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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY



 
 
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  #1  
Old May 31st 11, 07:01 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Recently John Norton, one of the leading priests in Einsteiniana, sent
a clear message to Einsteinians all over the world: The concept of
time, initially deduced from Einstein's special relativity and then
deformed by Einstein's general relativity, should be rejected:

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.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"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."

Overexcited, the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) decided to
give substantial sums of money to Einsteinians who find it profitable
to develop Norton's ideas:

http://www.fqxi.org/grants/large/awardees/list
(...)
Lee Smolin Perimeter Institute $47,500 Physical and cosmological
consequences of the hypotheses of the reality of time
(...)
Craig Callender University of California, San Diego $102,263 What
Makes Time Special
(...)

http://www.fqxi.org/community

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.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/151
"The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion." It was none other than Einstein who uttered
these words. He was speaking about how our perception of time differs
from the fundamental nature of time in physics. Take our perceptions
first: We have a clear sense of the present moment, what came before,
and what might come after. Unfortunately, physics treats time rather
differently. Einstein's theory of special relativity presents us with
a four-dimensional spacetime, in which the past, present and future
are already mapped out. There is no special "now," just as there's no
special "here." And just like spacetime does not have a fundamental
direction - forcing us to move inexorably from east to west, say -
time does not flow. "You have this big gap between the time of
fundamental science and the time we experience," says Craig Callender,
a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. It's this
gap that he has set out to narrow, using ideas from physics,
evolutionary theory and cognitive science."

Some Einsteinians know (others don't care) that Einstein's special
relativity is based on two postulates: the principle of relativity and
the principle of constancy of the speed of light. So if you wish to
reject a deductive consequence of the theory, you will have to declare
at least one of the postulates false. For the moment only the option:

"Principle of relativity false, Principle of constancy of the speed of
light true"

seems to be permitted in Einsteiniana:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5339/
Lorentzian theories vs. Einsteinian special relativity - a logico-
empiricist reconstruction
Laszlo E. Szabo
"It is widely believed that the principal difference between
Einstein's special relativity and its contemporary rival Lorentz-type
theories was that while the Lorentz-type theories were also capable of
"explaining away" the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment
and other experimental findings by means of the distortions of moving
measuring-rods and moving clocks, special relativity revealed more
fundamental new facts about the geometry of space-time behind these
phenomena. I shall argue that special relativity tells us nothing new
about the geometry of space-time, in comparison with the pre-
relativistic Galileo-invariant conceptions; it simply calls something
else "space-time", and this something else has different properties.
All statements of special relativity about those features of reality
that correspond to the original meaning of the terms "space" and
"time" are identical with the corresponding traditional pre-
relativistic statements. It will be also argued that special
relativity and Lorentz theory are completely identical in both senses,
as theories about space-time and as theories about the behavior of
moving physical objects."

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"It is remarkable that the Special Theory has thus far managed to
survive largely unscathed the collapse of its essential
epistemological underpinnings. One wonders how this can be so.
Undoubtedly a major part of the answer is the understandable one that
physicists are not epistemologists; physicists typically know no more
about epistemology, the philosophy of language (e.g. problems with the
verificationist criterion of semantic meaning), and ontology than
philosophers typically know about physics. The precise philosophical
arguments for the illogicality, falsity, or unjustifiably of the
epistemological, semantic, and ontological presuppositions of the
Special Theory remain, with a few exceptions, unknown among
physicists. The price paid for the growth of knowledge is increased
specialization, which, paradoxically, also prevents or reverses the
growth of knowledge, since specialists in one field often base their
work on premises that (unbeknownst to them) have been refuted or
disconfirmed in another field. The only solution we can see for this
problem is that the training or schooling of physicists ought to
include schooling in philosophy (and, as we shall see, the converse
should hold for philosophers). Perhaps this is most practicable in the
form of there being thinkers who take as their specialization the
intersection of physics and philosophy and the works of these
thinkers, at least in "introductory formats", being a part of the
education of both physicists and philosophers. If this proves
unfeasible and the situation remains as it presently stands, the
unpalatable situation may result that neither physicists nor
philosophers are in a position to have adequately justified beliefs
about space and time but only philosophers of physics (or the few
thinkers who are both philosophers and physicists, such as David
Albert and Bas Van Fraassen, and, from the side of physics, Niels Bohr
and David Bohm, who developed philosophical theories in addition to
physically interpreted equations). Apart from leaving unaddressed the
epistemological and semantic presuppositions of STR, there is an even
stronger factor behind physicists' unwillingness to abandon the
Special Theory. The Special Theory is a part of orthodox quantum field
theory (QFT) (quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics),
which aims to unify the Special Theory with quantum mechanics.
Physicists would be at a loss as to how to proceed if they rejected
the Special Theory as unjustified, since they (for the most part)
believe that this would require them to reject QFT. In the light of
this dependence on Special Relativity, physicists are not likely to
abandon it unless it is observationally disconfirmed and there is an
observationally adequate theory available to replace it. In fact,
there is a theory that is not merely observationally equivalent to the
Special Theory, but also observationally superior to it, namely
Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory. Lorentz's theory is regarded by
many physicists who have studied Lorentzian theory, such as J.S. Bell,
to be observationally equivalent to the Special Theory. However a
Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory is, in fact, observationally
superior to the Special Theory (a fact that Bell, surprisingly, did
not point out), since a Lorentzian theory, in contrast to the Special
Theory, is consistent with the relations of absolute, instantaneous
simultaneity..."

