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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society
Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice- President, Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE, Treasurer and Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President Dear Dr. Rees, Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001 a respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the second law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED HERRING, this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any further discussion: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is outright cynical about the respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean. Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot understand." From this anthology it emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics.....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." Einstein's relativity is younger than thermodynamics so its own epitaph came only recently: 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." The problem is that, despite Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary dreams, there is no tumultuous "paradigm change"; rather, false theories just silently die, burying with themselves an essential part of human cultu ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf "From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)." http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616 "Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of "Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them. Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker. The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein. Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are prepared to defend his Potemkin villages." http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78 "The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of professional discourse." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew "belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any hope for UK? I am really not sure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20.../22/schools.g2 "We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world- class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so WHO CARES IF WE DISAPPEAR?" Dr. Rees, the Royal Society bestowed Einstein on humankind in 1919; now it is time for redemption. I am sure you are considering some kind of redemption: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Einstein.html Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL." Pentcho Valev |
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SCAVING SIENCE? (I Openly fart in the face of The Royal Society).Signed, Dr. EinFarted
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice- President, Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE, Treasurer and Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President Dear Dr. Rees, Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001 a respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the second law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED HERRING, this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any further discussion: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is outright cynical about the respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean. Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot understand." From this anthology it emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics.....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." Einstein's relativity is younger than thermodynamics so its own epitaph came only recently: 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." The problem is that, despite Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary dreams, there is no tumultuous "paradigm change"; rather, false theories just silently die, burying with themselves an essential part of human cultu ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf "From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)." http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616 "Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of "Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them. Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker. The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein. Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are prepared to defend his Potemkin villages." http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78 "The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of professional discourse." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew "belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any hope for UK? I am really not sure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20.../22/schools.g2 "We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world- class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so WHO CARES IF WE DISAPPEAR?" Dr. Rees, the Royal Society bestowed Einstein on humankind in 1919; now it is time for redemption. I am sure you are considering some kind of redemption: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Einstein.html Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL." Pentcho Valev |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
It is no longer "the beginning of the end"; rather, we are nearing
