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Old August 19th 09, 10:01 AM posted to alt.philosophy,sci.logic,sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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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."


Multiplethink in Einsteiniana:

http://www.answers.com/topic/gravitational-redshift
"The gravitational weakening of light from high-gravity stars was
predicted by John Michell in 1783 and Pierre-Simon Laplace in 1796,
using Isaac Newton's concept of light corpuscles (see: emission
theory) and who predicted that some stars would have a gravity so
strong that light would not be able to escape. The effect of gravity
on light was then explored by Johann Georg von Soldner (1801), who
calculated the amount of deflection of a light ray by the sun,
arriving at the Newtonian answer which is half the value predicted by
general relativity. All of this early work assumed that light could
slow down and fall, which was inconsistent with the modern
understanding of light waves. Once it became accepted that light is an
electromagnetic wave, it was clear that the frequency of light should
not change from place to place, since waves from a source with a fixed
frequency keep the same frequency everywhere. The only way around this
conclusion would be if time itself was altered - if clocks at
different points had different rates. This was precisely Einstein's
conclusion in 1911. He considered an accelerating box, and noted that
according to the special theory of relativity, the clock rate at the
bottom of the box was slower than the clock rate at the top. (...) The
changing rates of clocks allowed Einstein to conclude that light waves
change frequency as they move, and the frequency/energy relationship
for photons allowed him to see that this was best interpreted as the
effect of the gravitational field on the mass-energy of the photon."

Pentcho Valev