Albert Einstein 1909: "A large body of facts shows undeniably that light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For this reason, I believe that the next phase in
the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:The_Development_of_Our_Views_on_the_Composition_and_Essence_of_
Radiation
Remorse or...what? Here is the story:
John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with
an emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to this
kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added
vectorially to the velocity of light emitted...If an emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state in the present. As long as Einstein expected a viable theory
of light, electricity and magnetism to be a field theory, these sorts of objections would render an emission theory of light inadmissible."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.pdf
That is, in devising his theory of special relativity, Einstein abandoned Newton's emission theory with its variable speed of light, and "borrowed" from the ether theory a continuous-field model of light with constant speed of light:
"The two first articles (January and March) establish clearly a discontinuous structure of matter and light. The standard look of Einstein's SR is, on the contrary, essentially based on the continuous conception of the field."
http://arxiv.org/ftp/
physics/papers/0101/0101109.pdf
"Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/
Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, 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. If it was so obvious, though,
why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will
prove to be superfluous."
https://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its-Roots-Banesh-Hoffmann/dp/0486406768
Albert Einstein: "I introduced the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light, which I borrowed from H. A. Lorentz's theory of the stationary luminiferous ether."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory
Then, one year before his death, Einstein made a confession: The continuous-field model of light, with its false tenet, the constancy of the speed of light, had actually killed physics:
Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing
of the rest of contemporary physics." John Stachel, Einstein from 'B' to 'Z', p. 151
https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-B-Z-John-Stachel/dp/0817641432
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