"the end of the end": http://www.independent.co.uk/news/ed...g-1888528.html Alarm sounded over demise of physics teaching By Richard Garner, Education Editor "Hundreds of state secondary schools are failing to enter a single pupil for A-level physics, MPs were told today. Professor Peter Main, director of education and science at the Institute of Physics, said the figure was as high as 500. "This is a very, very serious problem," he added." Pentcho Valev wrote: Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice- President, Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE, Treasurer and Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President Dear Dr. Rees, Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001 a respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the second law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED HERRING, this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any further discussion: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is outright cynical about the respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean. Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot understand." From this anthology it emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics.....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." Einstein's relativity is younger than thermodynamics so its own epitaph came only recently: 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." The problem is that, despite Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary dreams, there is no tumultuous "paradigm change"; rather, false theories just silently die, burying with themselves an essential part of human cultu ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf "From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)." http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616 "Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of "Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them. Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker. The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein. Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are prepared to defend his Potemkin villages." http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78 "The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of professional discourse." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew "belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any hope for UK? I am really not sure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20.../22/schools.g2 "We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world- class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so WHO CARES IF WE DISAPPEAR?" Dr. Rees, the Royal Society bestowed Einstein on humankind in 1919; now it is time for redemption. I am sure you are considering some kind of redemption: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Einstein.html Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL." Pentcho Valev |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
http://www.edge.org/documents/questions/q2001.2.html
Martin Rees: "The theory dates from 1916, and was famously corroborated by the measured deflection of starlight during eclipses, and by the anomalies in Mercury's orbit. But it took more than 50 years before there were any tests that could measure the distinctive effects of the theory with better than 10 percent accuracy. In the 1960s and 1970s , there was serious interest in tests that could decide between general relativity and alternative theories that were still in the running. But now these tests have improved so much, and yielded such comprehensive and precise support for Einstein, that it would require very compelling evicence indeed to shake our belief that general relativity is the correct "classical" theory of gravity." Dr. Rees, how can a theory be "famously corroborated" with less than 10 percent accuracy? Is "less than 10 percent accuracy" a euphemism for "sheer fraud"? If for 50 years the corroboration was just sheer fraud, where did honest Einsteinians come from in the 1960s and 1970s? Are there other examples in the history of science showing how sheer fraud rules for 50 years and then gloriously becomes absolute honesty? http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...ration.comment "And on 6 November, 1919, at a Royal Society meeting, the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington revealed that observations, taken during a solar eclipse, showed that starlight was being deflected by the sun's gravitational field in a way that fitted Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. 'Revolution in science. New theory of the Universe. Newtonian ideas overthrown,' the Times announced the next day on its front page. Einstein became a global superstar - thanks to the Royal Society." http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html New Scientist: Ode to Albert "Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light- bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse measurements to confirm general relativity." http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168 Stephen Hawking: "Einsteins prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ionic, therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck ["sheere luck" is a euphemism for "sheer fraud"], or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science." http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar...out-relativity "The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (youre looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs. In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the wrong outcome. No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einsteins death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action." http://www.upd.aas.org/had/meetings/2010Abstracts.html Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift of Sirius B Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona. "In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt. Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the Einstein shift in Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams 1925 published results agreed remarkably well with Eddingtons estimate. Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of General Relativity (after Mercurys anomalous perihelion advance and the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). It has been known for some time that both Eddingtons estimate and Adams measurement underestimated the true Sirius B gravitational redshift by a factor of four." http://alasource.blogs.nouvelobs.com...