🚀 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.....
> .................................

More examples of guilty conscience:

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://ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/publication/lna/detail/lna40/pgs/4_5.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "Il n’y a alors aucune raison théorique à ce que la
vitesse de la lumière ne dépende pas de la vitesse de sa source ainsi
que de celle de l’observateur terrestre ; plus clairement encore, il
n’y a pas de raison, dans le cadre de la logique des Principia de
Newton, pour que la lumière se comporte autrement – quant à sa
trajectoire – qu’une particule matérielle. Il n’y a pas non plus de
raison pour que la lumière ne soit pas sensible à la gravitation.
Bref, pourquoi ne pas appliquer à la lumière toute la théorie
newtonienne ? C’est en fait ce que font plusieurs astronomes,
opticiens, philosophes de la nature à la fin du XVIIIème siècle. Les
résultats sont étonnants... et aujourd’hui nouveaux. Il se passe fort
peu de choses avant John Michell, pasteur, philosophe de la nature et
fervent newtonien, qui ouvre à la lumière les portes de la
gravitation. En 1784, il publie un article aussi remarquable que peu
remarqué sur le sujet. Un corpuscule lumineux est soumis à la force
gravitationnelle de l’étoile qui l’a émis : il voit donc sa vitesse
peu à peu diminuée. Appliquant les Principia, Michell fait le calcul
et s’avise que si l’étoile est très – très ! – massive alors le
corpuscule lumineux est tellement freiné que sa vitesse est bientôt
nulle et, comme une fusée, comme une pierre lancée du sol vers le
ciel, il retombe vers l’étoile qui l’a émis. Toutes les particules
lumineuses retombent donc sur l’étoile qui ne sera plus visible de
loin. À ces étoiles étranges, cousines de nos trous noirs, Laplace
donnera, une douzaine d’année plus tard, le nom de « corps obscurs
»....Pourtant, au plan des structures physiques, l’optique relativiste
des corps en mouvement de cette fin du XVIIIème est infiniment plus
intéressante – et plus utile pédagogiquement – que le long cheminement
qu’a imposé l’éther."

http://cosmo.fis.fc.ul.pt/~crawford/artigos/essay-einstein-relativity.pdf
John Stachel: "The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of
particles had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity
into the middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission
theory" of light, a phrase I shall use...... The usual velocity
addition law is then replaced by a new one, in which the velocity of
light "added" to any other velocity ("added" in a new sense-it would
be better to say "compounded with") does not increase, but stays the
same! The Maxwell-Lorentz equations, when examined with the aid of
this new kinematics, prove to take the same form in every inertial
frame. They are, therefore, quite compatible with the relativity
principle, which demands that the laws of electricity, magnetism and
optics have this property. The presence or absence of an electric or
magnetic field, is then also found to be relative to an inertial
frame, allowing a completely satisfactory relativistic analysis of the
example of the conducting wire loop and magnet in relative motion.
Within six weeks of taking "the step," Einstein later recalled, he had
worked out all of these consequences and submitted the 1905 SRT paper
to Annalen der Physik. This does not imply that Lorentz's equations
are adequate to explain all the features of light, of course. Einstein
already knew they did not always correctly do so-in particular in the
processes of its emission, absorption and its behavior in black body
radiation. Indeed, his new velocity addition law is also compatible
with an emission theory of light, just because the speed of light
compounded with any lesser velocity still yields the same value. If we
model a beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can
still be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly
expressed the view that an adequate future theory of light would have
to be some sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories. This is
an example of how the special theory of relativity functioned as a
theory of principle, limiting but not fixing the choice of a
constructive theory of light."

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."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "A common belief among philosophers of
physics is that the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely
an illusion. The idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward
fact that our best physical theories of space and time have yet to
capture this passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know
what illusions are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no
sign of being an illusion....Following from the work of Einstein,
Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful
conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most
perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-
dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and and all other
processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd
sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns
out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are
differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow
captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage
of time. There are temporal orderings. We can identify earlier and
later stages of temporal processes and everything in between. What we
cannot find is a passing of those stages that recapitulates the
presentation of the successive moments to our consciousness, all
centered on the one preferred moment of "now." At first, that seems
like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it would seem, a failure of our
best physical theories of time to capture one of time's most important
properties. However the longer one works with the physics, the less
worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a happy and contented
believer that passage is an illusion. It did bother me a little that
we seemed to have no idea of just how the news of the moments of time
gets to be rationed to consciousness in such rigid doses.....Now
consider the passage of time. Is there a comparable reason in the
known physics of space and time to dismiss it as an illusion? I know
of none. The only stimulus is a negative one. We don't find passage in
our present theories and we would like to preserve the vanity that our
physical theories of time have captured all the important facts of
time. So we protect our vanity by the stratagem of dismissing passage
as an illusion."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com