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EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE



 
 
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  #1  
Old January 23rd 11, 08:20 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 8,078
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable, even inside Einsteiniana.
The rallying cry seems to be:

"Back to Newton through Lorentz!"

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."
Craig Callender: "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."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Physical-Rel.../dp/0199275831
"Harvey Brown thinks that most philsophers are confused about
relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the
relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation. (...)
Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the
heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of
relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself
became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the
limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach inspired
by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and
philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts
about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid
bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great
paper, and suggested that THE DYNAMICAL UNDERSTANDING OF LENGTH
CONTRACTION AND TIME DILATION INTIMATED BY THE IMMEDIATE PRECURSORS OF
EINSTEIN IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL."

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.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with
the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but
their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time,
so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle.
You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world
might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...spacetime.html
NEW SCIENTIST: "Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. IT WAS a
speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was
1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying
to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as
special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster
and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by
itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski
proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent
reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can
be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It
is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is
right, it may be no more than a mirage. (...) 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
"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."

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. (...) Physicists of the 21st
century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured
by the spacetime mirage. (...) What he and other pioneers on the
spacetime frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The
approaches of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the
challenges remaining from Einstein's century - such as finding a
harmonious mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum mechanics
the way Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently physicists
have been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what
makes up the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They
remain in the dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives the
universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the
dark energy's existence and intensity have been ambitious but
fruitless. To Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that it's
time for physics to drop old prejudices about how nature's laws ought
to be and search instead for how they really are. And that might mean
razing Minkowski's arena and rebuilding it from a new design. 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."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...al-denial.html
New Scientist, 12 January 2011: "Scepticism towards Einstein's theory
of relativity is not confined to irrational conservatives (13 November
2010, p 48). In his later years, the philosopher Karl Popper became
increasingly troubled by relativity. I argue that, for Popper,
inconsistencies in Einstein's presentation of his theory gave a
rational explanation for persistent opposition to it (Studies in
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol 41, p 354). Popper
himself ended up preferring Hendrik Lorentz's version of relativity,
which retained absolute space and time."

Pentcho Valev

  #2  
Old January 23rd 11, 02:10 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
hagman
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

On 23 Jan., 08:20, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable, even inside Einsteiniana.
The rallying cry seems to be:

"Back to Newton through Lorentz!"

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim...-Contemporary-...
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."
Craig Callender: "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."

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Physical-Rel...structure-pers...
"Harvey Brown thinks that most philsophers are confused about
relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the
relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation. (...)
Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the
heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of
relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself
became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the
limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach inspired
by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and
philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts
about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid
bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great
paper, and suggested that THE DYNAMICAL UNDERSTANDING OF LENGTH
CONTRACTION AND TIME DILATION INTIMATED BY THE IMMEDIATE PRECURSORS OF
EINSTEIN IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL."

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.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with
the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but
their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time,
so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle.
You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world
might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...inking-einstei...
NEW SCIENTIST: "Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. IT WAS a
speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was
1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying
to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as
special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster
and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by
itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski
proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent
reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can
be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It
is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is
right, it may be no more than a mirage. (...) 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/...-makes-the-uni...
"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."

http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.ph...t&view=article...
"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. (...) What he and other pioneers on the
spacetime frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The
approaches of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the
challenges remaining from Einstein's century - such as finding a
harmonious mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum mechanics
the way Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently physicists
have been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what
makes up the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They
remain in the dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives the
universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the
dark energy's existence and intensity have been ambitious but
fruitless. To Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that it's
time for physics to drop old prejudices about how nature's laws ought
to be and search instead for how they really are. And that might mean
razing Minkowski's arena and rebuilding it from a new design. 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."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...osophical-deni...
New Scientist, 12 January 2011: "Scepticism towards Einstein's theory
of relativity is not confined to irrational conservatives (13 November
2010, p 48). In his later years, the philosopher Karl Popper became
increasingly troubled by relativity. I argue that, for Popper,
inconsistencies in Einstein's presentation of his theory gave a
rational explanation for persistent opposition to it (Studies in
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol 41, p 354). Popper
himself ended up preferring Hendrik Lorentz's version of relativity,
which retained absolute space and time."

