🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 12, 4:11 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@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.

That is a misleading assertion. Physical theories are not held to be
“correct” but are held to model known physical phenomena within
experimental limits. There were no known physical phenomena that
contradicted special relativity (SR) at that time nor were there any
experiments which contradicted SR in 1905.

Also, Newton’s emission theory of light stated only that a light beam
consists of a stream of particles. It was erroneously assumed that
this meant that the speed of light was c’ = c + v and that’s what led
you to this erroneous conclusion about what Newton’s emission theory
is.

> 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
> pva...@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. 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."

So why are you sending Rees such an E-mail if all you’re going to do
is inform him of something he already believes?

> 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."

This too is a misleading assertion. You didn’t quote the entire
article. As the author explains
------------------------------------------------
Why? The main reason was that he wanted to extend relativity to
include all observers, whereas his special theory postulates only an
equivalence among a limited class of observers—those who aren’t
accelerating. A second reason was to incorporate gravity, making use
of a new principle he called the equivalence principle. This
postulates that observers can never distinguish the effects of gravity
from those of acceleration so long as they observe phenomena only in
their immediate neighborhood. By this principle he linked the problem
of gravity with the problem of extending relativity to all observers.
 ------------------------------------------------
Thus SR is a correct theory for all inertial observers. It is only
wrong in that it doesn’t apply to all observers. But that’s why
Einstein created general relativity (GR)!!!


> http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/OntologyOUP_TimesNR.pdf
> "What Can We Learn about the Ontology of Space and Time from the
> Theory of Relativity?", John D. Norton: "In general relativity there
> is no comparable sense of the constancy of the speed of light. The
> constancy of the speed of light is a consequence of the perfect
> homogeneity of spacetime presumed in special relativity. There is a
> special velocity at each event; homogeneity forces it to be the same
> velocity everywhere. We lose that homogeneity in the transition to
> general relativity and with it we lose the constancy of the speed of
> light. Such was Einstein's conclusion at the earliest moments of his
> preparation for general relativity. ALREADY IN 1907, A MERE TWO YEARS
> AFTER THE COMPLETION OF THE SPECIAL THEORY, HE HAD CONCLUDED THAT THE
> SPEED OF LIGHT IS VARIABLE IN THE PRESENCE OF A GRAVITATIONAL FIELD."

That is exactly what GR says and does not imply that emission theory
is right since the speed of light is still independent of the speed of
the source, even in GR.

> 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."

That’s highly debatable. See
http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm
-----------------------------------------
To return to the main thread of my conjecture, I believe that Einstein
dropped the ether hypothesis and adopted his relativity principle by
1903 or 1904 at the latest. This is by no means the end of the story.
It seemed that he must then drop Lorentz's version of Maxwell's
theory, based as it was on the ether hypothesis. With what was he to
replace it? There is good evidence suggesting he spent a great deal of
effort trying to replace it with an emission theory of light-the sort
of theory suggested by his concurrent researches into the quantum
nature of light.15 An emission theory is perfectly compatible with the
relativity principle. Thus, the M-M experiment presented no problem;
nor is stellar abberration difficult to explain on this basis
--------------------------------------------

<snipped articles which only seem to contract SR but really don’t>

Pete