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Old June 1st 09, 07:27 AM posted to fr.sci.astrophysique,sci.astro,sci.logic,alt.philosophy
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?

Pentcho Valev wrote:
http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
of the truth."


Doublethink at the Perimeter Institute. "The Party intellectual knows
in which direction his memories must be altered":

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered
Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his
own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's
insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative
motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same,
no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences
of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-
legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are
relative, not absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS
OF INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS
WRONG WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT."

Joao Magueijo, PLUS VITE QUE LA LUMIERE, Dunod, 2003, pp. 298-299:
"La racine du mal etait clairement la relativite restreinte. Tous ces
paradoxes resultaient d'effets bien connus comme la contraction des
longueurs, la dilatation du temps, ou E=mc^2, tous des predictions
directes de la relativite restreinte. (...) La consequence en etait
inevitable: pour edifier une theorie coherente de la gravite
quantique, quelle qu'elle soit, nous [Joao Magueijo et Lee Smolin]
devions commencer par abandonner la relativite restreinte. (...) Mais,
comme nous l'avons vu, celle-ci repose sur deux principes
independants. Le premier est la relativite du mouvement, le second la
constance de la vitesse de la lumiere. Une des solutions possibles a
notre probleme pouvait etre d'abandonner la relativite du mouvement.
(...) C'est une possibilite bien sur, mais nous avons choisi
l'alternative evidente: preserver la relativite du mouvement, mais
admettre qu'a de tres hautes energies, la vitesse de la lumiere ne
soit plus constante."

http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Se...lden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the
speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates
special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at
a constant speed for all observers..."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smol...n03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another
possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved,
but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so
as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most
shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real
possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without
violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years
ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I
did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial
College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept
coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all
seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it
was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they
had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how
Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special
relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
light.''

"....one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of
doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with
the lie always one leap ahead of the truth":

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Out...al_Relativity/
Perimeter Institute: "Modern Physics - Special Relativity. Fast is
different. You might have heard that "a moving clock runs slowly" and
"a moving object occupies less space." What, exactly, does this mean,
and how did Einstein discover these amazing properties of space and
time? Join us on an adventure into Einstein's universe and find out
why these strange-sounding properties are actually perfectly natural
and easy to understand."

Pentcho Valev