Natural Science Forum / Physics / General Physics / July 2008

For the moment the Reverend John Stachel is the only Einsteinian that
has no problems with Newton's emission theory of light:

http://www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm
This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, "'What Song the Syrens Sang':
How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel,
Einstein from "B" to "Z".
"This was itself a daring step, since these methods had been developed
to help understand the behavior of ordinary matter while Einstein was
applying them to the apparently quite different field of
electromagnetic radiation. The "revolutionary" conclusion to which he
came was that, in certain respects, electromagnetic radiation behaved
more like a collection of particles than like a wave. He announced
this result in a paper published in 1905, three months before his SRT
paper. The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of particles
had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity into the
middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission theory" of
light, a phrase I shall use.....Giving up the ether concept allowed
Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an
independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is
radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of
light.".....An emission theory is perfectly compatible with the
relativity principle. Thus, the M-M experiment presented no problem;
nor is stellar abberration difficult to explain on this
basis......This does not imply that Lorentz's equations are adequate
to explain all the features of light, of course. Einstein already knew
they did not always correctly do so-in particular in the processes of
its emission, absorption and its behavior in black body radiation.
Indeed, his new velocity addition law is also compatible with an
emission theory of light, just because the speed of light compounded
with any lesser velocity still yields the same value. If we model a
beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can still
be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed
the view that an adequate future theory of light would have to be some
sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories......The resulting
theory did not force him to choose between wave and emission theories
of light, but rather led him to look forward to a synthesis of the
two."

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i6272.html
John Stachel: "Not only is the theory [of relativity] compatible with
an emission theory of radiation, since it implies that the velocity of
light is always the same relative to its source; the theory also
requires that radiation transfer mass between an emitter and an
absorber, reinforcing Einstein's light quantum hypothesis that
radiation manifests a particulate structure under certain
circumstances."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

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Stachel's long-winded rant boil's down to nothing.

 You really do not understand the concept of 'photo' do you? Or 'time
stop'? Or that the source doesn't stop; never stops. Light never propagates
as source (0) but as [already] history (-). Regarding light and sources,
observers can only [try] to deal in the space and time difference (+)
between (-) and (0).

GLB

Curiously, John Stachel and John Norton are friends, write books
together, sell them to Einstein zombie world and share the money.
However, while John Stachel teaches that Einstein's relativity and
Newton's emission theory of light are compatible, John Norton teaches
the opposite:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/rel_of_sim/index.html
John Norton: "But an emission theory is precluded in special
relativity by the part of the light postulate that asserts that the
velocity of light is independent of the velocity of the emitter."

Einstein zombie world invariably sings "Divine Einstein".

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20279
Lee Smolin: "It is also disappointing that none of the biographers
mention the writings that lead John Stachel, the founding editor of
the Einstein Papers project, to speak of "the other Einstein." These
writings look beyond his struggles with the unified field theory to
"the other possibility [which] leads in my opinion to a renunciation
of the space-time continuum..."

Do all those honest biographers have a serious reason to avoid "the
other Einstein" problem? Something to do with "NOTHING WILL REMAIN of
my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but
also nothing of the rest of contemporary physics"?

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com