http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6039/jd9.html
"An open letter to Professor Stephen Hawking by John Doan, Melbourne, 29 August 97....There's only one thing that I want to raise with you in this letter, and it's Einstein's second postulate. Why can't you step out from Einstein's shadow and change relativity, Professor Hawking? Why should you accept Einstein's second postulate that the speed of light is absolute, resulting all paradoxes about time dilation? Why should you accept that c + v = c, in the sense that a light spent from Earth to a spaceship has to be measured as c regardless how fast the spaceship is travelling relative to Earth? How much evidence have you truly seen?....Your students would still keep asking the same questions your teachers have asked before. Many people are still confused. Some understand but cannot explain to idiots. Some don't understand but have stopped asking to stop being called idiots, too. And why should we deserve this? Why should we waste time imagining what our world would be like since Einstein said light is absolute? Why don't we go back and ask what if Einstein is wrong, that light is not absolute, that in fact c + c = 2c?....I have a dream, that one day Professor Hawking would write the first non-Einstein relativity book with an opposite second postulate, and I would be one of first readers congratulating you for helping me understand it.....If you say c + c = 2c, you certainly could make more sense than Einstein's postulate saying c + c = c. Yet where is non-Einstein relativity? Why can't you invent it, Professor Hawking? What has stopped you?"

Naive John Doan! "Professor" Stephen Hawking does not even know that the Michelson-Morley experiment was inconsistent with Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
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."

http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower, and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving."

In fact, the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally showed that the speed of light is VARIABLE and obeys the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light (yet by introducing miracles such as length contraction FitzGerald, Lorentz and Einstein managed to confuse and even replace this straightforward interpretation):

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."

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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

>http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6039/jd9.html
> "An open letter to Professor Stephen Hawking by John Doan, Melbourne,
> 29 August 97....There's only one thing that I want to raise with you
> in this letter, and it's Einstein's second postulate. Why can't you
> step out from Einstein's shadow and change relativity, Professor
> Hawking? Why should you accept Einstein's second postulate that the
> speed of light is absolute, resulting all paradoxes about time
> dilation? Why should you accept that c + v = c, in the sense that a
> light spent from Earth to a spaceship has to be measured as c
> regardless how fast the spaceship is travelling relative to Earth? How
> much evidence have you truly seen?....Your students would still keep
> asking the same questions your teachers have asked before. Many people
> are still confused. Some understand but cannot explain to idiots. Some
> don't understand but have stopped asking to stop being called idiots,
> too. And why should we deserve this? Why should we waste time
> imagining what our world would be like since Einstein said light is
> absolute? Why don't we go back and ask what if Einstein is wrong, that
> light is not absolute, that in fact c + c = 2c?....I have a dream,
> that one day Professor Hawking would write the first non-Einstein
> relativity book with an opposite second postulate, and I would be one
> of first readers congratulating you for helping me understand
> it.....If you say c + c = 2c, you certainly could make more sense than
> Einstein's postulate saying c + c = c. Yet where is non-Einstein
> relativity? Why can't you invent it, Professor Hawking? What has
> stopped you?"
>
> Naive John Doan! "Professor" Stephen Hawking does not even know that
> the Michelson-Morley experiment was inconsistent with Einstein's 1905
> false light postulate:
>
>http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
> 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."
>
>http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6a.html
> Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as
> the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower,
> and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that
> its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments
> failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion
> through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments
> was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case
> Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always
> traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were
> moving."
>
> In fact, the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally showed that the
> speed of light is VARIABLE and obeys the equation c'=c+v given by
> Newton's emission theory of light (yet by introducing miracles such as
> length contraction FitzGerald, Lorentz and Einstein managed to confuse
> and even replace this straightforward interpretation):
>
>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."
>
>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."

The Fundamental Mystery of Postscientism: Are Hawking-like teachers extremely silly and not so dishonest, or are they extremely dishonest and not so silly:

http://www.physorg.com/news156450506.html
"Hawking's lecture focused on black holes, a term coined by American physicist John Wheeler. Hawking discussed the history of black holes beginning with British physicist John Michell in 1783, who suggested that there might be Dark Stars whose gravity is strong enough to trap light and prevent the stars from being seen from far away. Two Americans, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, proved that the speed of light is invariant and does not depend upon where it comes from. Therefore, Michell's picture of Dark Stars is not entirely correct. Next, Albert Einstein weighed in with his theory of relativity where space and time are no longer independent entities, but rather different directions in four-dimensional space-time."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