Pentcho Valev


As a theory, Einsteins's SR is in principle falsifiable by a suitable
experiment.
Can you please describe an experiment where SR and your mentioend
alternative theories make different predictions?
If you can't, then you are not really objecting SR;
and if you can, let's try it (in fact, I bet that it has been tried
already).

hagman
  #3  
Old January 23rd 11, 03:19 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Tim Golden BandTech.com
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 38
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE: the polysign fix...

On Jan 23, 8:10*am, hagman wrote:
On 23 Jan., 08:20, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable, even inside Einsteiniana.
The rallying cry seems to be:
"Back to Newton through Lorentz!"

snip
Pentcho Valev


As a theory, Einsteins's SR is in principle falsifiable by a suitable
experiment.
Can you please describe an experiment where SR and your mentioend
alternative theories make different predictions?
If you can't, then you are not really objecting SR;
and if you can, let's try it (in fact, I bet that it has been tried
already).

hagman


There are other grounds to challenge a theory by.
Time is still under discussion to this day, and the actual treatment
of it as a fourth dimension can be challenged.
The means by which we discover that space is three dimensional does
not extend onto time, where no such freedoms can be found.
Couple this with time's unidirectional behavior and we see that the
ability to incorporate time into the same tensor construction with
space is dubious. We were free to rotate things about in the 3D form,
thus bolstering the tensor interpretation of 3D space, but upon adding
time as a fourth dimension the thing is off a bit, for we cannot
rotate the length of a pencil into time can we? No, and now this
metric which breaks the symmetry of the tensor, along with the
isotropic assumption must be reexamined.

I accept Einstein's brilliance; by reading a few paragraphs of his
writing I can accept this. He was extremely thoughtful and was somehow
able to squeeze into his master Minkowski's metric his theory. But the
physical correspondence of the theory does fail in some very basic
regards. How those qualities come to be swept under the rug in
modernia does seem to be a fairly political puzzle. The politics of
physics includes a belief in its own theories, which in order to be
adopted must have been near enough to the mathematician's level of
scrutiny, albeit in a physical guise, so as to be beyond deniability.
In my own hindsight even the mathematician's level of scrutiny is
dubious, and it is the physicist who tends to keep the more open mind.
Still, somehow these subjects must meld and become one, preferably
along with philosophy, to reach the level of credibility that modern
physics presumes in its class rooms.

We are free to construct and I do believe that there will be a
replacement theory to relativity theory, and that the electromagnetic
behaviors will be even more apparent than they are within relativity
theory. That this new theory will actually derive spacetime, or supply
its basis arithmetically is already exposed within polysign number
theory, including unidirectional zero dimensional time. That isotropic
space is a misnomer acceptable on the conglomerate scale, but with no
support at the particle level is already partially exposed in the spin
qualities of fundamental particles. That spacetime is structured is
already signalled with the oddities that time poses, and then too the
electromagnetic qualities, which are already regarded as spacetime
behaved. We are so close, but now the level of unwinding has to come
back at the mathematical level to get clean. When quantum physics
admits its own unsensibility and divorces itself from philosophy to
what degree is it then seeking a new philosophy?

The perspective that I argue for does include spacetime unification,
but it does not admit the tensor treatment. Instead it is a structured
form that may as well take the form
t x z
where t represents time, x represents a 1D constituent, and z
represents a 2D constituent (complex valued). This natural composition
is more apparent within polysign as
P1 P2 P3
and a behavioral breakpoint for P4+ exists within the polysign
algebra, so that even if the structure goes on the support for
spacetime remains. The nature of time is adjacent to the nature of the
real value and the complex value; all are from the same ruleset. We
have simply made a fundamental error by regarding the real value as
fundamental, and attempted to construct these others from it. Polysign
remedies this situation, and in doing so physical correspondence is
resumed to the point of needing to challenge the 'real' number. At
this juncture it will be easier to rename reality than it will be to
rename the 'real' number.
This work is not done, but a fundamental arithmetic is established.
Please feel free to ponder
http://bandtech.com/PolySigned/index.html

