? That physics education is in decline is beyond
doubt; the figures speak for themselves. According to a research study
recently published by Professor Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson,
educationalists based at the University of Buckingham, the numbers of
students taking A-level physics has fallen by 35% since 1990, at the
same time that A-level entries rose overall by over 12%. The decline
is claimed to be most noticeable in the state school sector. During
the same period, a number of university physics departments have
closed, or been merged with others in order to save costs."

http://www.buckingham.ac.uk/news/newsarchive2006/ceer-physics-2.html
"PHYSICS IN TERMINAL DECLINE? In CEER's latest report, published 11
August 2006 and funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Professor
Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson show that the decline in physics
as student numbers fall and university departments shut is more
serious than is generally appreciated."

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/leading-articles/leading-article-we-cannot-afford-this-scientific-brain-drain-891439.html
"A vicious circle is at work in our education sector. A recent report
from the University of Buckingham found that almost a quarter of
secondary schools in England no longer have specialist physics
teachers. Such shortages mean that the sciences are being less well
taught in schools and fewer students are pursuing them at university
as a result."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/ingdahl2.html
"But there has been a marked global decrease of students willing to
study physics, and funding has decreased accordingly. Not only that,
the best students are not heading for studies in physics, finding
other fields more appealing, and science teachers to schools are
getting scarcer in supply. In fact, warning voices are being heard
about the spread of a "scientific illiteracy" where many living in
technologically advanced societies lack the knowledge and the ability
for critical thinking in order to function in their daily
environment."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/22/schools.g2
"We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise
known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis
in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special
relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published
the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead
of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a
dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school.
The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15
years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next
few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a
lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state
schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those
students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home
of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world-
class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and
electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing
extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so
who cares if we disappear?"

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society

Copy to: Athene Donald FRS, Laurence Eaves Lancashire-Spencer
Professor of Physics, Prof John Peacock, Martin Taylor FRS, Lorna
Casselton FRS

Dear Dr. Rees,

Ninety years ago the Royal Society found it suitable to bury
definitively the antithesis of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - the
equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light (v is the
speed of the light source relative to the observer) - although even
then informed scientists including Einstein knew this particular
prediction of the emission theory was correct. Since then a
schizophrenic atmosphere has been established where informed
scientists often hint at and even extract profit from the correct
equation c'=c+v (see examples of guilty conscience below) while
ordinary mortals are forced to learn by rote the absurd consequences
of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate. I think it is time for YOU
to OFFICIALLY restore the truth.

I will post this Open Letter on a few internet forums.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Examples of guilty conscience:

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...."

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.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
hm, ha ha ha."

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://www.astrofind.net/documents/the-composition-and-essence-of-radiation.php
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation by Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein 1909: "A large body of facts shows undeniably that
light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by
Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For
this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of
theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be
considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories. The
purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show
that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of
light is imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up
light no longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather
as independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in
Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed
our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the
state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity
like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory
of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from
the emitting to the absorbing object."

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."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com