http://hps.elte.hu/PIRT.Budapest/
Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy In the Interpretations of
Relativity Theory, Budapest 4-6 September 2009
"The objective of the conference is to discuss the mathematical,
physical and philosophical elements in the physical interpretations of
Relativity Theory (PIRT); the physical and philosophical arguments and
commitments shaping those interpretations and the various applications
of the theory, especially in relativistic cosmology and relativistic
quantum theory. The organizing committee is open for discussion of
recent advances in investigations of the mathematical, logical and
conceptual structure of Relativity Theory, as well as for analysis of
the cultural, ideological and philosophical factors that have roles in
its evolution and in the development of the modern physical world view
determined to a considerable extent by that theory. The conference
intends to review the fruitfulness of orthodox Relativity, as
developed from the Einstein-Minkowski formulation, and to suggest how
history and philosophy of science clarify the relationship between the
accepted relativistic formal structure and the various physical
interpretations associated with it. While the organizing committee
encourages critical investigations and welcomes both Einsteinian and
non-Einsteinian (Lorentzian, etc.) approaches, including the recently
proposed ether-type theories, it is assumed that the received formal
structure of the theory is valid and anti-relativistic papers will not
be accepted."

Pentcho Valev

  #2  
Old June 1st 11, 07:36 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

On May 31 Pentcho Valev wrote:

For the moment only the option:

"Principle of relativity false, Principle of constancy of the speed of
light true"

seems to be permitted in Einsteiniana...


Yet:

http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5237I.pdf
Craig Callender: "Scientists are free to devise models of the world
wherein (say) the absolute speed of light is not constant. To be taken
seriously, however, the comment is not an idle one but rather one
embedded in an alterative systematization of a comparable range of
phenomena. It's a conceivable physical possibility. In fact it's
interesting that one way this possibility is challenged (e.g., Ellis
and Uzan 2005) is by pointing out how much the rest of the system
hangs on the speed of light being constant - it's a way of pointing
out that the scientist hasn't yet discharged her obligation to fit the
new possibility into a large and equally good system."

Craig Callender, I suspect you have never thought of Newton's emission
theory of light where "the absolute speed of light is not constant":

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Unfortunately, driven by doublethink, John Norton disturbs your
"protective stupidity" and explains that "the Michelson-Morley
experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that
CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE":

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the
importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even
though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the
experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation,
has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with
Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late
19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light
predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised
the greatest theoretician of the day."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers
in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues
that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of
light; and he gave us the crucial insight that 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. Even today, this point
needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible
with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

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."

Craig Callender, is crimestop so strong that you are unable to think
even of what John Norton says? How about the following text by Banesh
Hoffmann (perhaps it paralyzes you completely):

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"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."

Pentcho Valev

  #3  
Old June 1st 11, 03:26 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

Revolution in science? No of course. Just extracting additional career
and money from a "heresy" which is in fact camouflage (deviates the
attention from Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light
postulate). Both authors ("an international team of leading
philosophers and physicists") and readers continue to sing,
invariably, "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity,
relativity, relativity" (How wrong Thomas Kuhn was!):

http://www.haverford.edu/physics/songs/divine.htm
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein
Not Maxwell, Curie, or Bohr!
He explained the photo-electric effect,
And launched quantum physics with his intellect!
His fame went glo-bell, he won the Nobel --
He should have been given four!
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein,
Professor with brains galore!
No-one could outshine Professor Einstein --
Egad, could that guy derive!
He gave us special relativity,
That's always made him a hero to me!
Brownian motion, my true devotion,
He mastered back in aught-five!
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein,
Professor in overdrive!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity.
Yes we all believe in relativity, 8.033, relativity.
Einstein's postulates imply
That planes are shorter when they fly.
Their clocks are slowed by time dilation
And look warped from aberration.
We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity.
Yes we all believe in relativity, 8.033, relativity.