-deuxieme.html "D'abord il [Einstein] fait une hypothèse fausse (facile à dire aujourd'hui !) dans son équation de départ qui décrit les relations étroites entre géométrie de l'espace et contenu de matière de cet espace. Avec cette hypothèse il tente de calculer l'avance du périhélie de Mercure. Cette petite anomalie (à l'époque) du mouvement de la planète était un mystère. Einstein et Besso aboutissent finalement sur un nombre aberrant et s'aperçoivent qu'en fait le résultat est cent fois trop grand à cause d'une erreur dans la masse du soleil... Mais, même corrigé, le résultat reste loin des observations. Pourtant le physicien ne rejeta pas son idée. "Nous voyons là que si les critères de Popper étaient toujours respectés, la théorie aurait dû être abandonnée", constate, ironique, Etienne Klein. Un coup de main d'un autre ami, Grossmann, sortira Einstein de la difficulté et sa nouvelle équation s'avéra bonne. En quelques jours, il trouve la bonne réponse pour l'avance du périhélie de Mercure..." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Arthur Eddington , le premier en 1924, calculâtes théoriquement un décalage 0,007% attendu la surface de Sirius mais avec des données fausses à l'époque sur la masse et le rayon de l'étoile. L'année suivante, Walter Adams mesurerait exactement ces 0.007%. Il s'avère aujourd'hui que ces mesures , qui constituèrent pendant quarante ans une "preuves" de la relativité, étaient largement "arrangée" tant était grand le désir de vérifier la théorie d'Enstein. La véritable valeur fut mesurée en 1965. Elle est de 0.03% car Sirius est plus petite , et sont champ de gravitation est plus fort que ne le pensait Eddington." http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses RELATIVITE: LES PREUVES ETAIENT FAUSSES "Le monde entier a cru pendant plus de cinquante ans à une théorie non vérifiée. Car, nous le savons aujourd'hui, les premières preuves, issues notamment d'une célèbre éclipse de 1919, n'en étaient pas. Elles reposaient en partie sur des manipulations peu avouables visant à obtenir un résultat connu à l'avance, et sur des mesures entachées d'incertitudes, quand il ne s'agissait pas de fraudes caractérisées." http://www.cieletespaceradio.fr/inde...-la-relativite "Au début du XXème siècle, des scientifiques comme le Britannique Arthur Eddington avaient tant à coeur de vérifier la théorie de la relativité qu'ils ont tout mis en oeuvre pour que leurs expériences soient probantes." (ECOUTEZ!) Pentcho Valev wrote: Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice- President, Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE, Treasurer and Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign Secretary and Vice-President Dear Dr. Rees, Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001 a respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the second law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED HERRING, this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any further discussion: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is outright cynical about the respect with which nonmathematicians treat the Second Law: "Clausius verbal statement of the second law makes no sense [. . . ]. All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean. Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot understand." From this anthology it emerges that although many prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation. At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics.....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." Einstein's relativity is younger than thermodynamics so its own epitaph came only recently: 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." The problem is that, despite Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary dreams, there is no tumultuous "paradigm change"; rather, false theories just silently die, burying with themselves an essential part of human cultu ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SI...orts/06-46.pdf "From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)." http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616 "Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of "Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them. Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker. The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein. Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are prepared to defend his Potemkin villages." http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78 "The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics. Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of professional discourse." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...tion.education Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew "belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all, curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any hope for UK? I am really not sure." http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20.../22/schools.g2 "We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school. The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15 years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world- class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so WHO CARES IF WE DISAPPEAR?" Dr. Rees, the Royal Society bestowed Einstein on humankind in 1919; now it is time for redemption. I am sure you are considering some kind of redemption: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) Cynics said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technolog...-Einstein.html Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL." Pentcho Valev |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ear...e-science.html
