EINSTEIN'S ABUSE OF TIME

For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and
innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or,
generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most
schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...t-we-knew.html
Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert
Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the
passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed
that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one
another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time
at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in
the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher,
recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means
something special for man, something essentially different from the
past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot
occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow
of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein
wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me
by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced
physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only
an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics'
notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have
internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the
familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable
resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the
disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most
physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's
time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as
experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my
experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I
delight in what I know is the individual's power, however
imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often
conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I
further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in
moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events
exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition
into past, present and future being a useful but subjective
organization."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualit...nstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has
found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France. (...) 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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that
"the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's
1905 false light postulate.

Pentcho Valev

More about the schizophreny that definitively destroyed rationality in
science:

http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.c...al-about-time/
"Kip Thorne http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/Kip-Thorne/108 ,
an expert on Einstein's theory of relativity and the warping of the
universe, explains that when time ticks, "what I see is not always
what you see." How can that be? "Galileo, Newton, and all of the great
scientists before the 20th century thought of space and time as
absolute and having no real intimate connection," Thorne says. "But
Einstein taught us otherwise. Einstein's great insight in 1905 was to
recognize that space and time are personal. Your time flows at one
rate, my time flows at a different rate; you may see a space I may see
as a mixture of space and time. In a very precise sense, it's hard to
grasp." Thorne likes to begin with time. "Einstein's special
relativity and general relativity tell us that if you move at a high
speed past me and I watch clocks that you carry, those clocks will
appear to me to tick more slowly than my clocks tick. But at the same
time, you're going past me, and of course you see me moving relative
to you; you look at my clocks, you see my clocks tick slower than
yours. So I see your clocks tick slower, and you see my clocks tick
slower. It's crazy!" It sounds impossible. "It's crazy," Thorne
repeats, "but it's not impossible. It is possible because what you
regard as two simultaneous events, occurring at the same time but at
different locations in space, I don't see as simultaneous. If you have
two firecrackers and you carry them with you and you move at high
speed and you set them off simultaneously, measurements that I make
will show the firecracker in the back go off first, the firecracker in
the front go off afterward. So there are weird things in how time
seems to behave in simultaneity." The critical factor here is the
absolute, inviolable standardization of the speed of light, which was
Einstein's great insight in his special theory of relativity.
"Einstein intuited that the speed of light will be the same as
measured by everyone, no matter how they move through the universe,"
Thorne explains. "Now, in reality, if you go deeply into the
philosophy of science, what's really going on here, Einstein says, if
you define the rate and flow of time in a manner that makes the laws
of physics look simple - so that, for example, time is ticked in a
regular way by atomic clocks, as atoms vibrate - then, having made
that choice, the speed of light is the same as seen by everybody,
which means that time is personal and that space is personal. It's a
very deep insight."

Einstein "intuited" nothing. In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment
unequivocally refuted the independence of the speed of light of the
speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence
that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate -
and confirmed the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the
emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

Then FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced an aburd ad hoc auxiliary
hypothesis - length contraction - and so made the Michelson-Morley
experiment confirm the independence of the speed of light of the speed
of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that
was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and
refute the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the
emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light. Einstein
just inherited this "independence of the speed of light of the speed
of the emitter" which was a consequence of Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd
ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis.

Pentcho Valev

More about Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis -
the true origin of Einstein's relativity:

Initially (in 1892) objects moving relative to the ether had to shrink
in the direction of their movement but observers sitting on those
objects had to see objects at rest relative to the ether stretching.
So only observers at rest relative to the ether were able to trap
infinitely long objects inside infinitely short containers:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors
at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in
the barn. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the
speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special
Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the
direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if
the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the
reference frame of a stationary observer.....So, as the pole passes
through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the
barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your
switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least
momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The
runner emerges from the far door unscathed.....If the doors are kept
shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If
the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest
in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no
such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not
stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it
was Lorentz contracted. If it does not explode under the strain and it
is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back
to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other
end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be
trapped in a compressed state inside the barn."

