DON'T THINK ABOUT SPACE-TIME AS A SHEET ON A BED

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... (...) The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..." v

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U47kyV4TMnE
Nima Arkani-Hamed (06:11): "Almost all of us believe that space-time doesn't really exist, space-time is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks." v

Rejecting Einstein's spacetime without questioning Einstein's 1905 postulates means that Steve Giddings and Nima Arkani-Hamed do not know what they are talking about. This automatically converts then into celebrities - especially Nima Arkani-Hamed who can talk hysterical nonsense for hours. In short, welcome to Einstein's schizophrenic world:

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow FRS: "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." Relativity was a fashionable notion. It promised to sweep away old absolutist notions and refurbish science with modern ideas. In art and literature too, revolutionary changes were doing away with old conventions and standards. All things were being made new. Einstein's relativity suited the mood. Nobody got very excited about Einstein's brownian motion or his photoelectric effect but relativity promised to turn the world inside out."

http://thestute.com/2015/10/02/in-de...-common-sense/
John Horgan: "This year, physicists are celebrating the 100th anniversary of general relativity, Einstein's theory of gravity. Although I'm an Einstein fan, I feel compelled to deplore one aspect of his legacy: the widespread belief that science and common sense are incompatible."

Pentcho Valev

George Ellis is going to fiercely celebrate Einstein's general relativity:

https://philippelefloch.wordpress.com/gr-celebration/
GENERAL RELATIVITY: A CELEBRATION OF THE 100th ANNIVERSARY – Paris, November 16 to 20, 2015. Georges Ellis (Cape Town) The Steps Along The Way Whereby Einstein's General Theory Enabled The Rise of Present Day Cosmology

On the other hand, George Ellis is up against Einstein's special relativity:

https://www.newscientist.com/article...wards-in-time/
New Scientist: "[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. Although you might have seen three things happen in a particular order – 
A, then B, then C – someone moving 
at a different velocity could have seen 
it a different way – C, then B, then A. 
In other words, without simultaneity there is no way of specifying what things happened "now". And if not "now", what is moving through time? Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task."

In short, welcome to Einstein's schizophrenic world:

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."

Pentcho Valev

http://nautil.us/issue/29/scaling/li...n-spacetime-rp
Max Tegmark: "Einstein taught us that there are two equivalent ways of thinking about our physical reality: Either as a three-dimensional place called space, where things change over time, or as a four-dimensional place called spacetime that simply exists, unchanging, never created, and never destroyed. (...) This is analogous to your use of the terms here, in front of me, and behind me to refer to different parts of spacetime relative to your present position. The part that's in front of you is clearly no less real than the part behind you—indeed, if you're walking forward, some of what's presently in front of you will be behind you in the future, and is presently behind various other people. Analogously, in spacetime, the future is just as real as the past—parts of spacetime that are presently in your future will, in your future, be in your past. Since spacetime is static and unchanging, no parts of it can change their reality status, and all parts must be equally real."

This is an idiocy that owes its existence to another idiocy advanced by Einstein - the speed of light (relative to the observer) is independent of the speed of the observer:

http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/20...rs-of-gravity/
"Baumgarte began by discussing special relativity, which Einstein developed, 10 years earlier, in 1905, while he was employed as a patent officer in Bern, Switzerland. Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime."

http://www.aip.org/history/exhibits/...relativity.htm
John Stachel: "But here he ran into the most blatant-seeming contradiction, which I mentioned earlier when first discussing the two principles. As noted then, the Maxwell-Lorentz equations imply that there exists (at least) one inertial frame in which the speed of light is a constant regardless of the motion of the light source. Einstein's version of the relativity principle (minus the ether) requires that, if this is true for one inertial frame, it must be true for all inertial frames. But this seems to be nonsense. How can it happen that the speed of light relative to an observer cannot be increased or decreased if that observer moves towards or away from a light beam? Einstein states that he wrestled with this problem over a lengthy period of time, to the point of despair."

As any sane interpretation of the Doppler effect (moving observer) shows, the speed of light (relative to the observer) does depend on the speed of the observer, in violation of Einstein's relativity:

http://physics.bu.edu/~redner/211-sp...9_doppler.html
Professor Sidney Redner: "The Doppler effect is the shift in frequency of a wave that occurs when the wave source, or the detector of the wave, is moving. Applications of the Doppler effect range from medical tests using ultrasound to radar detectors and astronomy (with electromagnetic waves). (...) We will focus on sound waves in describing the Doppler effect, but it works for other waves too. (...) Let's say you, the observer, now move toward the source with velocity vO. You encounter more waves per unit time than you did before. Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed: v'=v+vO. The frequency of the waves you detect is higher, and is given by: f'=v'/λ=(v+vO)/λ."

"Relative to you, the waves travel at a higher speed" = Goodbye Einstein!

http://www.hep.man.ac.uk/u/roger/PHY.../lecture18.pdf
Professor Roger Barlow: "The Doppler effect - changes in frequencies when sources or observers are in motion - is familiar to anyone who has stood at the roadside and watched (and listened) to the cars go by. It applies to all types of wave, not just sound. (...) Moving Observer. Now suppose the source is fixed but the observer is moving towards the source, with speed v. In time t, ct/λ waves pass a fixed point. A moving point adds another vt/λ. So f'=(c+v)/λ."

That is, for all types of wave, the speed of the waves relative to the fixed point (observer) is

(ct/λ)(λ/t) = c

The speed of the waves relative to the moving point (observer) is

(ct/λ + vt/λ)(λ/t) = c + v,

in violation of Einstein's relativity.

Pentcho Valev