Pentcho Valev

  #4  
Old June 2nd 11, 08:07 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Repercussions in France: Einsteiniana's local godfather (Thibault
Damour) continues to teach, fiercely, the "new conceptualization of
time" based on Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate
but a more insiginificant member (Etienne Klein), influenced by John
Norton, Craig Callender and Lee Smolin, begs to disagree. Still the
crimestop continues to be in force: Etienne Klein would never inform
the French public that the properties of time he rejects are in fact
consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light
postulate:

http://www-cosmosaf.iap.fr/Damour1.htm
Thibault Damour: "En 1905, Einstein (après d'importants travaux de
Lorentz et de Poincaré) apporta un premier bouleversement conceptuel
des 4 catégories fondamentales de la physique du 19ième siècle, à
travers sa théorie de la "relativité restreinte". Cette théorie
unifie les deux catégories séparées d'Espace et de Temps en une
nouvelle catégorie: celle d'Espace-Temps. L'Espace-Temps est quadri-
dimensionnel, donné a priori, et muni d'une géométrie de Poincaré-
Minkowski. Il définit le cadre d' "existence continuée" (c'est-à-dire
de l'existence conçue dans toute sa durée) de la réalité. (...)
L'Espace-Temps de la Relativité Restreinte a apporté plusieurs
bouleversements des anciennes catégories: (...) (ii) l'existence de
l'instant présent" (du "maintenant") comme portant la seule réalité de
l'étant est fortement mise en doute car il devient incompatible avec
la structure géométrique de l'Espace-Temps de sélectionner une famille
de "tranches" horizontales correspondant à "l'écoulement du temps"..."

http://www.academie-sciences.fr/acti...ein_Damour.pdf
Thibault Damour: "Mentionnons pour finir qu'Einstein prenait au
sérieux l'impact existentiel de la révolution conceptuelle apportée
par la théorie de la Relativité, et notamment l'impossibilité de
donner un sens objectif au «maintenant» et plus généralement au
passage subjectif du temps. Il exprima cette idée de façon prégnante
dans la lettre de condoléances qu'il écrivit le 21 mars 1955 (un mois
avant sa propre mort) à la famille de son ami intime, Michele Besso,
qui venait de mourir : «Voilà qu'il m’a de nouveau précédé de peu en
quittant ce monde étrange. Cela ne signifie rien. Pour nous,
physiciens dans l'âme, la séparation entre passé, présent et avenir ne
garde que la valeur d'une illusion, si tenace soit-elle.»"

http://www.psycho-energie.fr/double/...hibault-damour
Thibault Damour: "Le formalisme de la relativité einsteinienne dit que
le temps est une illusion..."

http://www-llb.cea.fr/Phocea/Vie_des...php?id_ast=761
Two-day conference "Le Temps" (jointly with Séminaire Poincaré), IHP,
4 et 18 décembre 2010
http://www.bourbaphy.fr/damourtemps.pdf
Thibault Damour: "Textbook presentations of Special Relativity often
fail to convey the revolutionary nature, with respect to the "common
conception of time", of the seminal paper of Einstein in June 1905. It
is true that many of the equations, and mathematical considerations,
of this paper were also contained in a 1904 paper of Lorentz, and in
two papers of Poincaré submitted in June and July 1905. It is also
true that the central informational core of a physical theory is
defined by its fundamental equations, and that for some theories
(notably Quantum Mechanics) the fundamental equations were discovered
before their physical interpretation. However, in the case of Special
Relativity, the egregious merit of Einstein was, apart from his new
mathematical results and his new physical predictions (notably about
the comparison of the readings of clocks which have moved with respect
to each other) the conceptual breakthrough that the rescaled "local
time" variable t' of Lorentz was "purely and simply, the time", as
experienced by a moving observer. This new conceptualization of time
implied a deep upheaval of the common conception of time. (...) The
paradigm of the special relativistic upheaval of the usual concept of
time is the twin paradox. Let us emphasize that this striking example
of time dilation proves that time travel (towards the future) is
possible. As a gedanken experiment (if we neglect practicalities such
as the technology needed for reaching velocities comparable to the
velocity of light, the cost of the fuel and the capacity of the
traveller to sustain high accelerations), it shows that a sentient
being can jump, "within a minute" (of his experienced time)
arbitrarily far in the future, say sixty million years ahead, and see,
and be part of, what (will) happen then on Earth. This is a clear way
of realizing that the future "already exists" (as we can experience it
"in a minute"). No wonder that many people, attached to the usual idea
of an external flow of time, refused to believe that the travelling
twin will come back younger than his sedentary brother."

