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..." v

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." v

Rejecting Einstein's spacetime without questioning Einstein's 1905 postulates means that Steve Giddings and Nima Arkani-Hamed do not know what they are talking about. This automatically converts then into celebrities - especially Nima Arkani-Hamed who can talk hysterical nonsense for hours. In short, welcome to Einstein's schizophrenic world:

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow FRS: "Einstein restored faith in the unintelligibility of science. Everyone knew that Einstein had done something important in 1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody could tell you exactly what it was. When Einstein was interviewed for a Dutch newspaper in 1921, he attributed his mass appeal to the mystery of his work for the ordinary person: "Does it make a silly impression on me, here and yonder, about my theories of which they cannot understand a word? I think it is funny and also interesting to observe. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to them...it impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of the mysterious." Relativity was a fashionable notion. It promised to sweep away old absolutist notions and refurbish science with modern ideas. In art and literature too, revolutionary changes were doing away with old conventions and standards. All things were being made new. Einstein's relativity suited the mood. Nobody got very excited about Einstein's brownian motion or his photoelectric effect but relativity promised to turn the world inside out."

http://thestute.com/2015/10/02/in-de...-common-sense/
John Horgan: "This year, physicists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. Although I'm an Einstein fan, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of his legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible."

Pentcho Valev