Pentcho Valev
2011-05-21 05:52:42 UTC
1. Einsteinians (John Norton, Tom Roberts) admit that both the
Michelson-Morley and the Pound-Rebka experiments confirm Newton's
emission theory of light, a theory postulating that the speed of light
varies with v, the speed of the emitter relative to the observer, in
accordance with the equation c'=c+v. This equation contradicts
Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers
in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues
that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of
light; and he gave us the crucial insight that 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. Even today, this point
needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible
with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the
importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even
though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the
experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation,
has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with
Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late
19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light
predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised
the greatest theoretician of the day."
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/44abc7dbb30db6c2
John Norton: "THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH
AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
Tom Roberts: "Sure. The fact that this one experiment is compatible
with other theories does not refute relativity in any way. The full
experimental record refutes most if not all emission theories, but not
relativity."
Pentcho Valev: "THE POUND-REBKA EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN
EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
Tom Roberts: "Sure. But this experiment, too, does not refute
relativity. The full experimental record refutes most if not all
emission theories, but not relativity."
2. Einsteinians (John Norton, Craig Callender, Lee Smolin, Etienne
Klein) reject the absurd consequences of Einstein's 1905 constant-
speed-of-light postulate:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher
based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is
hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in
physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The
trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with
relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose
geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. 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 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."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion
Craig Callender in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Einstein mounted the next
assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity.
According to his special theory of relativity, what events are
happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true
arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two
observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an
event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time
are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who
had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared,
"are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse
in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which extends
special relativity to situations where the force of gravity operates.
Gravity distorts time, so that a second's passage here may not mean
the same thing as a second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it
possible to synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even
in principle. You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding,
tick by tick, according to a single time parameter. In extreme
situations, the world might not be carvable into instants of time at
all. It then becomes impossible to say that an event happened before
or after another."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/151
"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion." It was none other than Einstein who uttered
these words. He was speaking about how our perception of time differs
from the fundamental nature of time in physics. Take our perceptions
first: We have a clear sense of the present moment, what came before,
and what might come after. Unfortunately, physics treats time rather
differently. Einstein's theory of special relativity presents us with
a four-dimensional spacetime, in which the past, present and future
are already mapped out. There is no special "now," just as there's no
special "here." And just like spacetime does not have a fundamental
direction - forcing us to move inexorably from east to west, say -
time does not flow. "You have this big gap between the time of
fundamental science and the time we experience," says Craig Callender,
a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. It's this
gap that he has set out to narrow, using ideas from physics,
evolutionary theory and cognitive science."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to
differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to
do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity
seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics
operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But
Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special
relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless
they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is
relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a
proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is
literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of
his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has
become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes
that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real
as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The
notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for
Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate
students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
http://hps.master.univ-paris7.fr/cours_du_temps.doc
Etienne Klein: "Aujourd'hui, L'astrophysicien Thibault Damour
développe à sa manière des idées qui vont dans le même sens. Selon
lui, le temps qui passe (qu'il sagisse d'un fait ou de notre
sentiment) est le produit de notre seule subjectivité, un effet que
nous devrions au caractère irréversible de notre mise en mémoire, de
sorte que la question du cours du temps relèverait non pas de la
physique, mais des sciences cognitives. Il écrit : « De même que la
notion de température n'a aucun sens si l'on considère un système
constitué d'un petit nombre de particules, de même il est probable que
la notion d'écoulement du temps n'a de sens que pour certains systèmes
complexes, qui évoluent hors de l'équilibre thermodynamique, et qui
gèrent d'une certaine façon les informations accumulées dans leur
mémoire. » Le temps ne serait donc qu'une apparence d'ordre
psychologique : « Dans le domaine d'espace-temps que nous observons,
poursuit-il, nous avons l'impression qu'il s'écoule "du bas vers le
haut" de l'espace-temps, alors qu'en réalité ce dernier constitue un
bloc rigide qui n'est nullement orienté a priori : il ne le devient
que pour nous [35]. » L'existence même d'un « cours du temps », ou
d'un « passage du temps », n'est ainsi que simple apparence pour de
nombreux physiciens contemporains. Certains vont même jusqu'à
considérer le passage du temps comme une pure illusion, comme un
produit culturel abusivement dérivé de la métaphore du fleuve. C'est
en effet la conception dite de l'« univers-bloc » qui semble avoir les
faveurs d'une majorité de physiciens. Dans le droit fil de la théorie
de la relativité, celle-ci consiste à invoquer un univers constitué
dun continuum d'espace-temps à quatre dimensions, privé de tout flux
temporel : tous les événements, qu'ils soient passés, présents et
futurs, ont exactement la même réalité, de la même façon que
différents lieux coexistent, en même temps et avec le même poids
ontologique, dans l'espace. En d'autres termes, les notions de passé
ou de futur ne sont que des notions relatives, comme celles d'Est et
d'Ouest. En un sens, tout ce qui va exister existe déjà et tout ce qui
a existé existe encore. L'espace-temps contient l'ensemble de
l'histoire de la réalité comme la partition contient l'uvre musicale :
la partition existe sous une forme statique, mais ce qu'elle contient,
l'esprit humain l'appréhende généralement sous la forme d'un flux
temporel."