http://hps.master.univ-paris7.fr/cours_du_temps.doc
Etienne Klein: "Aujourd'hui, L'astrophysicien Thibault Damour
développe à sa manière des idées qui vont dans le même sens. Selon
lui, le temps qui passe (qu'il sagisse d'un fait ou de notre
sentiment) est le produit de notre seule subjectivité, un effet que
nous devrions au caractère irréversible de notre mise en mémoire, de
sorte que la question du cours du temps relèverait non pas de la
physique, mais des sciences cognitives. Il écrit : « De même que la
notion de température n'a aucun sens si l'on considère un système
constitué d'un petit nombre de particules, de même il est probable que
la notion d'écoulement du temps n'a de sens que pour certains systèmes
complexes, qui évoluent hors de l'équilibre thermodynamique, et qui
gèrent d'une certaine façon les informations accumulées dans leur
mémoire. » Le temps ne serait donc qu'une apparence d'ordre
psychologique : « Dans le domaine d'espace-temps que nous observons,
poursuit-il, nous avons l'impression qu'il s'écoule "du bas vers le
haut" de l'espace-temps, alors qu'en réalité ce dernier constitue un
bloc rigide qui n'est nullement orienté a priori : il ne le devient
que pour nous [35]. » L'existence même d'un « cours du temps », ou
d'un « passage du temps », n'est ainsi que simple apparence pour de
nombreux physiciens contemporains. Certains vont même jusqu'à
considérer le passage du temps comme une pure illusion, comme un
produit culturel abusivement dérivé de la métaphore du fleuve. C'est
en effet la conception dite de l'« univers-bloc » qui semble avoir les
faveurs d'une majorité de physiciens. Dans le droit fil de la théorie
de la relativité, celle-ci consiste à invoquer un univers constitué
d'un continuum d'espace-temps à quatre dimensions, privé de tout flux
temporel : tous les événements, qu'ils soient passés, présents et
futurs, ont exactement la même réalité, de la même façon que
différents lieux coexistent, en même temps et avec le même poids
ontologique, dans l'espace. En d'autres termes, les notions de passé
ou de futur ne sont que des notions relatives, comme celles d'Est et
d'Ouest. En un sens, tout ce qui va exister existe déjà et tout ce qui
a existé existe encore. L'espace-temps contient l'ensemble de
l'histoire de la réalité comme la partition contient l'uvre musicale :
la partition existe sous une forme statique, mais ce qu'elle contient,
l'esprit humain l'appréhende généralement sous la forme d'un flux
temporel."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev

  #5  
Old June 2nd 11, 02:30 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

French thinkers translated Callender's paper (where the absurd
consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light
postulate had been rejected) and are now waiting for John Norton,
Craig Callender and Lee Smolin to give additional instructions. The
Great Revolution in Science seems to be just around the corner:

http://www.pourlascience.fr/ewb_page...iona-26041.php
Craig CALLENDER: "Einstein lança l'assaut suivant en éliminant la
simultanéité absolue. D'après sa théorie de la relativité restreinte,
la détermination des événements qui se produisent au même instant
dépend du mouvement de l'observateur. La véritable arène des
événements n'est ni le temps ni l'espace, mais leur réunion : l'espace-
temps. Deux observateurs se déplaçant à des vitesses différentes ne
seront pas d'accord sur l'instant ni sur le lieu où se produit un
événement, mais ils seront d'accord sur sa localisation dans l'espace-
temps. L'espace et le temps sont ainsi des concepts plus secondaires.
Einstein n'a fait qu'empirer les choses en 1915 avec sa théorie de la
relativité générale, qui étend la relativité restreinte à des
situations où la gravitation est présente."

