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Old July 11th 09, 06:44 AM posted to alt.philosophy,sci.logic,sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default DOUBLETHINK IN EINSTEINIANA

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."


"Complete honesty" in Einsteiniana:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
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."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

"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://physics.suite101.com/article....ial_relativity
Paul Heckert: "Rather than trying to understand why the Michelson-
Morley experiment didn't work, Einstein effectively took the result as
his starting point. He made the basic assumption that the speed of
light is a fundamental constant in the universe and that all observers
in any reference frame that is not accelerating will measure the same
value for the speed of light."

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/...ial-relativity
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA: "The fact that the speed of light is the
same for all observers is inexplicable in ordinary terms. If a
passenger in a train moving at 100 km per hour shoots an arrow in the
trains direction of motion at 200 km per hour, a trackside observer
would measure the speed of the arrow as the sum of the two speeds, or
300 km per hour (see figure). In analogy, if the train moves at the
speed of light and a passenger shines a laser in the same direction,
then common sense indicates that a trackside observer should see the
light moving at the sum of the two speeds, or twice the speed of light
(6 × 108 metres per second). While such a law of addition of
velocities is valid in classical mechanics, THE MICHELSON-MORLEY
EXPERIMENT SHOWED THAT LIGHT DOES NOT OBEY THIS LAW."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?...64&It emid=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."

http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc...of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as
the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower,
and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that
its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments
failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion
through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments
was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case
Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always
traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were
moving."

Pentcho Valev