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Old March 30th 16, 01:10 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Albert Einstein the Doublethinker

Einstein was a subtle practitioner of doublethink - he was able to defend both thesis and antithesis with the same conviction and without any sign of remorse. So before the advent of Einstein's general relativity, the traveling-twin-is-younger tale was more than vulnerable in an analysis taking into account only the valid conclusions from Einstein's 1905 postulates. The youthfulness of the traveling twin was totally unjustifiable - the stationary twin sees his brother's clock running slow, the traveling twin sees his brother's clock running slow, and "the sudden change of direction" involving acceleration is immaterial, as Einstein had implicitly assumed in his 1905 paper and explicitly announced in 1911:

http://einsteinpapers.press.princeto...vol3-trans/368
Albert Einstein 1911: "The clock runs slower if it is in uniform motion, but if it undergoes a change of direction as a result of a jolt, then the theory of relativity does not tell us what happens. The sudden change of direction might produce a sudden change in the position of the hands of the clock. However, the longer the clock is moving rectilinearly and uniformly with a given speed in a forward motion, i.e., the larger the dimensions of the polygon, the smaller must be the effect of such a hypothetical sudden change."

In 1918 "the sudden change of direction" involving acceleration, which had been immaterial a couple of years before, became crucial:

http://sciliterature.50webs.com/Dialog.htm
Albert Einstein 1918: "A homogenous gravitational field appears, that is directed towards the positive x-axis. Clock U1 is accelerated in the direction of the positive x-axis until it has reached the velocity v, then the gravitational field disappears again. An external force, acting upon U2 in the negative direction of the x-axis prevents U2 from being set in motion by the gravitational field. (...) According to the general theory of relativity, a clock will go faster the higher the gravitational potential of the location where it is located, and during partial process 3 U2 happens to be located at a higher gravitational potential than U1. The calculation shows that this speeding ahead constitutes exactly twice as much as the lagging behind during the partial processes 2 and 4."

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"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. (...) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane.."

Today's Einsteinians are all doublethinkers but not as subtle as Einstein. Subconsciously they accept both thesis and antithesis - the acceleration is immaterial and crucial at the same time - but on the conscious level can defend only one of them. So half of the Einsteinians teach that "the sudden change of direction" involving acceleration is immaterial, the other half teach that it is crucial:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/p...ds-philosophy/
Tim Maudlin: "But even the great Richard Feynman did not always get the explanation right. In "The Feynman Lectures on Physics," he attributes the difference in ages to the acceleration one twin experiences: the twin who accelerates ends up younger. But it is easy to describe cases where the opposite is true, and even cases where neither twin accelerates but they end up different ages."

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/today/archiv...lReadMore.html
Don Lincoln: "Some readers, probably including some of my doctoral-holding colleagues at Fermilab, will claim that the difference between the two twins is that one of the two has experienced an acceleration. (After all, that's how he slowed down and reversed direction.) However, the relativistic equations don't include that acceleration phase; they include just the coasting time at high velocity."

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/research/...tivity2010.pdf
Gary W. Gibbons FRS: "In other words, by simply staying at home Jack has aged relative to Jill. There is no paradox because the lives of the twins are not strictly symmetrical. This might lead one to suspect that the accelerations suffered by Jill might be responsible for the effect. However this is simply not plausible because using identical accelerating phases of her trip, she could have travelled twice as far. This would give twice the amount of time gained."

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
Introduction to Classical Mechanics With Problems and Solutions, David Morin, Cambridge University Press, Chapter 11, p. 14: "Twin A stays on the earth, while twin B flies quickly to a distant star and back. (...) For the entire outward and return parts of the trip, B does observe A's clock running slow, but enough strangeness occurs during the turning-around period to make A end up older."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...yon/index.html
John Norton: "Then, at the end of the outward leg, the traveler abruptly changes motion, accelerating sharply to adopt a new inertial motion directed back to earth. What comes now is the key part of the analysis. The effect of the change of motion is to alter completely the traveler's judgment of simultaneity. The traveler's hypersurfaces of simultaneity now flip up dramatically. Moments after the turn-around, when the travelers clock reads just after 2 days, the traveler will judge the stay-at-home twin's clock to read just after 7 days. That is, the traveler will judge the stay-at-home twin's clock to have jumped suddenly from reading 1 day to reading 7 days. This huge jump puts the stay-at-home twin's clock so far ahead of the traveler's that it is now possible for the stay-at-home twin's clock to be ahead of the travelers when they reunite."

Today's Einsteinians:

http://www.ferovanemocnice.cz/images...es/f_pic31.jpg

Pentcho Valev