Then the mathematics of the absurdity developed and "length
contraction" became reciprocal - ANY observer was able to trap an
infinitely long object inside an infinitely short container - not only
observers at rest relative to the ether. Also, the reciprocity allowed
observers to live in incommensurable worlds - e.g. an observer
travelling with the rivet sees the bug squashed while the bug sees
itself alive and kicking:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu.../bugrivet.html
"The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is
similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the
bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it
looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's
point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just
0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the
bug....The paradox is not resolved."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

More about the schizophreny that definitively destroyed rationality in
science:

http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.c...al-about-time/
"Kip Thorne http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/Kip-Thorne/108 ,
an expert on Einstein's theory of relativity and the warping of the
universe, explains that when time ticks, "what I see is not always
what you see." How can that be? "Galileo, Newton, and all of the great
scientists before the 20th century thought of space and time as
absolute and having no real intimate connection," Thorne says. "But
Einstein taught us otherwise. Einstein's great insight in 1905 was to
recognize that space and time are personal. Your time flows at one
rate, my time flows at a different rate; you may see a space I may see
as a mixture of space and time. In a very precise sense, it's hard to
grasp." Thorne likes to begin with time. "Einstein's special
relativity and general relativity tell us that if you move at a high
speed past me and I watch clocks that you carry, those clocks will
appear to me to tick more slowly than my clocks tick. But at the same
time, you're going past me, and of course you see me moving relative
to you; you look at my clocks, you see my clocks tick slower than
yours. So I see your clocks tick slower, and you see my clocks tick
slower. It's crazy!" It sounds impossible. "It's crazy," Thorne
repeats, "but it's not impossible. It is possible because what you
regard as two simultaneous events, occurring at the same time but at
different locations in space, I don't see as simultaneous. If you have
two firecrackers and you carry them with you and you move at high
speed and you set them off simultaneously, measurements that I make
will show the firecracker in the back go off first, the firecracker in
the front go off afterward. So there are weird things in how time
seems to behave in simultaneity." The critical factor here is the
absolute, inviolable standardization of the speed of light, which was
Einstein's great insight in his special theory of relativity.
"Einstein intuited that the speed of light will be the same as
measured by everyone, no matter how they move through the universe,"
Thorne explains. "Now, in reality, if you go deeply into the
philosophy of science, what's really going on here, Einstein says, if
you define the rate and flow of time in a manner that makes the laws
of physics look simple - so that, for example, time is ticked in a
regular way by atomic clocks, as atoms vibrate - then, having made
that choice, the speed of light is the same as seen by everybody,
which means that time is personal and that space is personal. It's a
very deep insight."

Einstein "intuited" nothing. In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment
unequivocally refuted the independence of the speed of light of the
speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence
that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate -
and confirmed the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the
emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/arch.../02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

Then FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced an absurd ad hoc auxiliary
hypothesis - length contraction - and so made the Michelson-Morley
experiment confirm the independence of the speed of light of the speed
of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that
was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and
refute the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the
emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light. Einstein
just inherited this "independence of the speed of light of the speed
of the emitter" which was a consequence of Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd
ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis.

Pentcho Valev

On Jul 7, 1:47*am, Pentcho Valev wrote:
For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and
innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or,
generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most
schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...hought-we-knew...
Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert
Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the
passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed
that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one
another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time
at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in
the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher,
recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means
something special for man, something essentially different from the
past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot
occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow
of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein
wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me
by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced
physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only
an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics'
notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have
internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the
familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable
resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the
disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most
physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's
time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as
experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my
experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I
delight in what I know is the individual's power, however
imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often
conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I
further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in
moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events
exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition
into past, present and future being a useful but subjective
organization."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualit...nstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has
found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...-makes-the-uni...
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France. (...) 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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that
"the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's
1905 false light postulate.

It is not true, the passage of light is only a false consequence of
the false LT.
Pentcho Valev

http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender (another influential philosopher of science) 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."

Clearly Callender rejects "the passage of time is an illusion", this
absurd consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, but if
asked:

Is Einstein's 1905 light postulate false?

Callender would certainly reply "No!". George Orwell explains this
behaviour so typical of Einsteinians:

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. (...) 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."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and
innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or,
generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most
schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...t-we-knew.html
Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert
Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the
passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed
that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one
another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time
at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in
the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher,
recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means
something special for man, something essentially different from the
past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot
occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow
of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein
wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me
by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced
physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only
an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics'
notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have
internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the
familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable
resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the
disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most
physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's
time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as
experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my
experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I
delight in what I know is the individual's power, however
imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often
conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I
further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in
moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events
exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition
into past, present and future being a useful but subjective
organization."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualit...nstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has
found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France. (...) 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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that
"the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's
1905 false light postulate.

