EINSTEINIANS REJECT THE RELATIVITY OF TIME

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2408/
Vesselin Petkov: "This paper pursues two aims. First, to show that the
block universe view, regarding the universe as a timelessly existing
four-dimensional world, is the only one that is consistent with
special relativity."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers...UP_TimesNR.pdf
John Norton: "When Minkowski (1908) introduced the routine use of
spacetime into physics, it seemed that this represented the victory of
a particular view of time. Minkowski's spacetime represented all there
was: past, present and future, and all at once. Did this finally
vindicate an idea whose pedigree traces back to Parmenides in
antiquity: time and change are mere illusions? (...) Might there be
something special in the nature of the relativistic spacetime that
supports the illusory character of change? An ingenious line of
analysis suggests there might be."

The relativistic spacetime introduced by Minkowski is based on two
postulates:

1. The principle of relativity.

2. The principle of constancy of the speed of light (the speed of
light is independent of the speed of the light source).

So if there is "something special in the nature of the relativistic
spacetime that supports the illusory character of change", this can
only be the second postulate, the principle of constancy of the speed
of light. Accordingly, if one rejects the consequence, Minkowski's
concept of (illusory) time, one would also have to reject the premise,
Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate. That is, one would
have to admit that Einstein should not have "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":

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Its.../dp/0486406768
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
"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."

Einsteinians rejecting the relativity 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."

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.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."

http://hps.master.univ-paris7.fr/cours_du_temps.doc
Etienne Klein: "Aujourd'hui, L'astrophysicien Thibault Damour
développe à sa manière des idées qui vont dans le même sens. Selon
lui, le temps qui passe (qu'il sagisse d'un fait ou de notre
sentiment) est le produit de notre seule subjectivité, un effet que
nous devrions au caractère irréversible de notre mise en mémoire, de
sorte que la question du cours du temps relèverait non pas de la
physique, mais des sciences cognitives. Il écrit : « De même que la
notion de température n'a aucun sens si l'on considère un système
constitué d'un petit nombre de particules, de même il est probable que
la notion d'écoulement du temps n'a de sens que pour certains systèmes
complexes, qui évoluent hors de l'équilibre thermodynamique, et qui
gèrent d'une certaine façon les informations accumulées dans leur
mémoire. » Le temps ne serait donc qu'une apparence d'ordre
psychologique : « Dans le domaine d'espace-temps que nous observons,
poursuit-il, nous avons l'impression qu'il s'écoule "du bas vers le
haut" de l'espace-temps, alors qu'en réalité ce dernier constitue un
bloc rigide qui n'est nullement orienté a priori : il ne le devient
que pour nous [35]. » L'existence même d'un « cours du temps », ou
d'un « passage du temps », n'est ainsi que simple apparence pour de
nombreux physiciens contemporains. Certains vont même jusqu'à
considérer le passage du temps comme une pure illusion, comme un
produit culturel abusivement dérivé de la métaphore du fleuve. C'est
en effet la conception dite de l'« univers-bloc » qui semble avoir les
faveurs d'une majorité de physiciens. Dans le droit fil de la théorie
de la relativité, celle-ci consiste à invoquer un univers constitué
d'un continuum d'espace-temps à quatre dimensions, privé de tout flux
temporel : tous les événements, qu'ils soient passés, présents et
futurs, ont exactement la même réalité, de la même façon que
différents lieux coexistent, en même temps et avec le même poids
ontologique, dans l'espace. En d'autres termes, les notions de passé
ou de futur ne sont que des notions relatives, comme celles d'Est et
d'Ouest. En un sens, tout ce qui va exister existe déjà et tout ce qui
a existé existe encore. L'espace-temps contient l'ensemble de
l'histoire de la réalité comme la partition contient l'uvre musicale :
la partition existe sous une forme statique, mais ce qu'elle contient,
l'esprit humain l'appréhende généralement sous la forme d'un flux
temporel."

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."