- Tim
  #4  
Old January 23rd 11, 04:31 PM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Androcles[_39_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 134
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE


"hagman" wrote in message
...
| On 23 Jan., 08:20, Pentcho Valev wrote:
| Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable, even inside Einsteiniana.
| The rallying cry seems to be:
|
| "Back to Newton through Lorentz!"
|
| http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim...-Contemporary-...
| 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."
| Craig Callender: "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."
|
| http://www.amazon.co.uk/Physical-Rel...structure-pers...
| "Harvey Brown thinks that most philsophers are confused about
| relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the
| relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation. (...)
| Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the
| heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of
| relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself
| became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the
| limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach inspired
| by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and
| philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts
| about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid
| bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great
| paper, and suggested that THE DYNAMICAL UNDERSTANDING OF LENGTH
| CONTRACTION AND TIME DILATION INTIMATED BY THE IMMEDIATE PRECURSORS OF
| EINSTEIN IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL."
|
| 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.scientificamerican.com/ar...me-an-illusion
| Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with
| the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
| relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
| fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but
| their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
| disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
| spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
| mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
| university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
| into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
| general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
| situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time,
| so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
| second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
| synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle.
| You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
| according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world
| might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
| impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."
|
| http://www.newscientist.com/article/...inking-einstei...
| NEW SCIENTIST: "Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. IT WAS a
| speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was
| 1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying
| to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as
| special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster
| and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by
| itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski
| proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent
| reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can
| be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It
| is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is
| right, it may be no more than a mirage. (...) 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/...-makes-the-uni...
| "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."
|
| http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.ph...t&view=article...
| "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. (...) What he and other pioneers on the
| spacetime frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The
| approaches of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the
| challenges remaining from Einstein's century - such as finding a
| harmonious mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum mechanics
| the way Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently physicists
| have been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what
| makes up the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They
| remain in the dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives the
| universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the
| dark energy's existence and intensity have been ambitious but
| fruitless. To Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that it's
| time for physics to drop old prejudices about how nature's laws ought
| to be and search instead for how they really are. And that might mean
| razing Minkowski's arena and rebuilding it from a new design. 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."
|
| http://www.newscientist.com/article/...osophical-deni...
| New Scientist, 12 January 2011: "Scepticism towards Einstein's theory
| of relativity is not confined to irrational conservatives (13 November
| 2010, p 48). In his later years, the philosopher Karl Popper became
| increasingly troubled by relativity. I argue that, for Popper,
| inconsistencies in Einstein's presentation of his theory gave a
| rational explanation for persistent opposition to it (Studies in
| History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol 41, p 354). Popper
| himself ended up preferring Hendrik Lorentz's version of relativity,
| which retained absolute space and time."
|
| Pentcho Valev
|
|
| As a theory, Einsteins's SR is in principle falsifiable by a suitable
| experiment.
| Can you please describe an experiment where SR and your mentioend
| alternative theories make different predictions?

Sure.

--
r_AB/(c+v) = r_AB/(c-v). References given:
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/figures/img6.gif
http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/figures/img11.gif

Let r_AB = 480 million metres,
let c = 300 million metres/sec,
let v = 180 million metres/sec.

480/(300-180) = 480/(300 +180)
480/(120) = 480/(480)
4 = 1

"In agreement with experience we further assume the quantity
2AB/(t'A-tA) = c to be a universal constant, the velocity of
light in empty space." --§ 1. Definition of Simultaneity --
ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES By A. Einstein

"the velocity of light in our theory plays the part, physically, of an
infinitely great velocity"--§ 4. Physical Meaning of the Equations
Obtained in Respect to Moving Rigid Bodies and Moving Clocks
--ON THE ELECTRODYNAMICS OF MOVING BODIES By A. Einstein

In agreement with experience we further assume four seconds plays the
part, physically, of one second, the idiocy of raving lunatics in
Relativityland.



| If you can't, then you are not really objecting SR;
| and if you can, let's try it (in fact, I bet that it has been tried
| already).

Of course it has. Nobody can make 4 = 1.



