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Catastrophe in physics: the following two texts coexist and are
treated with the same indifference by the postscientific community:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/204892
"You might think there are no new revelations to be made about him,
but for Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one
key question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that
discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the
observer's speed or direction of motion—an idea that forms the core of
special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid out
the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper? Called the Michelson-
Morley experiment, it disproved the existence of the ether, a
substance once thought to carry light waves and form an absolute
reference frame for space. In their namesake experiment, Albert
Michelson (a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1907) and Edward
Morley (a chemist) showed that the speed of light is always the same
(now known to be 186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary
observers as well as moving ones. Nothing but light has this property:
if you are approaching a car that's moving 30 miles per hour, and
you're moving 30mph as well, the approaching car appears to be coming
at you at 60 mph. Not so with light. If you are traveling at the speed
of light, designated c, toward a light beam moving directly toward
you, it appears to be approaching at c, not 2c."

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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com