GROUNDBREAKING EINSTEINIANS

http://ttbook.org/book/lee-smolin-cr...oblems-physics
"Groundbreaking theoretical physicist Lee Smolin weighs in on creative problem solving in physics. Some advice that has served him? Start fresh every ten years."

Ten years ago Groundbreaking Smolin launched a fierce attack against Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate:

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

Recently Groundbreaking Smolin started fresh - now he is fiercely attacking a consequence of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate - Einstein's idiotic concept of time - but is wholeheartedly defending the postulate itself:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
"Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ.. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Cr.../dp/0547511728
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

http://www.independent.com/news/2013...7/time-reborn/
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me.
LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality.
QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here?
LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.

In ten years Groundbreaking Smolin will start fresh again and launch a fierce attack against Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate while wholeheartedly defending its consequence, Einstein's idiotic concept of time.

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A supergroundbreaking Einsteinian:

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

Special relativity is the root of all the evil but general relativity is not and Magueijo enthusiastically teaches it, Divine Einstein, yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo%C3%A3o_Magueijo
"João Magueijo (...) is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates "General Relativity" and postgraduates "Advanced General Relativity"."

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Special relativity destroyed the common "now" and for that reason Groundbreaking George Ellis rejects its absurd consequences. He is going to define this "now" within general relativity. Special relativity, with its relativity of simultaneity, will continue to confuse the picture but Groundbreaking Ellis is not going to pay it any attention - the simultaneity is "just psychology" and "doesn't mean anything for physics":

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029410.900
Saving time: Physics killed it. Do we need it back?, Michael Slezak: "Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century. According to his special theory of relativity, there is no way to specify events that everyone can agree happen simultaneously. Two events that are both "now" to you will happen at different times for anyone moving at another speed. Other people will see a different now that might contain elements of yours - but equally might not. "You can define it, but people won't necessarily agree," says physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The result is a picture known as the block universe: the universe seen from that impossible vantage point outside space and time. You can by all means mark what you think is "now" with a red dot, but there is nothing that distinguishes that place from any other, except that you are there. Past and future are no more physically distinguished than left and right. There are things that are closer to you in time, and things that are further away, just as there are things that are near or far away in space. But the idea that time flows past you is just as absurd as the suggestion that space does. George Ellis, a cosmologist at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, does not buy any of that. The block universe contradicts every single experience we have, he says. "It doesn't represent the passage of time, and that's one of the most fundamental features of daily life. So it's a bad model of reality." (...) Ellis thinks it is perfectly possible to define this "now" within relativity, too. Einstein's general theory of relativity, published a decade after his special theory, is a full picture of space and time, describing how a combined space-time is warped by the presence of matter to produce the force we call gravity. If we gathered enough data and had a big enough computer, we might take account of all the space-time distortions of all the galaxies, black holes and other matter in the universe to calculate a 3D surface on which each point is exactly the same age as the point where we are. "Space-time is defined up to then and not beyond," says Ellis. This present is still not "now" as we know it, because not everything on this 3D surface happens simultaneously: as demanded by special relativity, if you and I are moving at different speeds on it, we will still disagree on what is happening now. But that doesn't necessarily matter. Within relativity, things that are causally related to one another happen in the same order from all perspectives, even if individual observers can't agree on exactly when they happened. "That's just psychology," says Ellis. "It makes you feel happy to think this is imultaneous with that, but it doesn't mean anything for physics."

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Groundbreaking Smolin in deep crisis:

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Cr.../dp/0547511728
Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe, Lee Smolin, p. 163: "To describe how the correlations are established, a hidden-variables theory must embrace one observer's definition of simultaneity. This means, in turn, that there is a preferred notion of rest. And that, in turn, implies that motion is absolute. Motion is absolutely meaningful, because you can talk absolutely about who is moving with respect to that one observer - call him Aristotle. Aristotle is at rest. Anything he sees as moving is really moving. End of story. In other words, Einstein was wrong. Newton was wrong. Galileo was wrong. There is no relativity of motion."

A natural mind disintegration in Divine Albert's world. Only a couple of years ago Smolin was much better and even on the right track:

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ.. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."

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O tempora o mores:

http://www.noozhawk.com/article/ucsb...0#.UqeoYxWexjo
"Could Einstein's theory of relativity be wrong? That's among the burning questions being asked by theoretical physicists today. It's a startling claim and one that has received a lot of attention from other scientists. Researchers from UC Santa Barbara's Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Theretical Physics (KITP) have received a $1.32 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue their work on finding an answer."

http://www.reset-italia.net/wp-conte...iam-andiam.jpg

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