THE AFTERMATH OF EINSTEIN'S ACTIVITY

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: "Precisely because Einstein's theory is inconsistent, its exponents can draw on contradictory principles in a way that greatly extends the apparent explanatory scope of the theory. Inconsistency may be a disadvantage in a scientific theory but it can be a decisive advantage in an ideology. The inconsistency of relativity theory - to borrow the language of the early Marx - gives relativity its apparent universal content. This seeming power of explanation functions to enhance the status of the group, giving them power over others through the enhanced control over resources, and a greater power to direct research and to exclude and marginalise dissent."

http://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/tho...%20science.pdf
W.H. Newton-Smith, THE RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE, 1981, p. 229: "A theory ought to be internally consistent. The grounds for including this factor are a priori. For given a realist construal of theories, our concern is with verisimilitude, and if a theory is inconsistent it will contain every sentence of the language, as the following simple argument shows. Let 'q' be an arbitrary sentence of the language and suppose that the theory is inconsistent.. This means that we can derive the sentence 'p and not-p'. From this 'p' follows. And from 'p' it follows that 'p or q' (if 'p' is true then 'p or q' will be true no matter whether 'q' is true or not). Equally, it follows from 'p and not-p' that 'not-p'. But 'not-p' together with 'p or q' entails 'q'. Thus once we admit an inconsistency into our theory we have to admit everything."

Initially scientists admitted this:

http://www.ecampus.com/bk_detail.asp...63&referrer=CJ
Relativity and Its Roots, Banesh Hoffmann, p. 105: "In one case your clock is checked against two of mine, while in the other case my clock is checked against two of yours, and this permits us each to find without contradiction that the other's clocks go more slowly than his own."

Nowadays scientists admit everything, even this:

https://www.newscientist.com/article...-a-black-hole/
"Now Hawking says this information never makes it inside the black hole in the first place. "I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon," he said today. The event horizon is the sphere around a black hole from inside which nothing can escape its clutches. Hawking is suggesting that the information about particles passing through is translated into a kind of hologram - a 2D description of a 3D object - that sits on the surface of the event horizon. "The idea is the super translations are a hologram of the ingoing particles," he said. "Thus they contain all the information that would otherwise be lost." So how does that help something escape from the black hole? In the 1970s Hawking introduced the concept of Hawking radiation - photons emitted by black holes due to quantum fluctuations. Originally he said that this radiation carried no information from inside the black hole, but in 2004 changed his mind and said it could be possible for information to get out. Just how that works is still a mystery, but Hawking now thinks he's cracked it. His new theory is that Hawking radiation can pick up some of the information stored on the event horizon as it is emitted, providing a way for it to get out. But don't expect to get a message from within, he said. "The information about ingoing particles is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost." (...) More details are expected later today when one of Hawking's collaborators Malcom Perry expands on the idea, and Hawking and his colleagues say they will publish a paper on the work next month, but it's clear he is gunning for the idea that black holes are inescapable. It's even possible information could get out into parallel universes, he told the audience yesterday."

Pentcho Valev

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=7902
Bob Berman (cited by Piter Woit): "...the last 40 years or so have been difficult, with little progress. Unfortunately, some prominent theorists have now basically given up and decided to take an easy way out. The multiverse is invoked as an all-purpose, untestable excuse. They allow theoretical ideas like string theory that have turned out to be empty and consistent with anything to be kept alive instead of abandoned. It's a depressing possibility that this is where physics ends up. But I still hope this is a fad that will soon die out. Finding a better, deeper understanding of the laws of physics is incredibly challenging, but it's within our capability as humans, as long as the effort is not overwhelmed by those selling a non-answer to the problem."

Nowadays all theorists are selling non-answers to the problems. For instance, they reject, more or less explicitly, the absurd consequence, Einstein's spacetime, but continue to worship the underlying premise, Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate:

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

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

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/p...uantum-theory/
Frank Wilczek: "Einstein's special theory of relativity calls for radical renovation of common-sense ideas about time. Different observers, moving at constant velocity relative to one another, require different notions of time, since their clocks run differently. Yet each such observer can use his "time" to describe what he sees, and every description will give valid results, using the same laws of physics. In short: According to special relativity, there are many quite different but equally valid ways of assigning times to events. Einstein himself understood the importance of breaking free from the idea that there is an objective, universal "now." Yet, paradoxically, today's standard formulation of quantum mechanics makes heavy use of that discredited "now."

http://www.space.com/29859-the-illusion-of-time.html
"Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute, said, "I have the distressing experience of physicists telling me that time is not real. ... It confuses me, because time seems to be real. Things happen. When I clap my hands, it happened. ... I would prefer to say that general relativity is not the final theory than to say that time does not exist." Time is a prime conflict between relativity and quantum mechanics, measured and malleable in relativity while assumed as background (and not an observable) in quantum mechanics."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
"Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time (...) The stumbling block lies with their conflicting views of space and time. As seen by quantum theory, space and time are a static backdrop against which particles move. In Einstein's theories, by contrast, not only are space and time inextricably linked, but the resulting space-time is moulded by the bodies within it. (...) Something has to give in this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the smart money says that it's relativity that will be the loser."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"...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.guardian.co.uk/books/2013...reality-review
"And by making the clock's tick relative - what happens simultaneously for one observer might seem sequential to another - Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.bookdepository.com/Time-R.../9780547511726
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.ph...s-are-changing
"Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper about possible grounds for divorce. (...) Einstein's famous insistence that the velocity of light is a cosmic speed limit made sense, Minkowski saw, only if space and time were intertwined. (...) Physicists of the 21st century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage. (...) Andreas Albrecht, a cosmologist at the University of California, Davis, has thought deeply about choosing clocks, leading him to some troubling realizations. (...) "It seems to me like it's a time in the development of physics," says Albrecht, "where it's time to look at how we think about space and time very differently."

Pentcho Valev

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/...-common-sense/
John Horgan, Einstein and Science's Assault on Common Sense

See also my comment on John Horgan's essay.

Pentcho Valev