Pentcho Valev

When it comes to destruction of human rationality, Einsteinians know
no limits:

http://www.physorg.com/news198948917.html
"The possibility of going back in time only to kill your ancestors and
prevent your own birth has posed a serious problem for potential time
travelers, not even considering the technical details of building a
time machine. But a new theory proposed by physicists at MIT suggests
that this grandfather paradox could be avoided by using quantum
teleportation and "post-selecting" what a time traveler could and
could not do. So while murdering one’s relatives is unfortunately
possible in the present time, such actions would be strictly forbidden
if you were to try them during a trip to the past."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...007.2615v2.pdf
"Einstein's theory of general relativity allows the existence of
closed timelike curves, paths through spacetime that, if followed,
allow a time traveler - whether human being or elementary particle -
to interact with her former self."

Is there any hope for science?

Pentcho Valev wrote:

For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and
innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or,
generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most
schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...t-we-knew.html
Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert
Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the
passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed
that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one
another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time
at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in
the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher,
recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means
something special for man, something essentially different from the
past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot
occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow
of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein
wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me
by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced
physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only
an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics'
notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have
internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the
familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable
resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the
disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most
physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's
time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as
experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my
experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I
delight in what I know is the individual's power, however
imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often
conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I
further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in
moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events
exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition
into past, present and future being a useful but subjective
organization."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualit...nstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has
found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France. (...) 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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that
"the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's
1905 false light postulate.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho Valev wrote:
When it comes to destruction of human rationality, Einsteinians know
no limits:

No one ever said the universe is somehow constrained to operate
within the bounds of what you think makes sense.

Bob M.

----[ Valev 1 : Myers 0, zero, silch, nada ]-----

Pentcho Valev wrote:
When it comes to destruction of human rationality,
Einsteinians know no limits:

"Bob Myers" wrote:
No one [1] ever said the universe is somehow constrained to
operate within the bounds of what you [2] think makes sense.

hanson wrote:
If you'd included Einstein in [1] & [2] you would have made
sense too. Said Einstein himself:
::AE:: "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to
::AE:: reality, they are not certain; and as far as they
::AE:: are certain, they do not refer to reality."
::AE::"why would anyone be interested in getting exact
::AE:: solutions from such an ephemeral set of equations?"
::AE:: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based
::AE:: on the field concept, i. e., on continuous structures. In that
::AE:: case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [my]
::AE:: gravitation theory included." -- Albert Einstein



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

Einsteinians making career and money by superimposing additional
idiocies on the original one:

http://www.magazine.utoronto.ca/blog...ativity-works/
"Was the big bang the beginning of time? Is the future as fixed as the
present or the past? Could the "flow" of time be an illusion? You
might think that 100 years after Einstein gave us his theory of
relativity, we'd have it all sorted out. But the "Great Time Debate,"
held at U of T in late January featuring two physicists and a
philosopher, showed this was far from the case. Dick Bond, a U of T
cosmologist and physics professor, raised the possibility that what we
observe with our telescopes may be just one "bubble" in a vastly
larger "landscape" of multiple universes. (...) James R. Brown, a U of
T philosophy professor, meanwhile, argued that past, present, and
future - as fundamental as they may seem - do not make up part of our
"objective reality." He says that past, present, and future must all
be considered equally "real." This view is sometimes known as the
"block universe," in which time is represented as just another
dimension, analogous to the dimensions of space, and all parts of the
block are equally real. Incredibly, this leaves the so-called "flow"
of time as mere illusion, Brown says. (...) Lee Smolin, a physicist
with the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, took issue with
that argument: For him, the passage of time is real. He rejects both
the block universe and the idea of multiple universes, preferring the
idea of a single universe in which the passage of time is real. In
this view, the laws of physics can themselves change and evolve over
time. In other words, nothing exists "timelessly" - not even the laws
themselves."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and
innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or,
generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most
schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...t-we-knew.html
Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert
Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the
passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed
that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one
another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time
at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in
the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher,
recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means
something special for man, something essentially different from the
past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot
occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow
of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein
wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me
by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced
physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only
an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics'
notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have
internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the
familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable
resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the
disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most
physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's
time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as
experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my
experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I
delight in what I know is the individual's power, however
imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often
conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I
further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in
moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events
exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition
into past, present and future being a useful but subjective
organization."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualit...nstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has
found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France. (...) 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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes. (...) I was, I
confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion.
It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how
the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness
in such rigid doses. (...) Now consider the passage of time. Is there
a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss
it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative
one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like
to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have
captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by
the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that
"the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's
1905 false light postulate.

Pentcho Valev