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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Recently John Norton, one of the leading priests in Einsteiniana, sent
a clear message to Einsteinians all over the world: The concept of time, initially deduced from Einstein's special relativity and then deformed by Einstein's general relativity, should be rejected: 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.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html "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." Overexcited, the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) decided to give substantial sums of money to Einsteinians who find it profitable to develop Norton's ideas: http://www.fqxi.org/grants/large/awardees/list (...) Lee Smolin Perimeter Institute $47,500 Physical and cosmological consequences of the hypotheses of the reality of time (...) Craig Callender University of California, San Diego $102,263 What Makes Time Special (...) http://www.fqxi.org/community 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.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/151 "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." It was none other than Einstein who uttered these words. He was speaking about how our perception of time differs from the fundamental nature of time in physics. Take our perceptions first: We have a clear sense of the present moment, what came before, and what might come after. Unfortunately, physics treats time rather differently. Einstein's theory of special relativity presents us with a four-dimensional spacetime, in which the past, present and future are already mapped out. There is no special "now," just as there's no special "here." And just like spacetime does not have a fundamental direction - forcing us to move inexorably from east to west, say - time does not flow. "You have this big gap between the time of fundamental science and the time we experience," says Craig Callender, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. It's this gap that he has set out to narrow, using ideas from physics, evolutionary theory and cognitive science." Some Einsteinians know (others don't care) that Einstein's special relativity is based on two postulates: the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the speed of light. So if you wish to reject a deductive consequence of the theory, you will have to declare at least one of the postulates false. For the moment only the option: "Principle of relativity false, Principle of constancy of the speed of light true" seems to be permitted in Einsteiniana: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5339/ Lorentzian theories vs. Einsteinian special relativity - a logico- empiricist reconstruction Laszlo E. Szabo "It is widely believed that the principal difference between Einstein's special relativity and its contemporary rival Lorentz-type theories was that while the Lorentz-type theories were also capable of "explaining away" the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and other experimental findings by means of the distortions of moving measuring-rods and moving clocks, special relativity revealed more fundamental new facts about the geometry of space-time behind these phenomena. I shall argue that special relativity tells us nothing new about the geometry of space-time, in comparison with the pre- relativistic Galileo-invariant conceptions; it simply calls something else "space-time", and this something else has different properties. All statements of special relativity about those features of reality that correspond to the original meaning of the terms "space" and "time" are identical with the corresponding traditional pre- relativistic statements. It will be also argued that special relativity and Lorentz theory are completely identical in both senses, as theories about space-time and as theories about the behavior of moving physical objects." http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740 Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) "It is remarkable that the Special Theory has thus far managed to survive largely unscathed the collapse of its essential epistemological underpinnings. One wonders how this can be so. Undoubtedly a major part of the answer is the understandable one that physicists are not epistemologists; physicists typically know no more about epistemology, the philosophy of language (e.g. problems with the verificationist criterion of semantic meaning), and ontology than philosophers typically know about physics. The precise philosophical arguments for the illogicality, falsity, or unjustifiably of the epistemological, semantic, and ontological presuppositions of the Special Theory remain, with a few exceptions, unknown among physicists. The price paid for the growth of knowledge is increased specialization, which, paradoxically, also prevents or reverses the growth of knowledge, since specialists in one field often base their work on premises that (unbeknownst to them) have been refuted or disconfirmed in another field. The only solution we can see for this problem is that the training or schooling of physicists ought to include schooling in philosophy (and, as we shall see, the converse should hold for philosophers). Perhaps this is most practicable in the form of there being thinkers who take as their specialization the intersection of physics and philosophy and the works of these thinkers, at least in "introductory formats", being a part of the education of both physicists and philosophers. If this proves unfeasible and the situation remains as it presently stands, the unpalatable situation may result that neither physicists nor philosophers are in a position to have adequately justified beliefs about space and time but only philosophers of physics (or the few thinkers who are both philosophers and physicists, such as David Albert and Bas Van Fraassen, and, from the side of physics, Niels Bohr and David Bohm, who developed philosophical theories in addition to physically interpreted equations). Apart from leaving unaddressed the epistemological and semantic presuppositions of STR, there is an even stronger factor behind physicists' unwillingness to abandon the Special Theory. The Special Theory is a part of orthodox quantum field theory (QFT) (quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics), which aims to unify the Special Theory with quantum mechanics. Physicists would be at a loss as to how to proceed if they rejected the Special Theory as unjustified, since they (for the most part) believe that this would require them to reject QFT. In the light of this dependence on Special Relativity, physicists are not likely to abandon it unless it is observationally disconfirmed and there is an observationally adequate theory available to replace it. In fact, there is a theory that is not merely observationally equivalent to the Special Theory, but also observationally superior to it, namely Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory. Lorentz's theory is regarded by many physicists who have studied Lorentzian theory, such as J.S. Bell, to be observationally equivalent to the Special Theory. However a Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory is, in fact, observationally superior to the Special Theory (a fact that Bell, surprisingly, did not point out), since a Lorentzian theory, in contrast to the Special Theory, is consistent with the relations of absolute, instantaneous simultaneity..." http://hps.elte.hu/PIRT.Budapest/ Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy In the Interpretations of Relativity Theory, Budapest 4-6 September 2009 "The objective of the conference is to discuss the mathematical, physical and philosophical elements in the physical interpretations of Relativity Theory (PIRT); the physical and philosophical arguments and commitments shaping those interpretations and the various applications of the theory, especially in relativistic cosmology and relativistic quantum theory. The organizing committee is open for discussion of recent advances in investigations of the mathematical, logical and conceptual structure of Relativity Theory, as well as for analysis of the cultural, ideological and philosophical factors that have roles in its evolution and in the development of the modern physical world view determined to a considerable extent by that theory. The conference intends to review the fruitfulness of orthodox Relativity, as developed from the Einstein-Minkowski formulation, and to suggest how history and philosophy of science clarify the relationship between the accepted relativistic formal structure and the various physical interpretations associated with it. While the organizing committee encourages critical investigations and welcomes both Einsteinian and non-Einsteinian (Lorentzian, etc.) approaches, including the recently proposed ether-type theories, it is assumed that the received formal structure of the theory is valid and anti-relativistic papers will not be accepted." Pentcho Valev |
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