Jamini Bhusan said:
Dear Eric, each of us are on a journey from conception to death & there is not much point in looking back. One need not have a degree or doctorate in physics to raise questions; in fact, those who go to regular University become mechanical, they must agree with what they read in books, agree with couple of hundred pages of writings to secure their degree & livelihood. If questions are not raised then things would become absolute; modern scientists are now raising questions like you have. "A fundamental law of physics, indeed of all science, is causality: that cause always precedes effect. This was accepted in classical physics, and the special theory of relativity took pains to preserve the rule, despite the relativity of an object's motion." I am sure you know about work done by physicist Masatoshi Koshiba.
http://www.livescience.com/29111-speed-of-light-not-constant.html
This is a very annoying comment, and it repeats the often-spewed garbage that crackpots try to use against scientists, that we are nothing more than a bunch of people who simply toe the party line. This is not only silly, but also ignores the most obvious evidence out there, which is that advances in science and our knowledge ARE being made by these people. If we only become "mechanical", we won't be making such advances.
Here's the thing: to be able to go outside of the "box", you must, first and foremost, know WHERE the box is, and where the boundaries are! Otherwise, you won't know if something is new even if it comes up and bites you on your rear end! We teach kids about the known and verified science so that they will be able to recognize when something truly new comes up! Otherwise, you'll end up
claiming about something to be new when all it is is simply a reflection of your ignorance of what is already known!
Secondly, in the hands of someone who doesn't understand physics and doesn't keep up with all the latest results, that livescience article will result in exactly this: someone claiming that light can have a varying speed. Now, consider the fact that this possibility is actually
irrelevant in this case, because the topic of this thread is NOT about light varying in speed over the evolution of our universe (which is still highly controversial, by the way). The OP's point in the first thread, and the discussion throughout the thread, is not related to this point. So already this is highly off-topic. But more importantly, the issue of speed of light varying over time has not had a lot of experimental support. In fact, there have been many that points to the contrary. See, for example,
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2008/mar/10/new-optical-clock-promises-increased-accuracy, where this has a greater accuracy than previous measurement of the fine-structure constant.
Moral of the story here is that you simply cannot "imagine" all these things without first understanding the fundamental knowledge, and then being aware of the state of knowledge that we currently have, right now. That is why we have citation indexes, so that you can check if new work related to old ones have been published. Otherwise, you'll end up quoting something like this and misleading yourself into thinking that this is still something that it widely accepted.
Zz.