There is always a Great Revolution in Science "just around the corner"
in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=5538
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/cover
"Was Einstein Wrong? What if Einstein was wrong? The day João Magueijo
began to doubt Albert Einstein started inauspiciously. It was a rainy
winter morning in 1995 at Cambridge University, where Magueijo was a
research fellow in theoretical physics. He was tramping across a
sodden soccer field, suffering from a hangover and mumbling to
himself, when out of the gray a heretical idea brought him to a full
stop: What if Einstein was wrong? What if, rather than being forever
constant, the speed of light could change? Magueijo stood there in the
downpour. What would that mean?"

http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten
By Jonathan Leake, Science Editor
The Sunday Times - London
"A group of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the
rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are
actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book,
Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as
even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is
Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same -
186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
light.''

http://www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm
Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have
committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a
variable speed of light?
Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I
hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10
years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're
productive.
Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics?
Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if
you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me
face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an
angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I
may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured.
Question: So why should the speed of light vary?
Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why
should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of
light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems
in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that
relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some
point...

http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Se...lden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the
speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates
special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at
a constant speed for all observers..."

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smol...n03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity.....But there is another
possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved,
but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so
as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most
shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real
possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without
violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years
ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I
did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial
College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept
coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all
seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it
was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they
had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how
Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special
relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy."

Pentcho Valev

  #6  
Old June 3rd 11, 06:53 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/152
The Crystallizing Universe
Kate Becker wrote: "The view that the past, the present and the future
are of exactly the same physical character seems to be supported by
Einstein's special theory of relativity..."

This view is DEDUCED in Einstein's special theory of relativity, and
if you don't accept it, you should suggest which of the two postulates
- the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the
speed of light - is false. Any different discussion amounts to
crimestop:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev

  #7  
Old June 4th 11, 03:08 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "There are occasions in which our best science requires
us to dismiss some fact of experience as an illusion. All our ordinary
experience of water and air is that they are perfectly continuous
fluids. Yet our best science tells us that is an illusion. On a
sufficiently fine scale both have the granularity of molecules. The
appearance of continuity is an illusion. But it is one that is readily
explicable by the extremely small size of atoms. Again, light appears
to us to propagate instantaneously in ordinary experience. Yet it is
essential for relativity theory that it have a finite speed of
propagation. So we dismiss the appearance of instantaneous propagation
as an illusion. Once again, it is readily explicable by the extremely
short propagation times needed, which are well below those we can
discern in ordinary processes. 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."

Norton's euphemism "We don't find passage in our present theories" is
deciphered by Thibault Damour:

http://www.psycho-energie.fr/double/...hibault-damour
Thibault Damour: "Le formalisme de la relativité einsteinienne dit que
le temps est une illusion..."

In a world different from Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world John
Norton would be regarded as a fierce antirelativist. In Einsteiniana's
schizophrenic world he is just "the subtlest practitioner of
doublethink":

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

  #8  
Old June 5th 11, 06:23 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Self-mutilation of Einsteiniana's minds:

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.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-7.html
George Orwell: "In the end the Party would announce that two and two
made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that
they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their
position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the
very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their
philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was
terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise,
but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two
and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the
past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist
only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

Pentcho Valev

  #9  
Old June 6th 11, 07:29 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Doublethink in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:

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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...sim/index.html
John Norton: "In a relativistic (i.e. Minkowski) spacetime, the
relativity of simultaneity tells us that there are many ways to do
this; there is no unique, preferred unstacking. In this sense, space
and time get fused together and this fusion is the real novelty of the
spacetime approach in relativity theory. This novelty is surely what
Hermann Minkowski had in mind when he wrote in the introduction to his
famous lecture "Space and Time" of 1908: "The views of space and time
which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of
experimental physics and therein lies their strength. They are
radical. Henceforth space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to
fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality."

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

  #10  
Old June 7th 11, 08:55 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY

http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/129
"Now Horava, at the University of California, Berkeley, claims to have
found a solution that is both simple and - in physics terms, at least
- sacrilegious. To make the two theories gel, he argues, you need to
throw out Einstein's tenet that time is always relative, never
absolute. Horava's controversial idea is based on the fact that the
description of space and time in the quantum and relativistic worlds
are in conflict. Quantum theory harks back to the Newtonian concept
that time is absolute - an impassive backdrop against which events
take place. In contrast, general relativity tells us that space and
time are fundamentally intertwined; two events can only be marked
relative to one another, and not relative to an absolute background
clock. Einstein's subjective notion of time is well accepted and is
the hallmark of Lorentz invariance, the property that lies at the
heart of general relativity. "Lorentz invariance is not actually
fundamental to a theory of quantum gravity," says Horava. "But the
problem so far has been that many cosmologists are wedded to the
concept."

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...705.4507v1.pdf
Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat: "The question is then: If Lorentz
invariance is broken, what happens to the speed of light? Given that
Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of
observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the
speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles
must be violated."

Eternal silence in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Pentcho Valev

 




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