"Fifteen Lords, including the former head of BP Lord Browne of Madingley and the current President of the Royal Society Lord Rees of Ludlow, are concerned the public is losing confidence in the science after the so-called 'glaciergate' and 'climategate' scandals." Dr. Rees, 9 years ago you were concerned about relativity-gate. More precisely, you declared that "among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same": http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts "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." I think relativity-gate is much more fundamental than glacier-gate and climate-gate so you may wish to return to your 9-years old concern. This will help: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...ration.comment "And on 6 November, 1919, at a Royal Society meeting, the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington revealed that observations, taken during a solar eclipse, showed that starlight was being deflected by the sun's gravitational field in a way that fitted Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. 'Revolution in science. New theory of the Universe. Newtonian ideas overthrown,' the Times announced the next day on its front page. Einstein became a global superstar - thanks to the Royal Society." http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html New Scientist: Ode to Albert "Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light- bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse measurements to confirm general relativity." http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168 Stephen Hawking: "Einsteins prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ionic, therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck ["sheere luck" is a euphemism for "sheer fraud"], or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science." http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar...out-relativity "The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (youre looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs. In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the wrong outcome. No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einsteins death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action." http://www.upd.aas.org/had/meetings/2010Abstracts.html Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift of Sirius B Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona. "In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt. Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the Einstein shift in Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams 1925 published results agreed remarkably well with Eddingtons estimate. Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of General Relativity (after Mercurys anomalous perihelion advance and the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). It has been known for some time that both Eddingtons estimate and Adams measurement underestimated the true Sirius B gravitational redshift by a factor of four." http://alasource.blogs.nouvelobs.com...-deuxieme.html "D'abord il [Einstein] fait une hypothèse fausse (facile à dire aujourd'hui !) dans son équation de départ qui décrit les relations étroites entre géométrie de l'espace et contenu de matière de cet espace. Avec cette hypothèse il tente de calculer l'avance du périhélie de Mercure. Cette petite anomalie (à l'époque) du mouvement de la planète était un mystère. Einstein et Besso aboutissent finalement sur un nombre aberrant et s'aperçoivent qu'en fait le résultat est cent fois trop grand à cause d'une erreur dans la masse du soleil... Mais, même corrigé, le résultat reste loin des observations. Pourtant le physicien ne rejeta pas son idée. "Nous voyons là que si les critères de Popper étaient toujours respectés, la théorie aurait dû être abandonnée", constate, ironique, Etienne Klein. Un coup de main d'un autre ami, Grossmann, sortira Einstein de la difficulté et sa nouvelle équation s'avéra bonne. En quelques jours, il trouve la bonne réponse pour l'avance du périhélie de Mercure..." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Le deuxième test classique donne en revanche des inquiétudes. Historiquement, pourtant, l'explication de l'avance du périhélie de Mercure, proposé par Einstein lui-même, donna ses lettres de noblesse à la relativité générale. Il s'agissait de comprendra pourquoi le périhélie de Mercure ( le point de son orbite le plus proche du soleil ) se déplaçait de 574 s d'arc par siècle. Certes, sur ces 574 s, 531 s'expliquaient par les perturbations gravitationnels dues aux autres planètes. Mais restait 43 s, le fameux effet "périhélique " inexpliqué par les lois de Newton. Le calcul relativiste d'Einstein donna 42,98 s ! L'accord et si parfait qu'il ne laisse la place à aucune discussion. Or depuis 1966, le soleil est soupçonné ne pas être rigoureusement sphérique mais légèrement aplati à l'équateur. Une très légère dissymétries qui suffirait à faire avancer le périhélie de quelques secondes d'arc. Du coup, la preuve se transformerait en réfutation puisque les 42,88 s du calcul d'Einstein ne pourrait pas expliquer le mouvement réel de Mercure." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Arthur Eddington , le premier en 1924, calculâtes théoriquement un décalage 0,007% attendu la surface de Sirius mais avec des données fausses à l'époque sur la masse et le rayon de l'étoile. L'année suivante, Walter Adams mesurerait exactement ces 0.007%. Il s'avère aujourd'hui que ces mesures , qui constituèrent pendant quarante ans une "preuves" de la relativité, étaient largement "arrangée" tant était grand le désir de vérifier la théorie d'Enstein. La véritable valeur fut mesurée en 1965. Elle est de 0.03% car Sirius est plus petite , et sont champ de gravitation est plus fort que ne le pensait Eddington." http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses RELATIVITE: LES PREUVES ETAIENT FAUSSES "Le monde entier a cru pendant plus de cinquante ans à une théorie non vérifiée. Car, nous le savons aujourd'hui, les premières preuves, issues notamment d'une célèbre éclipse de 1919, n'en étaient pas. Elles reposaient en partie sur des manipulations peu avouables visant à obtenir un résultat connu à l'avance, et sur des mesures entachées d'incertitudes, quand il ne s'agissait pas de fraudes caractérisées." http://www.cieletespaceradio.fr/inde...-la-relativite "Au début du XXème siècle, des scientifiques comme le Britannique Arthur Eddington avaient tant à coeur de vérifier la théorie de la relativité qu'ils ont tout mis en oeuvre pour que leurs expériences soient probantes." (ECOUTEZ!) Pentcho Valev |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