3. Of all the Einsteinians not one could think of a reason why
Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate should be
questioned. Even if this postulate were false, Divine Albert's Divine
Theory would be unaffected:
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/bup.pdf
Jean-Marc LÉVY-LEBLOND: "Maintenant il s'agit de savoir si le photon a
vraiment une masse nulle. Pour un physicien, il est absolument
impossible d'affirmer qu'une grandeur, quelle qu'elle soit, a
rigoureusement la valeur zéro, pas plus d'ailleurs que n'importe
quelle autre valeur. Tout ce que je sais de la masse du photon, c'est
ce que disent mes collègues expérimentateurs : "Elle est très faible !
Inférieure, selon nos mesures actuelles, à 10^(-50)kg". Mais si
demain, on découvre que cette masse est non-nulle, alors, le photon ne
va pas à la vitesse de la lumière... Certes, il irait presque toujours
à une vitesse tellement proche de la vitesse limite que nous ne
verrions que difficilement la différence, mais conceptuellement, il
pourrait exister des photons immobiles, et la différence est
essentielle. Or, nous ne saurons évidemment jamais si la masse est
rigoureusement nulle ; nous pourrons diminuer la borne supérieure,
mais jamais l'annuler. Acceptons donc l'idée que la masse du photon
est nulle, et que les photons vont à la vitesse limite, mais
n'oublions pas que ce n'est pas une nécessité. Cela est important pour
la raison suivante. Supposez que demain un expérimentateur soit
capable de vraiment mettre la main sur le photon, et de dire qu'il n'a
pas une masse nulle. Qu'il a une masse de, mettons 10^(-60)kg. Sa
masse n'est pas nulle, et du coup la lumière ne va plus à la "vitesse
de la lumière". Vous pouvez imaginer les gros titres dans les
journaux : "La théorie de la relativité s'effondre", "Einstein s'est
trompé", etc. Or cette éventuelle observation ne serait en rien
contradictoire avec la théorie de la relativité ! Einstein a certe
construit sa théorie en analysant des échanges de signaux lumineux
propagés à la vitesse limite. Si on trouve que le photon a une masse
non-nulle, ce sera que cette vitesse n'est pas la vitesse limite, et
la démonstration initiale s'effondre donc. Mais ce n'est pas parce
qu'une démonstration est erronée que son résultat est faux ! Quand
vous avez une table à plusieurs pieds, vous pouvez en couper un, elle
continue à tenir debout. Et heureusement, la théorie de la relativité
a plusieurs pieds."
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent en évidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procédures opérationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La théorie elle-même en serait-elle
invalidée ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus économiques. En vérité, le premier postulat suffit, à la
condition de l'exploiter à fond."
http://www.hep.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/mechanics/levy-leblond_ajp_44_271_76.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c. (...) We believe that special relativity at the present time
stands as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common
space-time arena in which all fundamental processes take place. (...)
