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Article #775

Re: THE OTHER EINSTEIN

#775
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Sun, 07 Feb 2010 13:51
236 lines
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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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)
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