http://www.sciencealert.com.au/opinions/20080611-18405.html
"The Lucasian Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge has become not only one of the most prestigious professorships in science but indeed of all academia. The Chair is now vacant, following the announced retirement of its current incumbent Stephen Hawking. (...) The most obvious candidate to succeed Stephen Hawking would be Ed Witten, currently at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. (...) One possible candidate could well be Fotini Markopolou-Kalamara, a noted researcher in the most well known rival approach to quantum gravity, that being loop quantum gravity."

Stephen Hawking was a great moneymaker but did not understand the Michelson-Morley experiment and even believed that this experiment had confirmed Einstein's 1905 false light postulate and refuted Newton's emission theory of light:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star. He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down light, and make it fall back."

So the next Lucasian professor should at least understand the Michelson-Morley experiment. Ed Witten does not understand it and, in addition, is going to explain his string theory to Einstein zombie world in 2056:

http://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/science-forecasts/dn10567-edward-witten-forecasts-the-future.html
Edward Witten: "String theory will continue to be an extremely fertile source of new ideas. It will still be viewed as the interesting candidate for quantum gravity, and may even be more or less understood by 2056."

Markopolou-Kalamara also does not understand the Michelson-Morley experiment and, in addition, is developing loop quantum gravity without knowing what exactly she is doing:

http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Searching_for_the_Golden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at a constant speed for all observers..."

The only Einsteinian who understands the Michelson-Morley experiment is John Norton so he should succeed Stephen Hawking:

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

John Norton is also the only Einsteinian who understands Einstein's 1954 confession: the field theory of light has killed contemporary physics:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/homepage/cv.html#forthcoming
"Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity and the Problems in the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies that Led him to it." in Cambridge Companion to Einstein, M. Janssen and C. Lehner, eds., Cambridge University Press. Preprint.
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."

Compare John Norton and John Stachel: John Stachel often refers to Einstein's 1954 confession but does not understand it and, accordingly, does not take it seriously:

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."

So again: The Lucasian Professorship in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge should go to John Norton, the cleverest Einsteinian.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

The Golden Spike Author: "On the other hand, one experiment
has already delivered a rebuke to theorists
who predicted that special relativity
would break down at high energies. At
the Pierre Auger Cosmic Ray Observatory,
a network of cosmic ray detectors,
scientists have confirmed an energy
ceiling above which they detect no
cosmic raysjust as special relativity
predicts. This is important and exciting,
says Smolin, and strongly constrains
the degree by which special
relativity might be flawed.
Could it one day be possible to test
quantum gravity in a lab smaller than the
visible universe? The challenge, says
Crane, is concentrating enough energy
in a small enough volume to make violent
curvature at a quantum scale.
Its far beyond us now for practical
reasons. A nuclear laser the size of an
asteroid might eventually do it.
If youre not willing to wait for that giant
nuclear laser to come on line, there
is another possibility: Some string theorists
predict that the Large Hadron Collider,
currently under construction at
the CERN particle physics lab near Geneva,
may create mini black holes that
could test quantum gravity.
If we could make collisions that
formed black holes, the observable results
would give us information about
quantum gravity, says Crane. But, he
cautions, The practical limits on observations
appear long before we could reach
this. Just knowing whether a small black
hole decays or not would be important.
Crane quips: Given the lack of success
of string theory in predicting anything
we already see, I think it unlikely.
So, will the next great leap in quantum
gravity come from theory or from experiment?
The scientists interviewed for
this story answered along party lines
theorists for theory, experimentalists for
experiment. But whoever eventually
drives the golden spike between gravity
and quantum theory may not merely
close one frontier: He or she may open
a new one."

Note the bit about a new special relativity confirmation, that's actually news to me.

There is an upper limit for the energy level of cosmic rays, it's been confirmed, just as special relativity predicted.

I'm sure that's just a coincidence though, Einstein obviously didn't know what he was talking about.

And the "Theory of Relativity is the only possible reason for an upper limit on Gamma Rays. Gamma rays are the most particle like light waves known, and yet a one "photon" burst has been split. Too bad you didn't hear about that, Huh?