The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such,
shake in any way the validity of the special relalivity. It would,
however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance
of the photon velocity."
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c012de2
Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a
nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant
speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both
Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains
of applicability would be reduced)."
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoretical/dp/9810238886
Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the
long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a
relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of
light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity.
This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery
of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman,
Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity
29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST
"This "second postulate" is the source of all Einstein's eccentric
physics of shrinking space and haywire clocks. And with a little
further thought, it leads to the equivalence of mass and energy
embodied in the iconic equation E = mc2. The argument is not about the
physics, which countless experiments have confirmed. It is about
whether we can reach the same conclusions without hoisting light onto
its highly irregular pedestal. (...) But in fact, says Feigenbaum,
both Galileo and Einstein missed a surprising subtlety in the maths -
one that renders Einstein's second postulate superfluous. (...) The
idea that Einstein's relativity has nothing to do with light could
actually come in rather handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty
shock if anyone were ever to prove that photons, the particles of
light, have mass. We know that the photon's mass is very small - less
than 10-49 grams. A photon with any mass at all would imply that our
understanding of electricity and magnetism is wrong, and that electric
charge might not be conserved. That would be problem enough, but a
massive photon would also spell deep trouble for the second postulate,
as a photon with mass would not necessarily always travel at the same
speed. Feigenbaum's work shows how, contrary to many physicists'
beliefs, this need not be a problem for relativity."
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/msg/44d3ebf3b94d89ad
Tom Roberts: "As I said before, Special Relativity would not be
affected by a non-zero photon mass, as Einstein's second postulate is
not required in a modern derivation (using group theory one obtains
three related theories, two of which are solidly refuted
experimentally and the third is SR). So today's foundations of modern
physics would not be threatened.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.1234v1.pdf
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum: "In this paper, not only do I show that the
constant speed of light is unnecessary for the construction of the
theories of relativity, but overwhelmingly more, there is no room for
it in the theory. (...) We can make a few guesses. There is a
"villain" in the story, who, of course, is Newton."
Pentcho Valev
***@yahoo.com
Michelson-Morley and the Pound-Rebka experiments confirm Newton's
emission theory of light, a theory postulating that the speed of light
varies with v, the speed of the emitter relative to the observer, in
accordance with the equation c'=c+v. This equation contradicts
Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers
in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues
that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of
light; and he gave us the crucial insight that 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. Even today, this point
needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible
with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the
importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even
though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the
experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation,
has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with
Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late
19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light
predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised
the greatest theoretician of the day."
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/44abc7dbb30db6c2
John Norton: "THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH
AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
Tom Roberts: "Sure. The fact that this one experiment is compatible
with other theories does not refute relativity in any way. The full
experimental record refutes most if not all emission theories, but not
relativity."
Pentcho Valev: "THE POUND-REBKA EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN
EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."
Tom Roberts: "Sure. But this experiment, too, does not refute
relativity. The full experimental record refutes most if not all
emission theories, but not relativity."
2. Einsteinians (John Norton, Craig Callender, Lee Smolin, Etienne
Klein) reject the absurd consequences of Einstein's 1905 constant-
speed-of-light postulate:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher
based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is
hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in
physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The
trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with
relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose
geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. 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 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."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion
Craig Callender in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Einstein mounted the next
assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity.
According to his special theory of relativity, what events are
happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true
arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two
observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an
event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time
are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who
had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared,
"are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse
in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which extends
special relativity to situations where the force of gravity operates.
Gravity distorts time, so that a second's passage here may not mean
the same thing as a second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it
possible to synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even
in principle. You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding,
tick by tick, according to a single time parameter. In extreme
situations, the world might not be carvable into instants of time at
all. It then becomes impossible to say that an event happened before
or after another."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/151
"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion." It was none other than Einstein who uttered
these words. He was speaking about how our perception of time differs
from the fundamental nature of time in physics. Take our perceptions
first: We have a clear sense of the present moment, what came before,
and what might come after. Unfortunately, physics treats time rather
differently. Einstein's theory of special relativity presents us with
a four-dimensional spacetime, in which the past, present and future
are already mapped out. There is no special "now," just as there's no
special "here." And just like spacetime does not have a fundamental
direction - forcing us to move inexorably from east to west, say -
time does not flow. "You have this big gap between the time of
fundamental science and the time we experience," says Craig Callender,
a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. It's this
gap that he has set out to narrow, using ideas from physics,
evolutionary theory and cognitive science."