Pentcho Valev

Of all the Einsteinians rejecting the absurd illusoriness of time
deduced in Einstein's relativity, not one could think of a reason why
the absurdity of the consequence should entail the falsehood of the
premise. Since the premise in this case is Einstein's 1905 false
constant-speed-of-light postulate, the only source of Einsteiniana's
welfare, the crimestop is absolute:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Anyone who dare overcome the crimestop barrier automatically becomes
an unperson in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world. Herbert Dingle and
Jacques Maritain are typical unpersons:

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.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_215.pdf
Herbert Dingle: "The special relativity theory requires different
rates of ageing to result from motion which belongs no more to one
twin than to the other: that is impossible. It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance of this result, for this theory is, by
common consent, "taken for granted" in Max Born's words, in all modern
atomic research. and it determines the course of practically all
current developments in physical science, theoretical and
experimental, whether concerned with the laboratory or with the
universe. (...) But it is now clear that the interpretation of those
[Lorentz] equations as constituting a basis for a new kinematics,
displacing that of Galileo and Newton, which is the essence of the
special relativity theory, leads inevitably to impossibilities and
therefore cannot be true. Either there is an absolute standard of rest
- call it the ether as with Maxwell. or the universe as with Mach, or
absolute space as with Newton, or what you will or else ALL MOTION,
INCLUDING THAT WITH THE SPEED OF LIGHT, IS RELATIVE, AS WITH RITZ."

http://www.amazon.ca/Oeuvres-compl%C.../dp/2850492752
Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, Jean-Marie Allion
Oeuvres complètes, Volume 3, pp. 275-276:
Jacques Maritain: "Ce qui est absurde, c'est d'imposer au temps réel
et à la simultanéité réelle une relativité qui est le propre des
relations de raison variant avec l'observateur, et de prétendre que la
distance qui sépare deux événements dans le temps, ou deux points dans
l'espace, prise dans ce qui la constitue intrinsèquement, soit ceci ou
cela selon l'observateur, que deux événements soient réellement
simultanés ou réellement successifs à raison du mouvement de
l'observateur ; bref que le changement de mesure provenant du
changement de l'observateur affecte la réalité même de la chose
mesurée."

http://www.amazon.ca/Oeuvres-compl%C.../dp/2850492752
Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, Jean-Marie Allion
Oeuvres complètes, Volume 3, p. 285:
Jacques Maritain: "Il ne reste plus alors qu'à avouer que la théorie
[d'Einstein], si l'on donnait une signification ontologiquement réelle
aux entités qu'elle met en jeu, comporterait des absurdités;
entièrement logique et cohérente comme système hypothético-déductif et
synthèse mathématique des phénomènes, elle n'est pas, malgré les
prétensions de ses partisans, une philosophie de la nature, parce que
le principe de la constance de la vitesse de la lumière, sur lequel
elle s'appuie, ne peut pas être ontologiquement vrai."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-4.html
George Orwell: "Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not
exist : he had never existed."

Pentcho Valev

Einstein taken at face value:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtMw2f5YJk0
Brian Cox explains the Block Universe

John Norton, Craig Callender, Lee Smolin and Etienne Klein reject the
Block Universe but at the same time accept it as they believe that the
antecedent, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, is
true. This particular feature of their split personality is called
"doublethink":

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "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. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
of the truth. (...) It need hardly be said that the subtlest
practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and
know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society,
those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those
who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the
greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more
intelligent, the less sane."

Pentcho Valev

Jean Perrin: another unperson in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:

http://www.sofrphilo.fr/telecharger.php?id=69
Séance du 19 Octobre 1911
LE TEMPS, L'ESPACE ET LA CAUSALITÉ DANS LA PHYSIQUE MODERNE
"M. PERRIN. - Il est remarquable qu'un retour à l'hypothèse de
l'émission, en admettant que les particules lumineuses sont émises par
chaque source avec une même vitesse par rapport à elle dans toutes les
directions expliquerait, dans les conceptions de la Mécanique
classique, le résultat négatif de l'expérience de Michelson et Morley
quel que soit le mouvement d'ensemble du système. D'autre part les
physiciens, en développant la théorie des ondulations au point de vue
du principe de relativité, sont amenés à conclure que la lumière est
inerte et probablement pesante. N'est-ce pas un retour vers l'ancienne
théorie de l'émission ?"

