More remnants of conscience in the era of Postscientism:

http://www.voxy.co.nz/national/leadi...nstein/5/68244
"Leading Astronomer To Explore Dark Energy And Einstein (...) The
universe is expanding faster and faster but it is because of a
mysterious force called dark energy or a break down in Einstein's
theory of relativity?"

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...nts-2010-06-18
NEW SCIENTIST: "Claiming that something can move faster than light is
a good conversation-stopper in physics. People edge away from you in
cocktail parties; friends never return phone calls. You just don't
mess with Albert Einstein. (...) Singleton says the basic principle of
FTL currents goes back to work by English physicist Oliver Heaviside
and German physicist Arnold Sommerfeldt in the 1890s, but was
forgotten because Einstein's theories dissuaded physicists from
thinking about FTL phenomena, even those that evaded the theories'
strictures. I've only just touched on this engrossing physics and I
recommend you read the team's papers, beginning with this one. "People
just don't think about things moving faster than the speed of light,"
Singleton says. "This is a completely wide open and unexplored field."

http://io9.com/5607692/are-physicist...up-dark-energy
Dave Goldberg, Associate Professor of Physics at Drexel University:
"The idea of dark energy is so ridiculous that almost every question
is based on trying to make it go away. And believe me, I share your
concerns. I don't want to believe in dark energy, but I have no
choice. (...) Basically, if you want to get rid of dark energy, you
have to get rid of relativity."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/science/26essay.html
"The worrying continued. Lawrence Krauss, a cosmologist from Arizona
State, said that most theories were wrong. "We get the notions they
are right because we keep talking about them," he said. Not only are
most theories wrong, he said, but most data are also wrong..."

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/scienc.../87150187.html
"Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe (...) "We have a
complete inventory of the universe," Sean Carroll, a California
Institute of Technology cosmologist, has said, "and it makes no
sense."

http://io9.com/5528758/ask-a-physici...in-dark-matter
Dave Goldberg, Associate Professor of Physics at Drexel University:
"And don't even get me started about Dark Energy. It's the stuff that
accelerates the universe, and if you think you've got a problem with
Dark Matter, wait'll you see Dark Energy. It's no so much that we
don't understand where Dark Energy could come from; it's just that the
"natural" value (the one that comes out of reasonable assumptions
based on vacuum energy) is about 10^100 times the density that we
actually observe. For my money, this is the absolute biggest problem
in physics."

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow: "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."

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/...nd-relativism/
Washington Times: "A frequently heard statement of cultural relativism
goes like this: "If it feels right for you, it's OK. Who is to say
you're wrong?" One individual's experience is as "valid" as another's.
There is no "preferred" or higher vantage point from which to judge
these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of
the beholder. The "I" indeed is the "ultimate measure." The special
theory of relativity imposes on the physical world a claim that is
very similar to the one made by relativism. (...) So how come the
speed of light always stays the same? Einstein argued that when the
observer moves relative to an object, distance and time always adjust
themselves just enough to preserve light speed as a constant. Speed is
distance divided by time. So, Einstein argued, length contracts and
time dilates to just the extent needed to keep the speed of light ever
the same. Space and time are the alpha and omega of the physical
world. They are the stage within which everything happens. But if they
must trim and tarry whenever the observer moves, that puts "the
observer" in the driver's seat. Reality becomes observer-dependent.
Again, then, we find that the "I" is the ultimate measure. Pondering
this in Prague in the 1950s, Beckmann could not accept it. The
observer's function is to observe, he said, not to affect what's out
there. Relativity meant that two and two didn't quite add up any more
and elevated science into a priesthood of obscurity. Common sense
could no longer be trusted."

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As
the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are
"riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes
that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an
elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this
confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6
of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854
(Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of
obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the
writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and
Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the
(thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational
Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education
Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method
is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes
all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew
"belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture
of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all,
curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that
it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and
it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion
of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for
the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes
this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any
hope for UK? I am really not sure."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616
"Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of
"Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them.
Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian
statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged
to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate
stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to
the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of
these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress."

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of
Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully
powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most
perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-
dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other
processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd
sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns
out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are
differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow
captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage
of time."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, 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.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with
the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but
their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time,
so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle.
You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world
might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."

Pentcho Valev