The same lie (the speed of light is constant in a gravitational field) advanced by Stephen Hawking but he superimposes another lie by claiming that the Michelson-Morley experiment confirmed the constancy of the speed of light (originally, prior to introducing length contraction, the ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis, the Michelson-Morley experiment straightforwardly confirmed the variation of the speed of light with the speed of the light source as predicted by Newton's emission theory of light):

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...)"

www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_...;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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Pentcho wrote:
Perhaps philosophers of science would not be so silent if they knew how blatant Einsteiniana's lies are:

An excerpt from COSMIC HORIZONS: ASTRONOMY AT THE CUTTING EDGE, edited by Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson, a publication of the New Press. © 2000 American Museum of Natural History. To order the book, call 1-800-233-4830, or go to www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web/buybook/

www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web...smic/cs_michell.html
"Michell accepted Newton's theory that light consists of small material particles. He reasoned that such particles, emerging from the surface of a star, would have their speed reduced by the star's gravitational pull, just like projectiles fired upward from the Earth. (...) Michell got the right answer, although he was wrong about one point. We now know, from Einstein's relativity theory of 1905, that light moves through space at a constant speed, regardless of the local strength of gravity."

Needless to say, in 1905 Einstein did not say anything like "light moves through space at a constant speed, regardless of the local strength of gravity". Rather, from 1907 on, he claimed that, in a gravitational field, the speed of light is VARIABLE, not constant. In 1911 Einstein was explicitly using Newton's emission theory of light in order to show how the speed of light varies with the gravitational potential:

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."

www.blazelabs.com/f-g-gcont.asp
"So, faced with this evidence most readers must be wondering why we learn about the importance of the constancy of speed of light. Did Einstein miss this? Sometimes I find out that what's written in our textbooks is just a biased version taken from the original work, so after searching within the original text of the theory of GR by Einstein, I found this quote: "In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust. But in reality this is not the case. We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity ; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g. of light)." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - The General Theory of Relativity: Chapter 22 - A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity-. Today we find that since the Special Theory of Relativity unfortunately became part of the so called mainstream science, it is considered a sacrilege to even suggest that the speed of light be anything other than a constant. This is somewhat surprising since even Einstein himself suggested in a paper "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light," Annalen der Physik, 35, 1911, that the speed of light might vary with the gravitational potential. Indeed, the variation of the speed of light in a vacuum or space is explicitly shown in Einstein's calculation for the angle at which light should bend upon the influence of gravity. One can find his calculation in his paper. The result is c'=c(1+V/c^2) where V is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the measurement is taken. 1+V/c^2 is also known as the GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT FACTOR."

In 1915 Einstein managed to get rid of Newton's emission theory of light by replacing the equation c'=c(1+V/c^2) with c'=c(1+2V/c^2), which is tantamount to replacing 2+2=4 with 2+2=5:

www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-01/6-01.htm
"In geometrical units we define c_0 = 1, so Einstein's 1911 formula can be written simply as c=1+phi. However, this formula for the speed of light (not to mention this whole approach to gravity) turned out to be incorrect, as Einstein realized during the years leading up to 1915 and the completion of the general theory. In fact, the general theory of relativity doesn't give any equation for the speed of light at a particular location, because the effect of gravity cannot be represented by a simple scalar field of c values. Instead, the "speed of light" at a each point depends on the direction of the light ray through that point, as well as on the choice of coordinate systems, so we can't generally talk about the value of c at a given point in a non-vanishing gravitational field. However, if we consider just radial light rays near a spherically symmetrical (and non- rotating) mass, and if we agree to use a specific set of coordinates, namely those in which the metric coefficients are independent of t, then we can read a formula analogous to Einstein's 1911 formula directly from the Schwarzschild metric. (...) In the Newtonian limit the classical gravitational potential at a distance r from mass m is phi=-m/r, so if we let c_r = dr/dt denote the radial speed of light in Schwarzschild coordinates, we have c_r =1+2phi, which corresponds to Einstein's 1911 equation, except that we have a factor of 2 instead of 1 on the potential term."

www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from: www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/histo.../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."

www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
George Orwell "1984": "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

it is quite sad.

You stand on the beach and the wavecrests hit your feet with frequency F and speed V. You know that

F=V/L

where L is the wavelength - the distance between the crests. Then you start wading against the waves with speed v. This means that the wavecrests now hit your feet with speed (V+v); the frequency increases accordingly:

F'=(V+v)/L ; F'>F

Not so, say Einsteinians knowing that, for light waves, (V+v) is to be replaced by (c+v): a replacement which, if officially admitted, would mark the end of Einsteiniana (the speed of light varies with the speed of the observer). Then Einsteinians advance the most blatant lie: the wavecrests continue to hit your feet with CONSTANT speed V while the increase in frequency is accompanied with an IDIOTIC decrease in wavelength:

F'=V/L' ; L'=LV/(V+v)

sampit.geol.sc.edu/Doppler.html
"Moving observer: A man is standing on the beach, watching the tide. The waves are washing into the shore and over his feet with a constant frequency and wavelength. However, if he begins walking out into the ocean, the waves will begin hitting him more frequently, leading him to perceive that the wavelength of the waves has decreased. Again, this phenomenon is due to the fact that the source and the observer are not the in the same frame of reference. Although the wavelength appears to have decreased to the man, the wavelength would appear constant to a jellyfish floating along with the tide."

www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/big_bang/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."

All along believers invariably sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity":

"YES WE ALL BELIEVE IN RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY"


"DIVINE EINSTEIN"
(No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein not Maxwell, Curie, or B-o-o-ohr!)
www.haverford.edu/physics-astro/songs/divine.htm

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

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."


Um...because Michelson and Morley did not do their experiment
anywhere near a black hole?
Even the simplest sanity check indicates you are very delusional.

You have got to move on.

I agree... Pentcho has to move on. -Revering John Norton's idea as fact, and demonizing Einstein's opinion as idiotic is too irrational.

I just went looking for subtle issues, and I
was really shocked by such a glaring oversight.
Internal self-consistency is the first thing
I check. Tripping on your shoelaces in the
same sentence betrays a severe lack of
proper thinking. It's a shame, given what
looks like thousands of hours of devotion...
..to phantasms, it looks like