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to
differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to
do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity
seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics
operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But
Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special
relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless
they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is
relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a
proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is
literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of
his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has
become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes
that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real
as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The
notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for
Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate
students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
http://hps.master.univ-paris7.fr/cours_du_temps.doc
Etienne Klein: "Aujourd'hui, L'astrophysicien Thibault Damour
développe à sa manière des idées qui vont dans le même sens. Selon
lui, le temps qui passe (qu'il sagisse d'un fait ou de notre
sentiment) est le produit de notre seule subjectivité, un effet que
nous devrions au caractère irréversible de notre mise en mémoire, de
sorte que la question du cours du temps relèverait non pas de la
physique, mais des sciences cognitives. Il écrit : « De même que la
notion de température n'a aucun sens si l'on considère un système
constitué d'un petit nombre de particules, de même il est probable que
la notion d'écoulement du temps n'a de sens que pour certains systèmes
complexes, qui évoluent hors de l'équilibre thermodynamique, et qui
gèrent d'une certaine façon les informations accumulées dans leur
mémoire. » Le temps ne serait donc qu'une apparence d'ordre
psychologique : « Dans le domaine d'espace-temps que nous observons,
poursuit-il, nous avons l'impression qu'il s'écoule "du bas vers le
haut" de l'espace-temps, alors qu'en réalité ce dernier constitue un
bloc rigide qui n'est nullement orienté a priori : il ne le devient
que pour nous [35]. » L'existence même d'un « cours du temps », ou
d'un « passage du temps », n'est ainsi que simple apparence pour de
nombreux physiciens contemporains. Certains vont même jusqu'à
considérer le passage du temps comme une pure illusion, comme un
produit culturel abusivement dérivé de la métaphore du fleuve. C'est
en effet la conception dite de l'« univers-bloc » qui semble avoir les
faveurs d'une majorité de physiciens. Dans le droit fil de la théorie
de la relativité, celle-ci consiste à invoquer un univers constitué
dun continuum d'espace-temps à quatre dimensions, privé de tout flux
temporel : tous les événements, qu'ils soient passés, présents et
futurs, ont exactement la même réalité, de la même façon que
différents lieux coexistent, en même temps et avec le même poids
ontologique, dans l'espace. En d'autres termes, les notions de passé
ou de futur ne sont que des notions relatives, comme celles d'Est et
d'Ouest. En un sens, tout ce qui va exister existe déjà et tout ce qui
a existé existe encore. L'espace-temps contient l'ensemble de
l'histoire de la réalité comme la partition contient l'uvre musicale :
la partition existe sous une forme statique, mais ce qu'elle contient,
l'esprit humain l'appréhende généralement sous la forme d'un flux
temporel."
3. Of all the Einsteinians not one could think of a reason why
Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate should be
questioned. Even if this postulate were false, Divine Albert's Divine
Theory would be unaffected:
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/bup.pdf
Jean-Marc LÉVY-LEBLOND: "Maintenant il s'agit de savoir si le photon a
vraiment une masse nulle. Pour un physicien, il est absolument
impossible d'affirmer qu'une grandeur, quelle qu'elle soit, a
rigoureusement la valeur zéro, pas plus d'ailleurs que n'importe
quelle autre valeur. Tout ce que je sais de la masse du photon, c'est
ce que disent mes collègues expérimentateurs : "Elle est très faible !
