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Old July 29th 16, 11:44 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Contradictions in Einstein Schizophrenic World

In Einstein schizophrenic world contradictions take the form of doublethink - thesis and antithesis are both profitable in the pursuit of career and money. So "The future already exists", the idiotic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate, feeds a lot of Einsteinians, but "The future does not exist" sounds revolutionary and is not less nutritious:

http://www.bourbaphy.fr/damourtemps.pdf
Thibault Damour: "The paradigm of the special relativistic upheaval of the usual concept of time is the twin paradox. Let us emphasize that this striking example of time dilation proves that time travel (towards the future) is possible. As a gedanken experiment (if we neglect practicalities such as the technology needed for reaching velocities comparable to the velocity of light, the cost of the fuel and the capacity of the traveller to sustain high accelerations), it shows that a sentient being can jump, "within a minute" (of his experienced time) arbitrarily far in the future, say sixty million years ahead, and see, and be part of, what (will) happen then on Earth.. This is a clear way of realizing that the future "already exists" (as we can experience it "in a minute")."

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160...and-cosmology/
"...said Avshalom Elitzur, a physicist and philosopher formerly of Bar-Ilan University. “I don’t think that next Thursday has the same footing as this Thursday. The future does not exist. It does not! Ontologically, it’s not there.” [...] In the latter work, mirroring Elitzur’s sentiments about the future’s lack of concreteness, Smolin wrote: “The future is not now real and there can be no definite facts of the matter about the future.” What is real is “the process by which future events are generated out of present events,” he said at the conference."

In Einstein schizophrenic world one is free to reject either thesis or antithesis as false but it is absolutely forbidden to infer that the underlying premise (postulate) is false as well (postulates are sacred, consequences are not). So Avshalom Elitzur and Lee Smolin readily admit that "The future already exists" is false but would not even think of the simple logical rule saying that Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, from which the falsehood is derived, cannot be true:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev