🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 3/12/09, Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> 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.....
> ...........................

Some Einsteinians believe that Minkowski's spacetime can successfully
camouflage the falsehood of Einstein's 1905 light postulate; others do
not think so and are trying to get rid of Minkowski's spacetime:

http://www.spacetimecenter.org/conferences/2008/Henry.pdf
Teaching Special Relativity: Minkowski trumps Einstein
Richard Conn Henry
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
The Johns Hopkins University
"Students find physics difficultI am thinking of first-year
undergraduate university physics majors. I found it difficult myself,
and it took me almost 40 years of teaching physics to fully understand
the reasons for the perceived "difficulty." Why do students who find
mathematics easy to understand, find physics difficult to
understand?....How grotesquely badly we teach special relativity
encapsulates the practical problem of teaching physics to the freshman
physics major. I have never found a single freshman physics textbook
that teaches Minkowski spacetime; I have never found a single text on
General Relativity that mentions "Einstein's two
postulates.".....There is no doubt that, historically, Albert
Einstein, in 1905, did introduce two postulates (and also, that it is
he who discovered special relativity). But the second of these
postulates (the one concerning the constancy of c, just in case Reese
has confused you!) did not survive the year. In September of 1905
Einstein published a development from relativitythe discovery of the
implication that E = mc2 , and in this new paper he mentions a single
postulate only. But the paper contains a sweet footnote: "The
principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is of course
contained in Maxwell's equations." How I love that "of course!"
Einstein was human!......Antique postulates that are not of anything
but historical interest to genuine physicists are presented to
students as "Special Relativity.".....I feel that the time has come to
relegate the "two postulates" to the dustbin of history, and to teach
special relativity to undergraduates (or indeed, to middle school
students) the Minkowski way."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/
MINKOWSKI SPACE-TIME: A GLORIOUS NON-ENTITY
Harvey R. Brown, Oliver Pooley
"It is argued that Minkowski space-time cannot serve as the deep
structure within a "constructive" version of the special theory of
relativity, contrary to widespread opinion in the philosophical
community."

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/35992/title/It%E2%80%99s_Likely_That_Times_Are_Changing
IT'S LIKELY THAT TIMES ARE CHANGING
"Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he
at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was
first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture
delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician
Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of
physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the
mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and
it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as
spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for
spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper
about possible grounds for divorce.....Physicists of the 21st century
therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured by the
spacetime mirage.....If you can choose any time you like and get
different laws, it makes no sense to say that the universe is ruled by
a single Constitution of Physics. The cosmos becomes more like the
United Nations, a hodgepodge of jurisdictions with diverse codes of
conduct. The clock ambiguity suggests that we must view physical laws
as emergent from a random ensemble of all possible laws, Albrecht and
Iglesias write.....What he and other pioneers on the spacetime
frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The approaches
of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the challenges
remaining from Einsteins centurysuch as finding a harmonious
mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum mechanics the way
Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently physicists have
been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what makes up
the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They remain in the
dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives the universe to
expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the dark energys
existence and intensity have been ambitious but fruitless. To
Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that its time for physics
to drop old prejudices about how natures laws ought to be and search
instead for how they really are. And that might mean razing Minkowskis
arena and rebuilding it from a new design. It seems to me like its a
time in the development of physics, says Albrecht, where its time to
look at how we think about space and time very differently.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com