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SPECIAL RELATIVITY : THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL



 
 
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  #1  
Old September 27th 13, 06:22 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SPECIAL RELATIVITY : THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL

http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0601182v1.pdf
Harvey Brown: "It is argued that the methodology of Einstein's 1905 theory represents a victory of pragmatism over explanatory depth; and that its adoption only made sense in the context of the chaotic state state of physics at the start of the 20th century - as Einstein well knew."

The state was chaotic because in 1887 scientists failed (or refused) to see that the only existing theory able to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment was Newton's emission theory of light stating that the speed of light does depend on the speed of the emitter. Lorentz and Fitzgerald started to Procrusteanize space and time to fit the ether theory's false tenet that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter, and Einstein's special relativity was the final nail in the coffin of sane science.

Now it may be too late - "the true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage" is perhaps lost forever:

http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.ph...cles&Itemid=68
"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. (...) Physicists of the 21st century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage."

Pentcho Valev
  #2  
Old September 28th 13, 06:39 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SPECIAL RELATIVITY : THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL

Einstein's fundamental rationality-killing step: "the rescaled "local time" variable t' of Lorentz was "purely and simply, the time", as experienced by a moving observer":

http://www.bourbaphy.fr/damourtemps.pdf
Thibault Damour: "Textbook presentations of Special Relativity often fail to convey the revolutionary nature, with respect to the "common conception of time", of the seminal paper of Einstein in June 1905. It is true that many of the equations, and mathematical considerations, of this paper were also contained in a 1904 paper of Lorentz, and in two papers of Poincare submitted in June and July 1905. It is also true that the central informational core of a physical theory is defined by its fundamental equations, and that for some theories (notably Quantum Mechanics) the fundamental equations were discovered before their physical interpretation. However, in the case of Special Relativity, the egregious merit of Einstein was, apart from his new mathematical results and his new physical predictions (notably about the comparison of the readings of clocks which have moved with respect to each other) the conceptual breakthrough that the rescaled "local time" variable t' of Lorentz was "purely and simply, the time", as experienced by a moving observer. This new conceptualization of time implied a deep upheaval of the common conception of time. Max Planck immediately realized this and said, later, that Einstein's breakthrough exceeded in audacity everything that had been accomplished so far in speculative science, and that the idea of non-Euclidean geometries was, by comparison, mere "child's play"."

Poincaré could not take that step, although the Lorentz transforms (of which he was one of the authors) urged him to do so - the step led to the absurd conclusion that, as the observer starts moving towards the light source and, accordingly, the wavecrests start hitting him more frequently, the speed of the wavecrests relative to the observer nevertheless remains unchanged:

http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home..._num_55_1_2143
Les écrits épistémologiques de Poincaré, obstacles à la diffusion de la relativité?, Vincent Borella, p. 74: "Pour Einstein le postulat de la constance de la vitesse de la lumière par rapport à n'importe quel référentiel dans lequel elle est mesurée (ce qui est une expression du principe de relativité) est suffisant, alors qu'en fait, pour Poincaré, la vitesse de la lumière ne peut être constante que relativement au milieu dans lequel elle se propage, à savoir l'éther supposé immobile."

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3653092
The Mystery of the Einstein-Poincaré Connection, Olivier Darrigol: "It is clear from the context that Poincaré meant here to apply the postulate [of constancy of the speed of light] only in an ether-bound frame, in which case he could indeed state that it had been "accepted by everybody." In 1900 and in later writings he defined the apparent time of a moving observer in such a way that the velocity of light measured by this observer would be the same as if he were at rest (with respect to the ether). This does not mean, however, that he meant the postulate to apply in any inertial frame. From his point of view, the true velocity of light in a moving frame was not a constant but was given by the Galilean law of addition of velocities."

Pentcho Valev
  #3  
Old October 1st 13, 09:13 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SPECIAL RELATIVITY : THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "There are various remarks to be made about this second principle. For instance, if it is so obvious, how could it turn out to be part of a revolution - especially when the first principle is also a natural one? Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous."

This means that the following two sets of postulates/hypotheses are able to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment:

SET I:
1. The principle of relativity is correct.
2. The speed of light varies with the speed of the emitter like the speed of any material projectile.

SET II:
1. The principle of relativity is correct.
2. The speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter.
3. Lengths contract so that SET II's postulates 1 and 2 can become consistent with the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment.

Initially Poincaré found SET II's postulate 3 unacceptable:

http://www.brera.unimi.it/sisfa/atti/1998/giannetto.pdf
Henri Poincaré: "...les termes du second ordre auraient dû devenir sensibles, et cependant le résultat [de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley] a encore été négatif, la théorie de Lorentz laissant prévoir un résultat positif. On a alors imaginé une hypothèse supplémentai tous les corps subiraient un raccourcissement dans le sens du mouvement de la Terre... cette étrange propriété semblerait un véritable coup de pouce donné par la nature pour éviter que le mouvement de la Terre puisse être révélé par des phénomènes optiques. Ceci ne saurait me satisfaire..."

In the end Poincaré did accept length contraction but only as an initial postulate/hypothesis whose truthfulness is by no means guaranteed (Einsteinians managed to convince the world that length contraction is a glorious consequence of SET II's postulates 1 and 2):

http://www.amazon.com/Understanding-.../dp/0520200292
Understanding Relativity: A Simplified Approach to Einstein's Theories, Leo Sartori, p.131: "The special force, which became known as "Poincaré stress" or "Poincaré pressure" is a red herring. As Einstein showed, the contraction is inherently a kinematic effect, a direct consequence of the properties of space and time expressed through the Lorentz transformation. Whatever forces are present in matter must transform in a manner consistent with the contraction; no special force is needed. As late as 1909, Poincaré still had not disabused himself of this fundamental misunderstanding. In a lecture at Göttingen, he asserted that the "new mechanics" is based on three hypotheses, of which the third is the longitudinal deformation of a body in translational motion. (The first two were Einstein's two postulates.)"

Pentcho Valev
  #4  
Old October 2nd 13, 06:49 AM posted to sci.astro
Pentcho Valev
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Default SPECIAL RELATIVITY : THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL

Rationality in Divine Albert's world is so devastated that Einsteinians can safely make career and money by rejecting the idiotic "relative" time introduced by special relativity and advocating, in one way or another, the old Newtonian time:

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

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.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us. How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion, an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage of time."

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

Pentcho Valev
 




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