>http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/6039/jd9.html
> "An open letter to Professor Stephen Hawking by John Doan, Melbourne,
> 29 August 97....There's only one thing that I want to raise with you
> in this letter, and it's Einstein's second postulate. Why can't you
> step out from Einstein's shadow and change relativity, Professor
> Hawking? Why should you accept Einstein's second postulate that the
> speed of light is absolute, resulting all paradoxes about time
> dilation? Why should you accept that c + v = c, in the sense that a
> light spent from Earth to a spaceship has to be measured as c
> regardless how fast the spaceship is travelling relative to Earth? How
> much evidence have you truly seen?....Your students would still keep
> asking the same questions your teachers have asked before. Many people
> are still confused. Some understand but cannot explain to idiots. Some
> don't understand but have stopped asking to stop being called idiots,
> too. And why should we deserve this? Why should we waste time
> imagining what our world would be like since Einstein said light is
> absolute? Why don't we go back and ask what if Einstein is wrong, that
> light is not absolute, that in fact c + c = 2c?....I have a dream,
> that one day Professor Hawking would write the first non-Einstein
> relativity book with an opposite second postulate, and I would be one
> of first readers congratulating you for helping me understand
> it.....If you say c + c = 2c, you certainly could make more sense than
> Einstein's postulate saying c + c = c. Yet where is non-Einstein
> relativity? Why can't you invent it, Professor Hawking? What has
> stopped you?"
>
> The Fundamental Mystery of Postscientism: Are Hawking-like teachers
> extremely silly and not so dishonest, or are they extremely dishonest
> and not so silly:
>
>http://www.physorg.com/news156450506.html
> "Hawking's lecture focused on black holes, a term coined by American
> physicist John Wheeler. Hawking discussed the history of black holes
> beginning with British physicist John Michell in 1783, who suggested
> that there might be Dark Stars whose gravity is strong enough to
> trap light and prevent the stars from being seen from far away. Two
> Americans, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, proved that the speed
> of light is invariant and does not depend upon where it comes from.
> Therefore, Michell's picture of Dark Stars is not entirely correct.

The problem of the variability or constancy of the speed of light in a gravitational field (does the speed of light "vary with position" in a gravitational field, as Einstein believed and clever Einsteinians nowadays teach, or does it remain constant, as silly Einsteinians teach) shows that Einsteinians' stupidity or dishonesty is not the major problem. Rather, scientific rationality has been irreversibly destroyed so students just learn "the speed of light is variable" when clever teachers want them to do so and "the speed of light is constant" after clever teachers get replaced by silly teachers:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 6:
"Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles, one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward at a constant speed...)"

http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_gr.html
"Is light affected by gravity? If so, how can the speed of light be constant? Wouldn't the light coming off of the Sun be slower than the light we make here? If not, why doesn't light escape a black hole? Yes, light is affected by gravity, but not in its speed. General Relativity (our best guess as to how the Universe works) gives two effects of gravity on light. It can bend light (which includes effects such as gravitational lensing), and it can change the energy of light. But it changes the energy by shifting the frequency of the light (gravitational redshift) not by changing light speed. Gravity bends light by warping space so that what the light beam sees as "straight" is not straight to an outside observer. The speed of light is still constant." Dr. Eric Christian

http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae13.cfm
"So, it is absolutely true that the speed of light is not constant in a gravitational field [which, by the equivalence principle, applies as well to accelerating (non-inertial) frames of reference]. If this were not so, there would be no bending of light by the gravitational field of stars....Indeed, this is exactly how Einstein did the calculation in: 'On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,' Annalen der Physik, 35, 1911. which predated the full formal development of general relativity by about four years. This paper is widely available in English. You can find a copy beginning on page 99 of the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity.' You will find in section 3 of that paper, Einstein's derivation of the (variable) speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is,
c' = c0 ( 1 + V / c^2 )
where V is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light c0 is measured."

http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from:http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/einstein-papers/1911_35_898-908.pdf ). It predated the full formal development of general relativity by about four years. You can find an English translation of this paper in the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity' beginning on page 99; you will find in section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the variable speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is: c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light co is measured......You can find a more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from the full theory of general relativity in the weak field approximation....For the 1955 results but not in coordinates see page 93, eqn (6.28): c(r)=[1+2phi(r)/c^2]c. Namely the 1955 approximation shows a variation in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Who is sillier: Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, or Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott:

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 6:
"Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles, one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward at a constant speed...)"

http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8572
Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott: "Although black holes lie at the frontier of astronomy, the idea such objects might exist stretches back more than 200 years. In the late 1700s, British professor John Michell and French astronomer and mathematician Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, advanced the idea of what Laplace called "dark bodies." Using Newton's concepts of light and gravity, they reasoned that the gravitational pull of a massive star could grow large enough to prevent light from escaping. Unfortunately, Newton's theory could not describe what happens when gravity grows that strong. Enter Albert Einstein. In 1916, his general theory of relativity put black holes on a firm footing."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation: "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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Are both Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, and Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott sillier than Lee Smolin, another Albert Einstein of our generation:

http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9
Lee Smolin, another Albert Einstein of our generation: "Newton's theory predicts that light goes in straight lines and therefore if the star passes behind the sun, we can't see it. Einstein's theory predicts that light is bent...."

On Aug 25 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> Who is sillier: Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our
> generation, or Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott:
>
>http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
> Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation, "A Brief
> History of Time", Chapter 6:
> "Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how
> it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles,
> one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that
> cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really
> consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of
> gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired
> upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will
> eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward
> at a constant speed...)"
>
>http://www.astronomy.com/asy/default.aspx?c=a&id=8572
> Astronomy magazine Senior Editor Richard Talcott: "Although black
> holes lie at the frontier of astronomy, the idea such objects might
> exist stretches back more than 200 years. In the late 1700s, British
> professor John Michell and French astronomer and mathematician Pierre
> Simon, Marquis de Laplace, advanced the idea of what Laplace called
> "dark bodies." Using Newton's concepts of light and gravity, they
> reasoned that the gravitational pull of a massive star could grow
> large enough to prevent light from escaping. Unfortunately, Newton's
> theory could not describe what happens when gravity grows that strong.
> Enter Albert Einstein. In 1916, his general theory of relativity put
> black holes on a firm footing."
>
>http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
> Stephen Hawking, the Albert Einstein of our generation: "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."