How Einsteinians Win Grants

Mark Srednicki and Joseph Polchinski were given a $1.32 million dollar grant to say whether Einstein was wrong:

http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2013/013823...oning-einstein
"Could Einstein's theory of relativity be wrong? That's among the burning questions being asked by theoretical physicists today. It's a startling claim and one that has received a lot of attention from other scientists. Researchers from UC Santa Barbara's Department of Physics and the Kavli Institute for Theretical Physics (KITP) have received a $1.32 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue their work on finding an answer."

Srednicki and Polchinski found the joke really amusing, took the money and said that Einstein was not wrong:

http://www.news.ucsb.edu/sites/www.n...Polchinski.jpg

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Lee Smolin promised to replace Einstein's relative time with a real and global time and FQXi gave him a grant:

"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/148

Smolin took the money and did not replace Einstein's relative time with a real and global time.

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"Professor Hermann Nicolai, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute), has received one of the prestigious Advanced Grants of the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC is funding Prof. Nicolai's research on a unified theory of quantum gravity with approximately €1.9 million. In Nicolai's approach symmetries play a decisive role. One of the greatest challenges in theoretical physics is the unification of quantum field theory and Einstein's general relativity into a theory of quantum gravity. The two fundamental theories are not compatible with each other within the known physical laws. But if we want to understand what happens inside a black hole or at the Big Bang, we need a theory that combines both." http://spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=50731

€1.9 million for unifying Einstein's relative time, the idiotic consequence of Einstein's false constant-speed-of-light postulate, and Newton's absolute time. This oligophrenic activity has been a money-spinner for more than a half a century - it will obviously continue unabated:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20161...-time-problem/
"The effort to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity means reconciling totally different notions of time. In quantum mechanics, time is universal and absolute; its steady ticks dictate the evolving entanglements between particles. But in general relativity (Albert Einstein's theory of gravity), time is relative and dynamical, a dimension that's inextricably interwoven with directions X, Y and Z into a four-dimensional "space-time" fabric."

https://www.newscientist.com/article...-go-both-ways/
"In quantum theory, a "master clock" ticks away somewhere in the universe, measuring out all processes. But in Einstein's relativity, time is distorted by motion and gravity, so clocks don't necessarily agree on how it is passing - meaning any master clock must, somewhat implausibly, be outside the universe."

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://science.sciencemag.org/conten...cience.aac6498
"In Einstein's general theory of relativity, time depends locally on gravity; in standard quantum theory, time is global – all clocks "tick" uniformly."

http://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0610057.pdf
"One one hand, time in quantum mechanics is a Newtonian time, i.e., an absolute time. In fact, the two main methods of quantization, namely, canonical quantization method due to Dirac and Feynman's path integral method are based on classical constraints which become operators annihilating the physical states, and on the sum over all possible classical trajectories, respectively. Therefore, both quantization methods rely on the Newton global and absolute time. [...] The transition to (special) relativistic quantum field theories can be realized by replacing the unique absolute Newtonian time by a set of timelike parameters associated to the naturally distinguished family of relativistic inertial frames."

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/isrn/2013/509316/
"In quantum mechanics, time is absolute. The parameter occurring in the Schrödinger equation has been directly inherited from Newtonian mechanics and is not turned into an operator. In quantum field theory, time by itself is no longer absolute, but the four-dimensional spacetime is; it constitutes the fixed background structure on which the dynamical fields act. GR is of a very different nature. According to the Einstein equations (2), spacetime is dynamical, acting in a complicated manner with energy momentum of matter and with itself. The concepts of time (spacetime) in quantum theory and GR are thus drastically different and cannot both be fundamentally true.."

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