you Rock, Pentcho -- rocks o'light!
anyway, can you excerpt more from the NS article?... I don't wawnt to sign-up to their ****. http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html New Scientist: Ode to Albert "Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light- bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse measurements to confirm general relativity." thus: you rock, Al -- rocks o'light! * A square meter of mirror costs much less than a square meter of solar cells, so actual solar-cell power plants usually use large mirror arrays to concentrate sunlight onto smaller solar-cell arrays. This greatly lowers the cost/Watt. [This reasoning doesn't apply in space, where the cost of the cells is utterly negligible compared to the "astronomical" cost of launching the system, so the design optimization is for minimum mass/power, not for minimum manufacturing-cost/power.] --les OEuvres! http://wlym.com --Stop Cheeny and Rice's 3rd British Invasion of Sudan! http://larouchepub.com/pr/2010/10020...sts_sudan.html |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2...-02-20-01.html
Lord Martin Rees: "It is important that people have the utmost confidence in the science of climate change." Is it equally important that people have the utmost confidence in today's cosmology, Dr. Rees? http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6...-be-wrong.html Lord Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist." Should people have the utmost confidence in your claim that "time dilation entails no inconsistency or paradox", Dr. Rees? http://www.firstscience.com/site/art...blackholes.asp Lord Martin Rees: "According to Einstein, the speed of a clock depends on where you are and how you're moving. If your subjective clock ran very slowly compared to the cosmic clock, you could travel "fast forward" into the future. This would happen if you were moving at a velocity close to the speed of light. Furthermore, strong gravity would distort time; clocks on a neutron star would run 20 or 30 percent slower. (...) This elasticity in the rate of passage of time may seem counter to our intuition. But such intuition is acquired from our everyday environment (and perhaps, even more, that of our remote ancestors), which has offered us no experience of such effects. Few of us have travelled faster than a millionth of the speed of light (the speed of a jet airliner); we live on a planet where the pull of gravity is 1000 billion times weaker than on a neutron star. But time dilation entails no inconsistency or paradox." Pentcho Valev wrote: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/ear...e-science.html "Fifteen Lords, including the former head of BP Lord Browne of Madingley and the current President of the Royal Society Lord Rees of Ludlow, are concerned the public is losing confidence in the science after the so-called 'glaciergate' and 'climategate' scandals." Dr. Rees, 9 years ago you were concerned about relativity-gate. More precisely, you declared that "among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same": http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts "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." I think relativity-gate is much more fundamental than glacier-gate and climate-gate so you may wish to return to your 9-years old concern. This will help: http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...ration.comment "And on 6 November, 1919, at a Royal Society meeting, the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington revealed that observations, taken during a solar eclipse, showed that starlight was being deflected by the sun's gravitational field in a way that fitted Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. 'Revolution in science. New theory of the Universe. Newtonian ideas overthrown,' the Times announced the next day on its front page. Einstein became a global superstar - thanks to the Royal Society." http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html New Scientist: Ode to Albert "Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light- bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse measurements to confirm general relativity." http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168 Stephen Hawking: "Einsteins prediction of light deflection could not be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition, observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ionic, therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck ["sheere luck" is a euphemism for "sheer fraud"], or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science." http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar...out-relativity "The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (youre looking at it on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame and onto coffee mugs. In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged the results, throwing out photos that showed the wrong outcome. No wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einsteins death in 1955, scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in action." http://www.upd.aas.org/had/meetings/2010Abstracts.html Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational Redshift of Sirius B Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona. "In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt. Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the Einstein shift in Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams 1925 published results agreed remarkably well with Eddingtons estimate. Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of General Relativity (after Mercurys anomalous perihelion advance and the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). It has been known for some time that both Eddingtons estimate and Adams measurement underestimated the true Sirius B gravitational redshift by a factor of four." http://alasource.blogs.nouvelobs.com...