🚀 go-pugleaf

Einsteiniana's revolutions used to involve two campaigns (often
occurring simultaneously):

Campaign 1: An extremely heretical claim, usually challenging
Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, is advanced and even
experimentally confirmed. Selected "mavericks" in Einsteiniana extract
maximum career and money from the fuss:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327246.800-13-more-things-magic-results.html
"In 2005, researchers at the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope on La Palma in
the Canary Islands were studying gamma-ray bursts emitted by the black
hole in the centre of the Markarian 501 galaxy, half a billion light
years away. The burst's high-energy gamma rays arrived at the
telescope 4 minutes later than the lower-energy rays. Both parts of
the spectrum should have been emitted at the same time. So is the time
lag due to the high-energy radiation travelling slower through space?
That wouldn't make sense: it would contravene one of the central
tenets of special relativity. According to Einstein, all
electromagnetic radiation always travels through vacuum at the cosmic
speed limit the speed of light. The energy of the radiation should be
absolutely irrelevant."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another
possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved,
but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so
as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most
shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real
possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without
violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years
ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I
did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial
College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept
coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all
seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it
was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they
had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how
Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special
relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy."

Campaign 2: The extremely heretical claim is useless and even harmful
(in terms of career and money) for other Einsteinians so it is slowly
but surely being undermined, with "Einstein is still right" as the
final conclusion. The selected "mavericks" gradually abandon their
heresy but career and money gained in the first campaign remain:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/10/29/a-gamma-ray-race-through-the-fabric-of-space-time-proves-einstein-right/
"New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into
orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert
Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good. (...) But the study
of the Fermi Telescopes results, published in Nature, declares that
since all the gamma rays arrived within nine-tenths of a second apart,
they must have all traveled at almost exactly the same speed. (...)
Physicists working with the Fermi Telescope will keep looking for new
evidence. But for now, says study coauthor Peter F. Michelson, "I take
it as a confirmation that Einstein is still right" [The New York
Times]."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

The MAGICIAN'S HAT model of science in action. Initially, an idiotic
"axiom" is advanced; then magicians are free to extract career, money,
Nobel prizes etc. from it; all along believers should sing dithyrambs,
"until any single one of the host of equations that can be derived
from it....has been shown experimentally to be false":

L. McGlashan, Chemical thermodynamics, Academic Press, London (1979),
pp. 72-73:
"For an infinitesimal change in the state of a phase alpha we write
dU = T dS - p dV + SUM mu_B dn_B (1)
We regard equation (1) as an axiom and call it the fundamental
equation for a change of the state of a phase alpha. It is one half of
the second law of thermodynamics. We do not ask where it comes from.
Indeed we do not admit the existence of any more fundamental relations
from which it might have been derived. Nor shall we here enquire into
the history of its formulation, though that is a subject of great
interest to the historian of science. It is a starting point ; it must
be learnt by heart. It may be allowed to stand as an axiom until any
single one of the host of equations that can be derived from it (with
the help of other axioms of thermodynamics) has been shown
experimentally to be false."

For a closed system doing reversible work of expansion the first law
of thermodynamics takes the form

dU = dQ - PdV /1/

where dU is the internal energy change, dQ is the heat absorbed, P is
pressure and V is volume. Since the system is CLOSED and undergoes
reversible changes the entropy change is, by definition, dS=dQ/T and /
1/ becomes:

dU = TdS - PdV /2/

J. Gibbs managed to convince the world that, if the system is OPEN
(substances are added to it), /2/ should be replaced by the equation:

dU = TdS - PdV + SUM mu_i dn_i /3/

where mu_i is the chemical potential and n_i is the amount of the ith
component. However Gibbs failed to explain the meaning of the entropy
change, dS, for an OPEN system. Was dS again equal to dQ/T, as it is
for a closed system, or was dS equal to something else when substances
were added to the system?

The fact that dS was not defined for open systems made the equation /
3/ so fashionable (scientists adore equations with undefined terms)
that in the end /3/ was called "the fundamental equation of
thermodynamics". Yet scientists somehow felt that a new explicit
definition of dS could bring even more career and money. The quickest
among them, Ilya Prigogine, simply combined /1/ and /3/ and obtained

dS = dQ/T - (1/T)SUM mu_i dn_i /4/

That was a new incredible definition of the entropy change (the
scientific community had never seen anything like this) so the Nobel
Committee immediately gave Prigogine the Nobel prize. Believers do not
know how /4/ can be "shown experimentally to be false". Similarly,
they do not know how the statement "The greenness of the crocodile
exceeds its length" can be shown experimentally to be false.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com