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Are Einsteinians Disguised Newtonians?



 
 
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  #1  
Old June 30th 16, 05:18 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default Are Einsteinians Disguised Newtonians?

At 53:28 in this video Joao Magueijo declares allegiance to the Newtonian space and time:

http://pirsa.org/displayFlash.php?id=16060116
FUNDAMENTAL TIME, Wednesday Jun 29, 2016, Speaker(s): Laurent Freidel, Lee Smolin, Joao Magueijo, 53:28

Here is another striking statement:

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

Is Magueijo a Newtonian who teaches relativity just for money?

Judging from the following texts, Lee Smolin is a Newtonian as well:

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

http://www.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..."

Pentcho Valev
  #2  
Old June 30th 16, 06:27 PM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default Are Einsteinians Disguised Newtonians?

Judging from the following texts, actually most Einsteinians are more or less disguised Newtonians:

https://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-185331159.html
"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."

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.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."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...wards-in-time/
"[George] Ellis is up against one of the most successful theories in physics: special relativity. It revealed that there's no such thing as objective simultaneity. Although you might have seen three things happen in a particular order – 
A, then B, then C – someone moving 
at a different velocity could have seen 
it a different way – C, then B, then A. 
In other words, without simultaneity there is no way of specifying what things happened "now". And if not "now", what is moving through time? Rescuing an objective "now" is a daunting task."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029410.900
New Scientist: "Saving time: Physics killed it. Do we need it back? [...] Einstein landed the fatal blow at the turn of the 20th century."

https://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/re...essons-quantum
Perimeter Institute: "Quantum mechanics has one thing, time, which is absolute. But general relativity tells us that space and time are both dynamical so there is a big contradiction there. So the question is, can quantum gravity be formulated in a context where quantum mechanics still has absolute time?"

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."

Pentcho Valev
  #3  
Old July 1st 16, 07:59 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default Are Einsteinians Disguised Newtonians?

Einsteinians are disguised Newtonians but this does not mean that they do not accept Einstein's relative time. Actually they are practitioners of doublethink and oscillate between the truth (Newton's absolute time) and the lie (Einstein's relative time) in the way explained by George Orwell:

http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwe...hapter2.9.html
"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary."

Typical doublethink in Einsteiniana:

Lee Smolin rejects Einstein's relative time, the consequence of Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, and declares allegiance to Newton's absolute time:

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

http://www.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."

Lee Smolin worships Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate and all its consequences, including Einstein's relative time:

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

Pentcho Valev
 




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