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THE LATEST PROFITEER IN EINSTEINIANA



 
 
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  #1  
Old February 27th 10, 08:00 AM posted to sci.logic,alt.philosophy,sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default THE LATEST PROFITEER IN EINSTEINIANA

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/what-is-time/
"Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech where he focuses
on theories of cosmology, field theory and gravitation by studying the
evolution of the universe. Carroll's latest book, From Eternity to
He The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is an attempt to
bring his theory of time and the universe to physicists and
nonphysicists alike. (...) Sean Carroll: I'm trying to understand how
time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different
aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how
we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that
I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is
different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember
the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that
happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an
omelet into an egg. And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow
of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an
Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called
entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And
it tends to grow. That's the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy
goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly
stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you're not surprised
they turn into a mess. You'd be very surprised if a mess turned into
neatly stacked papers. That's entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy
goes up as it becomes messier."

Unlike Brian Greene who is still procrusteanizing his mind into
conformity with Einstein's time-is-an-illusion idiocy, Seal Carroll
seems to have taken notice of what clever John Norton teaches:

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/j...dj_6-22-09.php
"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious" - Albert
Einstein

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_h...50422141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

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."

However Sean Carroll has not yet taken or does not want to take any
notice of what clever Jos Uffink teaches:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."

Pentcho Valev

  #2  
Old February 27th 10, 11:56 AM posted to sci.logic,alt.philosophy,sci.astro,sci.math
John Jones[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 123
Default Hi, Pantcho here. I have some more Einstein stuff for you. I've givenit a new title again. Hope this doesn't annoy and confuse. Goodbye.

Pentcho Valev wrote:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/02/what-is-time/
"Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at Caltech where he focuses
on theories of cosmology, field theory and gravitation by studying the
evolution of the universe. Carroll's latest book, From Eternity to
He The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, is an attempt to
bring his theory of time and the universe to physicists and
nonphysicists alike. (...) Sean Carroll: I'm trying to understand how
time works. And that's a huge question that has lots of different
aspects to it. A lot of them go back to Einstein and spacetime and how
we measure time using clocks. But the particular aspect of time that
I'm interested in is the arrow of time: the fact that the past is
different from the future. We remember the past but we don't remember
the future. There are irreversible processes. There are things that
happen, like you turn an egg into an omelet, but you can't turn an
omelet into an egg. And we sort of understand that halfway. The arrow
of time is based on ideas that go back to Ludwig Boltzmann, an
Austrian physicist in the 1870s. He figured out this thing called
entropy. Entropy is just a measure of how disorderly things are. And
it tends to grow. That's the second law of thermodynamics: Entropy
goes up with time, things become more disorderly. So, if you neatly
stack papers on your desk, and you walk away, you're not surprised
they turn into a mess. You'd be very surprised if a mess turned into
neatly stacked papers. That's entropy and the arrow of time. Entropy
goes up as it becomes messier."

Unlike Brian Greene who is still procrusteanizing his mind into
conformity with Einstein's time-is-an-illusion idiocy, Seal Carroll
seems to have taken notice of what clever John Norton teaches:

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/j...dj_6-22-09.php
"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious" - Albert
Einstein

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_h...50422141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

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."

However Sean Carroll has not yet taken or does not want to take any
notice of what clever Jos Uffink teaches:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."

Pentcho Valev

 




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