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Old April 27th 12, 11:07 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default THERMODYNAMICS AND RELATIVITY: DEAD SCIENCES

Dead science is neither right nor wrong insofar as, of all the official scientists, not one could think of a reason why the truthfulness of the axioms or the consistency of the consequences should be discussed. Yet Lee Smolin needs more evidence of science's death and sets a decisive experiment: "Would FQXi pay me if I suddenly declare that Divine Albert's Divine Theory is deeply wrong? If they do and if there is no other reaction, then this science couldn't be more dead!"

Smolin's experiment proved successful:

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

Pentcho Valev