  #5  
Old January 27th 11, 11:21 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE: the polysign fix...

Now that even Einsteinians as faithful as John Norton and Craig
Callender protest against Divine Albert's Divine Theory heresy does
not look very dangerous. Yet that was not the case some time ago so
let us remember the martyrs:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...1831761a0.html
Nature 183, 1761 (20 June 1959) Herbert Dingle: "AS is well known,
Einstein's special theory of relativity rests on two postulates: (1)
the postulate of relativity; (2) the postulate of constant light
velocity, which says "that light is always propagated in empty space
with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion
of the emitting body". For the first postulate there is much
experimental support; for the second, none."

http://blog.hasslberger.com/Dingle_S...Crossroads.pdf
Herbert Dingle, SCIENCE AT THE CROSSROADS
"According to the special relativity theory, as expounded by Einstein
in his original paper, two similar, regularly-running clocks, A and B,
in uniform relative motion, must work at different rates.....How is
the slower-working clock distinguished? The supposition that the
theory merely requires each clock to APPEAR to work more slowly from
the point of view of the other is ruled out not only by its many
applications and by the fact that the theory would then be useless in
practice, but also by Einstein's own examples, of which it is
sufficient to cite the one best known and most often claimed to have
been indirectly established by experiment, viz. 'Thence' [i.e. from
the theory he had just expounded, which takes no account of possible
effects of accleration, gravitation, or any difference at all between
the clocks except their state of uniform motion] 'we conclude that a
balance-clock at the equator must go more slowly, by a very small
amount, than a precisely similar clock situated at one of the poles
under otherwise identical conditions.' Applied to this example, the
question is: what entitled Einstein to conclude FROM HIS THEORY that
the equatorial, and not the polar, clock worked more slowly?"

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/c...&filetype=.pdf
Herbert Dingle: "...the internal consistency of the restricted
relativity theory seems questionable if the postulate of the constancy
of the velocity of light is given its usual interpretation... (...)
These difficulties are removed if the postulate be interpreted MERELY
as requiring that the velocity of light relative to its actual
material source shall always be c..."

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
The farce of physics
Bryan Wallace
"Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that
the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the
whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this
postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce! (...) The
speed of light is c+v. (...) I expect that the scientists of the
future will consider the dominant abstract physics theories of our
time in much the same light as we now consider the Medieval theories
of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin or that the Earth
stands still and the Universe moves around it."
[Bryan Wallace wrote "The Farce of Physics" on his deathbed hence some
imperfections in the text]

Pentcho Valev

  #6  
Old January 29th 11, 04:57 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
spudnik
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Posts: 220
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

hate scrolling that ****, dood, as much
as scrolling PV's bot's palimpsest.

it's just a phase-space, and this should
have been recognized a long time ago, since
it is not the first use of phase-spaces.

read more »


  #7  
Old February 1st 11, 10:37 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE: the polysign fix...

For Einsteiniana's profiteers Divine Albert's Divine Theory is now
unbearable because it can no longer be a money-spinner (everybody
knows Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is false;
nobody takes length contraction and time dilation miracles seriously
anymore). So they are desperately looking for a new money-spinner:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/bl...-im-2011-01-28
John Horgan: "In his new book Greene takes us even further away from
reality, asking us to consider not just hypothetical particles but
entire universes that lie beyond the reach of our instruments.
Multiverses are old hat, of course. In a 1990 article for Scientific
American on cosmology I included a sidebar, "Here a universe, there a
universe…," about speculation that our universe "is only one in an
infinitude of cosmos." My tone was lightly mocking, because
cosmologists themselves seemed to be kidding - even embarrassed - when
they talked about all these alternate universes. But now Greene - as
well as Stephen Hawking, Leonard Susskind, Sean M. Carroll and other
prominent physicist/popularizers - want us to take multiverses
seriously."

Pentcho Valev

  #8  
Old February 2nd 11, 09:29 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Posts: 8,078
Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main...11/bosmo10.xml
"Smolin admits that "we have made no real headway". "We have failed,"
he says. "It has produced a crisis in physics." (...) EINSTEIN MAY
HAVE STARTED THE ROT."

When did Einstein start the rot?

