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EINSTEINIANA, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, HONESTY



 
 
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Old August 24th 10, 06:56 AM posted to sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default EINSTEINIANA, PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE, HONESTY

Judging from the quotations below, philosophers of science John Norton
and Craig Callender reject the consequence of Einstein's 1905 light
postulate known as "the passage of time is an illusion". Then what
could possibly prevent both philosophers from making the next obvious
step and inferring that Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false?

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.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "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

 




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