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Old March 12th 16, 11:32 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Einsteinian Schizophrenia: Hailing Gravitational Waves, Rejecting Spacetime

http://www.space.com/32098-gravitati...s-hearing.html
"Experts to Congress: Gravitational Waves Discovery Will Help Science, Humanity. On Feb. 18, members of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) testified before Congress about the Feb. 11 announcement that the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) had directly detected gravitational waves — ripples in the fabric of space-time predicted by Albert Einstein 100 years ago."

Einstein did not predict such ripples of course:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04674
"Around 1936, Einstein wrote to his close friend Max Born telling him that, together with Nathan Rosen, he had arrived at the interesting result that gravitational waves did not exist, though they had been assumed a certainty to the first approximation. He finally had found a mistake in his 1936 paper with Rosen and believed that gravitational waves do exist. However, in 1938, Einstein again obtained the result that there could be no gravitational waves!"

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160...ick-interview/
""There are no gravitational waves ... " ... "Plane gravitational waves, traveling along the positive X-axis, can therefore be found ... " ... " ... gravitational waves do not exist ... " ... "Do gravitational waves exist?" .... "It turns out that rigorous solutions exist ... " These are the words of Albert Einstein. For 20 years he equivocated about gravitational waves, unsure whether these undulations in the fabric of space and time were predicted or ruled out by his revolutionary 1915 theory of general relativity."

What is even more schizophrenic is that Einsteinians, secretly but often explicitly, reject Einstein's spacetime, while hailing its ripples, the gravitational waves:

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... (...) The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE
Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:11): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-185331159.html
"Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper about possible grounds for divorce. (...) Einstein's famous insistence that the velocity of light is a cosmic speed limit made sense, Minkowski saw, only if space and time were intertwined. (...) Physicists of the 21st century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage. (...) Andreas Albrecht, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis, has thought deeply about choosing clocks, leading him to some troubling realizations. (...) "It seems to me like it's a time in the development of physics," says Albrecht, "where it's time to look at how we think about space and time very differently."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"...says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029410.900
New Scientist: "Saving time: Physics killed it. Do we need it back? (...) Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...wards-in-time/
"[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. Although you might have seen three things happen in a particular order – 
A, then B, then C – someone moving 
at a different velocity could have seen 
it a different way – C, then B, then A. 
In other words, without simultaneity there is no way of specifying what things happened "now". And if not "now", what is moving through time? Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.bookdepository.com/Time-R.../9780547511726
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time (...) The stumbling block lies with their conflicting views of space and time. As seen by quantum theory, space and time are a static backdrop against which particles move. In Einstein's theories, by contrast, not only are space and time inextricably linked, but the resulting space-time is moulded by the bodies within it. (...) Something has to give in this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the smart money says that it's relativity that will be the loser."

Pentcho Valev