Inférieure, selon nos mesures actuelles, à 10^(-50)kg". Mais si
demain, on découvre que cette masse est non-nulle, alors, le photon ne
va pas à la vitesse de la lumière... Certes, il irait presque toujours
à une vitesse tellement proche de la vitesse limite que nous ne
verrions que difficilement la différence, mais conceptuellement, il
pourrait exister des photons immobiles, et la différence est
essentielle. Or, nous ne saurons évidemment jamais si la masse est
rigoureusement nulle ; nous pourrons diminuer la borne supérieure,
mais jamais l'annuler. Acceptons donc l'idée que la masse du photon
est nulle, et que les photons vont à la vitesse limite, mais
n'oublions pas que ce n'est pas une nécessité. Cela est important pour
la raison suivante. Supposez que demain un expérimentateur soit
capable de vraiment mettre la main sur le photon, et de dire qu'il n'a
pas une masse nulle. Qu'il a une masse de, mettons 10^(-60)kg. Sa
masse n'est pas nulle, et du coup la lumière ne va plus à la "vitesse
de la lumière". Vous pouvez imaginer les gros titres dans les
journaux : "La théorie de la relativité s'effondre", "Einstein s'est
trompé", etc. Or cette éventuelle observation ne serait en rien
contradictoire avec la théorie de la relativité ! Einstein a certe
construit sa théorie en analysant des échanges de signaux lumineux
propagés à la vitesse limite. Si on trouve que le photon a une masse
non-nulle, ce sera que cette vitesse n'est pas la vitesse limite, et
la démonstration initiale s'effondre donc. Mais ce n'est pas parce
qu'une démonstration est erronée que son résultat est faux ! Quand
vous avez une table à plusieurs pieds, vous pouvez en couper un, elle
continue à tenir debout. Et heureusement, la théorie de la relativité
a plusieurs pieds."
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/Chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent en évidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procédures opérationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La théorie elle-même en serait-elle
invalidée ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus économiques. En vérité, le premier postulat suffit, à la
condition de l'exploiter à fond."
http://www.hep.princeton.edu/~mcdonald/examples/mechanics/levy-leblond_ajp_44_271_76.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c. (...) We believe that special relativity at the present time
stands as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common
space-time arena in which all fundamental processes take place. (...)
The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such,
shake in any way the validity of the special relalivity. It would,
however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance
of the photon velocity."
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/msg/dc1ebdf49c012de2
Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a
nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant
speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both
Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains
of applicability would be reduced)."
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoretical/dp/9810238886
Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the
long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a
relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of
light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity.
This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery
of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman,
Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html
Why Einstein was wrong about relativity
29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST
"This "second postulate" is the source of all Einstein's eccentric
physics of shrinking space and haywire clocks. And with a little
further thought, it leads to the equivalence of mass and energy
embodied in the iconic equation E = mc2. The argument is not about the
physics, which countless experiments have confirmed. It is about
whether we can reach the same conclusions without hoisting light onto
its highly irregular pedestal. (...) But in fact, says Feigenbaum,
both Galileo and Einstein missed a surprising subtlety in the maths -
one that renders Einstein's second postulate superfluous. (...) The
idea that Einstein's relativity has nothing to do with light could
actually come in rather handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty
shock if anyone were ever to prove that photons, the particles of
light, have mass. We know that the photon's mass is very small - less
than 10-49 grams. A photon with any mass at all would imply that our
understanding of electricity and magnetism is wrong, and that electric
charge might not be conserved. That would be problem enough, but a
massive photon would also spell deep trouble for the second postulate,
as a photon with mass would not necessarily always travel at the same
speed. Feigenbaum's work shows how, contrary to many physicists'
beliefs, this need not be a problem for relativity."
http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/msg/44d3ebf3b94d89ad
Tom Roberts: "As I said before, Special Relativity would not be
affected by a non-zero photon mass, as Einstein's second postulate is
not required in a modern derivation (using group theory one obtains
three related theories, two of which are solidly refuted
experimentally and the third is SR). So today's foundations of modern
physics would not be threatened.
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0806/0806.1234v1.pdf
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum: "In this paper, not only do I show that the
constant speed of light is unnecessary for the construction of the
theories of relativity, but overwhelmingly more, there is no room for
it in the theory. (...) We can make a few guesses. There is a
"villain" in the story, who, of course, is Newton."
Pentcho Valev
***@yahoo.com