-deuxieme.html "D'abord il [Einstein] fait une hypothèse fausse (facile à dire aujourd'hui !) dans son équation de départ qui décrit les relations étroites entre géométrie de l'espace et contenu de matière de cet espace. Avec cette hypothèse il tente de calculer l'avance du périhélie de Mercure. Cette petite anomalie (à l'époque) du mouvement de la planète était un mystère. Einstein et Besso aboutissent finalement sur un nombre aberrant et s'aperçoivent qu'en fait le résultat est cent fois trop grand à cause d'une erreur dans la masse du soleil... Mais, même corrigé, le résultat reste loin des observations. Pourtant le physicien ne rejeta pas son idée. "Nous voyons là que si les critères de Popper étaient toujours respectés, la théorie aurait dû être abandonnée", constate, ironique, Etienne Klein. Un coup de main d'un autre ami, Grossmann, sortira Einstein de la difficulté et sa nouvelle équation s'avéra bonne. En quelques jours, il trouve la bonne réponse pour l'avance du périhélie de Mercure..." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Le deuxième test classique donne en revanche des inquiétudes. Historiquement, pourtant, l'explication de l'avance du périhélie de Mercure, proposé par Einstein lui-même, donna ses lettres de noblesse à la relativité générale. Il s'agissait de comprendra pourquoi le périhélie de Mercure ( le point de son orbite le plus proche du soleil ) se déplaçait de 574 s d'arc par siècle. Certes, sur ces 574 s, 531 s'expliquaient par les perturbations gravitationnels dues aux autres planètes. Mais restait 43 s, le fameux effet "périhélique " inexpliqué par les lois de Newton. Le calcul relativiste d'Einstein donna 42,98 s ! L'accord et si parfait qu'il ne laisse la place à aucune discussion. Or depuis 1966, le soleil est soupçonné ne pas être rigoureusement sphérique mais légèrement aplati à l'équateur. Une très légère dissymétries qui suffirait à faire avancer le périhélie de quelques secondes d'arc. Du coup, la preuve se transformerait en réfutation puisque les 42,88 s du calcul d'Einstein ne pourrait pas expliquer le mouvement réel de Mercure." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Arthur Eddington , le premier en 1924, calculâtes théoriquement un décalage 0,007% attendu la surface de Sirius mais avec des données fausses à l'époque sur la masse et le rayon de l'étoile. L'année suivante, Walter Adams mesurerait exactement ces 0.007%. Il s'avère aujourd'hui que ces mesures , qui constituèrent pendant quarante ans une "preuves" de la relativité, étaient largement "arrangée" tant était grand le désir de vérifier la théorie d'Enstein. La véritable valeur fut mesurée en 1965. Elle est de 0.03% car Sirius est plus petite , et sont champ de gravitation est plus fort que ne le pensait Eddington." http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses RELATIVITE: LES PREUVES ETAIENT FAUSSES "Le monde entier a cru pendant plus de cinquante ans à une théorie non vérifiée. Car, nous le savons aujourd'hui, les premières preuves, issues notamment d'une célèbre éclipse de 1919, n'en étaient pas. Elles reposaient en partie sur des manipulations peu avouables visant à obtenir un résultat connu à l'avance, et sur des mesures entachées d'incertitudes, quand il ne s'agissait pas de fraudes caractérisées." http://www.cieletespaceradio.fr/inde...-la-relativite "Au début du XXème siècle, des scientifiques comme le Britannique Arthur Eddington avaient tant à coeur de vérifier la théorie de la relativité qu'ils ont tout mis en oeuvre pour que leurs expériences soient probantes." (ECOUTEZ!) Pentcho Valev |
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SAVING SCIENCE? (Open Letter to the Royal Society)
vous etes tres pathetique, monsieur PV. comme-ca,
quelle es problamatique avec dilation doo temps -- fais-vous supposez, cette est le meme chose a journe' een temps ?? http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Le deuxième test classique donne en revanche des inquiétudes. Historiquement, pourtant, l'explication de l'avance du périhélie de Mercure, proposé par Einstein lui-même, donna ses lettres de noblesse à la relativité générale. Il s'agissait de comprendra pourquoi le périhélie de Mercure ( le point de son orbite le plus proche du soleil ) se déplaçait de 574 s d'arc par siècle. Certes, sur ces 574 s, 531 s'expliquaient par les perturbations gravitationnels dues aux autres planètes. Mais restait 43 s, le fameux effet "périhélique " inexpliqué par les lois de Newton. Le calcul relativiste d'Einstein donna 42,98 s ! L'accord et si parfait qu'il ne laisse la place à aucune discussion. Or depuis 1966, le soleil est soupçonné ne pas être rigoureusement sphérique mais légèrement aplati à l'équateur. Une très légère dissymétries qui suffirait à faire avancer le périhélie de quelques secondes d'arc. Du coup, la preuve se transformerait en réfutation puisque les 42,88 s du calcul d'Einstein ne pourrait pas expliquer le mouvement réel de Mercure." http://astronomy.ifrance.com/pages/g.../einstein.html "Arthur Eddington , le premier en 1924, calculâtes théoriquement un décalage 0,007% attendu la surface de Sirius mais avec des données fausses à l'époque sur la masse et le rayon de l'étoile. L'année suivante, Walter Adams mesurerait exactement ces 0.007%. Il s'avère aujourd'hui que ces mesures , qui constituèrent pendant quarante ans une "preuves" de la relativité, étaient largement "arrangée" tant était grand le désir de vérifier la théorie d'Enstein. La véritable valeur fut mesurée en 1965. Elle est de 0.03% car Sirius est plus petite , et sont champ de gravitation est plus fort que ne le pensait Eddington." http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...ves-taient-fau....... read more » --les OEuvres! http://wlym.com --Stop Cheeny and Rice's 3rd British Invasion of Sudan! http://larouchepub.com/pr/2010/10020...sts_sudan.html |
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