Article View: sci.physics.relativity
Article #775Re: THE OTHER EINSTEIN
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:51
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:51
236 lines
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14975 bytes
The other Einstein misled some Einsteinians into believing that Newton's emission theory of light is compatible with and even essential for the future development of Divine Albert's Divine Theory: http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, " 'What Song the Syrens Sang' : How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel, Einstein from "B" to "Z". "This was itself a daring step, since these methods had been developed to help understand the behavior of ordinary matter while Einstein was applying them to the apparently quite different field of electromagnetic radiation. The "revolutionary" conclusion to which he came was that, in certain respects, electromagnetic radiation behaved more like a collection of particles than like a wave. He announced this result in a paper published in 1905, three months before his SRT paper. 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.....Giving up the ether concept allowed Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of light.".....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......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......The resulting theory did not force him to choose between wave and emission theories of light, but rather led him to look forward to a synthesis of the two." http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i6272.html John Stachel: "Not only is the theory [of relativity] compatible with an emission theory of radiation, since it implies that the velocity of light is always the same relative to its source; the theory also requires that radiation transfer mass between an emitter and an absorber, reinforcing Einstein's light quantum hypothesis that radiation manifests a particulate structure under certain circumstances." http://ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/publication/lna/detail/lna40/pgs/4_5.pdf Jean Eisenstaedt: "Même s'il était conscient de l'intérêt de la théorie de l'émission, Einstein n'a pas pris le chemin, totalement oublié, de Michell, de Blair, des Principia en somme. Le contexte de découverte de la relativité ignorera le XVIIIème siècle et ses racines historiques plongent au coeur du XIXème siècle. Arago, Fresnel, Fizeau, Maxwell, Mascart, Michelson, Poincaré, Lorentz en furent les principaux acteurs et l'optique ondulatoire le cadre dans lequel ces questions sont posées. 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://www.mfo.de/programme/schedule/2006/08c/OWR_2006_10.pdf Jean Eisenstaedt: "At the end of the 18th century, a natural extension of Newton's dynamics to light was developed but immediately forgotten. A body of works completed the Principia with a relativistic optics of moving bodies, the discovery of the Doppler-Fizeau effect some sixty years before Doppler, and many other effects and ideas which represent a fascinating preamble to Einstein relativities. It was simply supposed that 'a body-light', as Newton named it, was subject to the whole dynamics of the Principia in much the same way as were material particles; thus it was subject to the Galilean relativity and its velocity was supposed to be variable. Of course it was subject to the short range 'refringent' force of the corpuscular theory of light -- which is part of the Principia-- but also to the long range force of gravitation which induces Newton's theory of gravitation. The fact that the 'mass' of a corpuscle of light was not known did not constitute a problem since it does not appear in the Newtonian (or Einsteinian) equations of motion. It was precisely what John Michell (1724-1793), Robert Blair (1748-1828), Johann G. von Soldner (1776-1833) and François Arago (1786-1853) were to do at the end of the 18th century and the beginning the 19th century in the context of Newton's dynamics. Actually this 'completed' Newtonian theory of light and material corpuscle seems to have been implicitly accepted at the time. In such a Newtonian context, not only Soldner's calculation of the deviation of light in a gravitational field was understood, but also dark bodies (cousins of black holes). A natural (Galilean and thus relativistic) optics of moving bodies was also developed which easily explained aberration and implied as well the essence of what we call today the Doppler effect. Moreover, at the same time the structure of -- but also the questions raised by-- the Michelson experiment was understood. Most of this corpus has long been forgotten. The Michell-Blair-Arago effect, prior to Doppler's effect, is entirely unknown to physicists and historians. As to the influence of gravitation on light, the story was very superficially known but had never been studied in any detail. Moreover, the existence of a theory dealing with light, relativity and gravitation, embedded in Newton's Principia was completely ignored by physicists and by historians as well. But it was a simple and natural way to deal with the question of light, relativity (and gravitation) in a Newtonian context." John Stachel and John Norton are friends. They write books together, sell them successfully and share the money. Yet John Stachel teaches that Newton's emission theory of light and Divine Albert's Divine Theory are compatible while John Norton teaches the opposite (the scientific community invariably sings "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity"): http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/rel_of_sim/index.html John Norton: "But an emission theory is precluded in special relativity by the part of the light postulate that asserts that the velocity of light is independent of the velocity of the emitter." Pentcho Valev wrote: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/975547d7-2d00-433a-b7e3-4a09145525ca.pdf John Stachel: "It is not so well known that there was "another Einstein," who from 1916 on was skeptical about the continuum as a foundational element in physics, especially because of the existence of quantum phenomena." The problem that tortured "the other Einstein": http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf John Norton: "How could we ignore the possibility of a connection between Einstein's reflections on an emission theory of light and his 1905 postulation of the light quantum hypothesis? But what might that connection be?" A straightforward answer given by Banesh Hoffmann, Einstein's apostle: 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.nybooks.com/articles/20279 Lee Smolin: "It is also disappointing that none of the biographers mention the writings that lead John Stachel, the founding editor of the Einstein Papers project, to speak of "the other Einstein". These writings look beyond his struggles with the unified field theory..." "The other Einstein" was the honest (but weaker) moiety of Einstein's split personality that was sorry for having destroyed theoretical physics by procrusteanizing it into conformity with his 1905 false light postulate: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Development_of_Our_Views_on_the_Composition_and_Essence_of_Radiation The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation by 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://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/ "Genius Among Geniuses" by Thomas Levenson "And then, in June, Einstein completes special relativity, which adds a twist to the story: Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves. Alice's Red Queen can accept many impossible things before breakfast, but it takes a supremely confident mind to do so. Einstein, age 26, sees light as wave and particle, picking the attribute he needs to confront each problem in turn. Now that's tough." 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://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state in the present. AS LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY OF LIGHT, ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of objections would render an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE." http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce!....The speed of light is c+v." Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com
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X-Google-Thread: 237b8ad48,dcfed9079f99835c X-Google-Attributes: gid237b8ad48,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique Subject: Re: THE OTHER EINSTEIN Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 05:51:15 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 236 Message-ID: <a7fb73d4-b194-43cb-85e5-835fe95abe0b@h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com> References: <3f8a5c45-7e7d-423a-8a0c-98ab58c77a09@l30g2000yqb.googlegroups.com> <b186e453-80a5-4cef-beac-cbcd38db31b4@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 89.215.201.48 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1265550675 13343 127.0.0.1 (7 Feb 2010 13:51:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 13:51:15 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: h2g2000yqj.googlegroups.com; posting-host=89.215.201.48; posting-account=Lz-LbgoAAABPDavKeW-eYeobwLHD_cvQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)