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...UP_TimesNR.pdf
John Norton: "Already in 1907, a mere two years after the completion
of the special theory, he [Einstein] had concluded that the speed of
light is variable in the presence of a gravitational field."

That is, photons accelerate as they move towards an observer in the
presence of a gravitational field - this observer will measure the
speed of light to be higher or lower than c (more precisely, he will
measure the frequency to be higher or lower than the original
frequency). But if a static observer in a gravitational field measures
the speed of light to be variable, so does an accelerating observer in
the absence of a gravitational field. That is, in 1907 Einstein
realized that his 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate was false:

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "Special relativity was the result of 10 years of
intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong
within two years of publishing it."

Special relativity "was wrong" but Einstein did not want to abandon
the length contraction and time dilation miracles - they were going to
convert him into Divine Albert. So 1907 was the year when Einstein
"STARTED THE ROT".

Pentcho Valev

  #9  
Old February 5th 11, 08:35 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

In 1952 Einstein was still defending his 1905 false constant-speed-of-
light postulate by suggesting that the continuous-field model of light
should be prefered over the discontinuous-particle model:

http://www.relativitybook.com/resour...ein_space.html
"Relativity and the Problem of Space"
Albert Einstein (1952): "During the second half of the nineteenth
century, in connection with the researches of Faraday and Maxwell it
became more and more clear that the description of electromagnetic
processes in terms of field was vastly superior to a treatment on the
basis of the mechanical concepts of material points. By the
introduction of the field concept in electrodynamics, Maxwell
succeeded in predicting the existence of electromagnetic waves, the
essential identity of which with light waves could not be doubted
because of the equality of their velocity of propagation. As a result
of this, optics was, in principle, absorbed by electrodynamics. One
psychological effect of this immense success was that the field
concept, as opposed to the mechanistic framework of classical physics,
gradually won greater independence. (...) Since the special theory of
relativity revealed the physical equivalence of all inertial systems,
it proved the untenability of the hypothesis of an aether at rest. It
was therefore necessary to renounce the idea that the electromagnetic
field is to be regarded as a state of a material carrier. The field
thus becomes an irreducible element of physical description..."

Then in 1954 Einstein suddenly became honest (people do get honest at
the end of their lives) and his 1905 false constant-speed-of-light
postulate, closely related to the continuous-field model of light,
became unbearable to him:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf...09145525ca.pdf
Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics
cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
contemporary physics."

Curiously, Einstein had a temporary burst of honesty in 1909 when the
gravitational-time-dilation camouflage was not devised yet and
everything spoke in favour of Newton's emission theory of light
(giving the true antithesis of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-
light postulate):

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_De...e_of_Radiation
"The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation", Albert Einstein, 1909
"A large body of facts shows undeniably that light has certain
fundamental properties that are better explained by Newton's emission
theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For this reason, I
believe that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics
will bring us a theory of light that can be considered a fusion of the
oscillation and emission theories. The purpose of the following
remarks is to justify this belief and to show that a profound change
in our views on the composition and essence of light is
imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up light no
longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather as
independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in
Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed
our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the
state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity
like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory
of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from
the emitting to the absorbing object."

Pentcho Valev

  #10  
Old February 8th 11, 08:27 AM posted to sci.astro,sci.math
Pentcho Valev
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Default EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY UNBEARABLE

Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate unbearable:

http://www.crc-resurrection.org/Rena...e_Einstein.php
"Écoutons Lévy-Leblond : « Le génie d'Einstein fut de mettre en cause
les notions de base d'espace et de temps elles-mêmes (bigre !). Il
inversa la démarche : au lieu d'expliquer la constance apparente de la
vitesse de la lumière (par quelque cause physique particulière), il la
prit comme point de départ et bâtit sur cette hypothèse une nouvelle
théorie de l'espace et du temps. » (Lévy-Leblond, p. 419) Mais c'est
absurde ! « Qu'on le tourne et retourne comme on voudra, il faut
avouer que c'est là un pur non-sens. » (Maritain, Réflexions sur
l'intelligence, p. 215) Ce n'est plus la vitesse du mobile qui résulte
de l'espace et du temps, ce sont l'espace et le temps qui se
contractent ou se dilatent, pour laisser à l'objet sa vitesse
constante, invariable, insurpassable, absolue !"

