Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all theories in the past proved partially false so present and future theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive method. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is true, then all its consequences are true.

If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true. Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the antithesis deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its conclusions are true.

Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content and falsity content are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either absolutely true or absolutely false.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) And if we do arrive at such a unified theory, will it invalidate the efforts of Newton and Einstein or all of the modern physicists who have tried to explain the inexplicable? Not a bit of it. Scientists know that they can never reach finality. Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society

This seems to be the real beginning of the shock and horror announced a few years ago:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2003/04/waseinsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."

I think Einstein should have gone fishing even before 1920 since, as I explain below, "deductive theories are either absolutely true or absolutely false". Unlike today's Einsteinians Einstein knew this quite well:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and theory of gravity is false."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

On Aug 19 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as
> verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all
> theories in the past proved partially false so present and future
> theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive
> method. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:
>
>http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/"...light is
> always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
> independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."
>
> By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that
> is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence
> of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is
> true, then all its consequences are true.
>
> If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the
> equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true.
> Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
> antithesis deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd
> auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its
> conclusions are true.
>
> Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content
> and falsity content are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either
> absolutely true or absolutely false.

This is absolutely false:

"... If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true. ..."

1) c'=c+v is not the antithesis of the light postulate
2) c', c and v are not defined in the PV statement

An more importantly, physics does not know "absolute truth".
Physics is a theoretisation of experimental data.
Most experimental data have precision limits.
Therefore the theories built on these data cannot be assumed to be more precise that their source data unless they are checked again with more precision.

Therefore, there is not reason that the (local) light postulate would remain true to an arbitrary level of precision.
However, it is known to be true to a very high precision in a large spatial and temporal domain.

Anyway, the postulate is also expected by most physicists to break down at the Planck scale or even before.
It is at least clear that at the Planck scale our concepts of space and time (mainly pre-historic concepts) are unreliable.
Therefore no reason anymore to trust the light postulate so far.

In this sense, the "light postulate" will never be falsified.
It can only be superseded by something more precise and more generally applicable.

_______________
I wonder why I need to explain such trivial trivialities and why phylosopyers like PV can waste their time is such a conceptual mud.

Was Einstein wrong?
Paul Davies 20th April 2003 Issue 85
The idea of a variable speed of light, championed by an angry young scientist, could one day topple Einstein's theory of relativity
_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Angry and young, interresting.

Angry and young, that was the scoop of the journalist.
Skip the journalist, and go directly to this paper by the young and angry physicist:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/9811/9811018v2.pdf

That's quite an interresting paper.
I appreciated very much he appendix I, specially I.A.
Clearly it is about extending the light postulate on the basis of new experimental data.
It is interresting to note that special relativity would still remain valid locally even close to the big bang, only with another c.
Of course, it is also possible to go even further.

This is very far from the PV mood: old and angry.

Now that "dark energy" is a miracle no longer acceptable in Einsteiniana, will Lord Martin Rees and Einsteiniana Brotherhood in general be so kind as to free the world from other miracles which have destroyed, perhaps irreversibly, human rationality:

http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/blackholes.asp
Lord Martin Rees 2004: "Good science fiction should respect the fundamental constraints of physical law. In that sprit, it is worth mentioning that an observer could, in principle, observe the far future in what, subjectively, seemed quiet a short time. According to Einstein, the speed of a clock depends on where you are and how you're moving. If your subjective clock ran very slowly compared to the cosmic clock, you could travel "fast forward" into the future. This would happen if you were moving at a velocity close to the speed of light. Furthermore, strong gravity would distort time; clocks on a neutron star would run 20 or 30 percent slower. Near a black hole, the distortions would be even greater. If you were to fall into one, your future would be finite; you would be ripped apart - spaghettified - by ever more violent gravitational forces. However, a more prudent astronaut who managed to get into the closest possible orbit around a rapidly spinning hole without falling into it would also have interesting experiences, space-time is so distorted there that his clock would run arbitrarily slow and he could, therefore, in a subjectively short period, view an immensely long future timespan in the external universe."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) And if we do arrive at such a unified theory, will it invalidate the efforts of Newton and Einstein or all of the modern physicists who have tried to explain the inexplicable? Not a bit of it. Scientists know that they can never reach finality. Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society

This seems to be the real beginning of the shock and horror announced a few years ago:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2003/04/waseinsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."

I think Einstein should have gone fishing even before 1920 since, as I explain below, "deductive theories are either absolutely true or absolutely false". Unlike today's Einsteinians Einstein knew this quite well:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and theory of gravity is false."

Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all theories in the past proved partially false so present and future theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive method. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is true, then all its consequences are true.

If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true. Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the antithesis deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its conclusions are true.

Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content and falsity content are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either absolutely true or absolutely false.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Anonymous does not understand the difference between empirical reasoning and deductive reasoning. In his arrogance, he covers himself with the steaming bovine substance.

JR, you are becoming bellicose because you have no answer.

This kind of discussion we can practice till the eternity. Some are for and other is against. But which physical arguments we use by our discussions? Physical model, if would be set , indicates that the Einsteins light postulate about a constant spread of light in a vacuum is true. It wasnt the first time and probably it will not be the last, that by based on wrong hypotheses we bring accurate attitudes. Especially if we have the setting attitudes which are illusory correct but physically unsubstantiated. But it could not say for certain consequences of this postulate. Namely Einsteins model of electromagnetic waves is wrong because it is based on the magnitude (photons), which, objectively speaking, has no physical meaning. If we still wont to continue discuss let us to try to identify the acceptable physical model of electromagnetic wave which is not relying on a paradox, dualisms, and so forth, but on the real physical magnitudes, because these waves belong to this category of the natural (and physical) phenomena. They are the real physical process. The physical model is the crux of the problem and will bring into question the theory of Relativity, and probably knock down it, but the postulate of constant spreading (not speed) of light remain unchanged, at least in the next few billion years, while the cosmos does not change its characteristics.
Milos

Einsteiniana's most recent camouflage of the falsehood of Einstein's 1905 light postulate:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090824115758.htm
"Despite the success of general relativity, one of the most important problems in modern physics is finding a theory of quantum gravity that reconciles the continuous nature of gravitational fields with the inherent 'graininess' of quantum mechanics. Recently, Petr Hořava at Lawrence Berkeley Lab proposed such a model for quantum gravity that has received widespread interest, in no small part because it is one of the few models that could be experimentally tested. In Hořava's model, Lorentz symmetry, which says that physics is the same regardless of the reference frame, is violated at small distance scales, but remerges over longer distance scales."

Einsteiniana's new discovery that Lorentz symmetry "is violated at small distance scales, but remerges over longer distance scales" may allow Einsteinans to answer the existential question asked by Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat without damaging Divine Albert's Divine Theory:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0705/0705.4507v1.pdf
Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat: "The question is then: If Lorentz invariance is broken, what happens to the speed of light? Given that Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles must be violated."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

On Aug 19 Pentcho Valev wrote:
> Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as
> verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all
> theories in the past proved partially false so present and future
> theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive
> method. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:
>
>http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is
> always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
> independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."
>
> By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that
> is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence
> of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is
> true, then all its consequences are true.
>
> If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the
> equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true.
> Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
> antithesis deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd
> auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its
> conclusions are true.
>
> Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content
> and falsity content are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either
> absolutely true or absolutely false.

C'est la vie.

For those of you related to the the cement process engineer, the above phrase is in French