http://www.oocities.com/rainforest/6039/jd9.html
"An open letter to Professor Stephen Hawking by John Doan, Melbourne,
29 August 97....There's only one thing that I want to raise with you
in this letter, and it's Einstein's second postulate. Why can't you
step out from Einstein's shadow and change relativity, Professor
Hawking? Why should you accept Einstein's second postulate that the
speed of light is absolute, resulting all paradoxes about time
dilation? Why should you accept that c + v = c, in the sense that a
light spent from Earth to a spaceship has to be measured as c
regardless how fast the spaceship is travelling relative to Earth? How
much evidence have you truly seen?....Your students would still keep
asking the same questions your teachers have asked before. Many people
are still confused. Some understand but cannot explain to idiots. Some
don't understand but have stopped asking to stop being called idiots,
too. And why should we deserve this? Why should we waste time
imagining what our world would be like since Einstein said light is
absolute? Why don't we go back and ask what if Einstein is wrong, that
light is not absolute, that in fact c + c = 2c?....I have a dream,
that one day Professor Hawking would write the first non-Einstein
relativity book with an opposite second postulate, and I would be one
of first readers congratulating you for helping me understand
it.....If you say c + c = 2c, you certainly could make more sense than
Einstein's postulate saying c + c = c. Yet where is non-Einstein
relativity? Why can't you invent it, Professor Hawking? What has
stopped you?"

The unbearably absurd consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-
speed-of-light postulate (an arbitrarily long object can be trapped
inside an arbitrarily short container and a bug can be both dead and
alive):

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors
at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in
the barn. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the
speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special
Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the
direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if
the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the
reference frame of a stationary observer.....So, as the pole passes
through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the
barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your
switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least
momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The
runner emerges from the far door unscathed.....If the doors are kept
shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If
the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest
in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no
such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not
stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it
was Lorentz contracted. If it does not explode under the strain and it
is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back
to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other
end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be
trapped IN A COMPRESSED STATE inside the barn."

http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/Revolutions
"Cependant, si une fusée de 100 m passait devant nous à une vitesse
proche de celle de la lumière, elle pourrait sembler ne mesurer que 50
m, ou même moins. Bien sûr, la question qui vient tout de suite à
l'esprit est: «Cette contraction n'est-elle qu'une illusion?» Il
semble tout à fait incroyable que le simple mouvement puisse comprimer
un objet aussi rigide qu'une fusée. Et pourtant, la contraction est
réelle... mais SANS COMPRESSION physique de l'objet! Ainsi, une fusée
de 100 m passant à toute vitesse dans un tunnel de 60 m pourrait être
entièrement contenue dans ce tunnel pendant une fraction de seconde,
durant laquelle il serait possible de fermer des portes aux deux
bouts! La fusée est donc réellement plus courte. Pourtant, il n'y a
PAS DE COMPRESSION matérielle ou physique de l'engin. Comment est-ce
possible?"

http://alcor.concordia.ca/~scol/semi...ts/Durand.html
"La contraction une longueur est un phénomène à la fois réel mais sans
déformation structurelle. C'est un phénomène réel (et non pas une
illusion) car, par exemple, une perche dont la longueur au repos est
plus grande que la longueur au repos d'une grange peut réellement être
contenue dans cette dernière si elle se déplace assez rapidement. Par
contre, il ne peut y avoir de contraction structurelle de la perche,
i.e de déformation matérielle de l'objet, car la contraction de sa
longueur aurait aussi lieu si c'était plutôt l'observateur qui se
mettait en mouvement sans changer l'état de mouvement de la perche.
Autrement dit, sans changer l'état de la perche, en se mettant soi-
même en mouvement, on change sa longueur: ce n'est donc clairement pas
une contraction matérielle (l'état de la perche est le même dans les
deux cas)."

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu.../bugrivet.html
"The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is
similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the
bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it
looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's
point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just
0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the
bug....The paradox is not resolved."

Pentcho Valev

 




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