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Of all the Einsteinians rejecting the absurd illusoriness of time
deduced in Einstein's relativity, not one could think of a reason why
the absurdity of the consequence should entail the falsehood of the
premise. Since the premise in this case is Einstein's 1905 false
constant-speed-of-light postulate, the only source of Einsteiniana's
welfare, the crimestop is absolute:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."

Anyone who dare overcome the crimestop barrier automatically becomes
an unperson in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world. Herbert Dingle and
Jacques Maritain are typical unpersons:

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.worldnpa.org/pdf/abstracts/abstracts_215.pdf
Herbert Dingle: "The special relativity theory requires different
rates of ageing to result from motion which belongs no more to one
twin than to the other: that is impossible. It is impossible to
exaggerate the importance of this result, for this theory is, by
common consent, "taken for granted" in Max Born's words, in all modern
atomic research. and it determines the course of practically all
current developments in physical science, theoretical and
experimental, whether concerned with the laboratory or with the
universe. (...) But it is now clear that the interpretation of those
[Lorentz] equations as constituting a basis for a new kinematics,
displacing that of Galileo and Newton, which is the essence of the
special relativity theory, leads inevitably to impossibilities and
therefore cannot be true. Either there is an absolute standard of rest
- call it the ether as with Maxwell. or the universe as with Mach, or
absolute space as with Newton, or what you will or else ALL MOTION,
INCLUDING THAT WITH THE SPEED OF LIGHT, IS RELATIVE, AS WITH RITZ."

http://www.amazon.ca/Oeuvres-compl%C.../dp/2850492752
Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, Jean-Marie Allion
Oeuvres complètes, Volume 3, pp. 275-276:
Jacques Maritain: "Ce qui est absurde, c'est d'imposer au temps réel
et à la simultanéité réelle une relativité qui est le propre des
relations de raison variant avec l'observateur, et de prétendre que la
distance qui sépare deux événements dans le temps, ou deux points dans
l'espace, prise dans ce qui la constitue intrinsèquement, soit ceci ou
cela selon l'observateur, que deux événements soient réellement
simultanés ou réellement successifs à raison du mouvement de
l'observateur ; bref que le changement de mesure provenant du
changement de l'observateur affecte la réalité même de la chose
mesurée."

http://www.amazon.ca/Oeuvres-compl%C.../dp/2850492752
Jacques Maritain, Raïssa Maritain, Jean-Marie Allion
Oeuvres complètes, Volume 3, p. 285:
Jacques Maritain: "Il ne reste plus alors qu'à avouer que la théorie
[d'Einstein], si l'on donnait une signification ontologiquement réelle
aux entités qu'elle met en jeu, comporterait des absurdités;
entièrement logique et cohérente comme système hypothético-déductif et
synthèse mathématique des phénomènes, elle n'est pas, malgré les
prétensions de ses partisans, une philosophie de la nature, parce que
le principe de la constance de la vitesse de la lumière, sur lequel
elle s'appuie, ne peut pas être ontologiquement vrai."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-4.html
George Orwell: "Withers, however, was already an unperson. He did not
exist : he had never existed."

Pentcho Valev

If John Norton, Craig Callender, Lee Smolin and Etienne Klein want to
convince brothers Einsteinians that the relativity of time should be
rejected, they may have to reject the relativity of length first. Both
relativities are absurd consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-
speed-of-light postulate but the absurdity of the relativity of length
is more outrageous - it would be more difficult for brothers
Einsteinians to oppose the rejection:

http://www.math.upatras.gr/~weele/fi...aper%2064).pdf
"One of the most popular paradoxes of Special Relativity, appearing in
almost every course on the subject, is the pole-barn paradox. It can
be stated as follows: A farmer, who owns a barn 4 m long and a ladder
of length 5 m, would like to fit the ladder inside the barn. To
accomplish this, he plans to use the Lorentz contraction, i.e., the
relativistic effect that objects 'shrink' when moving with constant
velocity with respect to an observer. (...) ...in the farmer's frame
(normal-sized barn, shortened ladder) the ladder is completely inside
the barn between tB and tA. (...) Now we come to the actual catching
of the ladder. Let us assume that the farmer closes the barn at some
moment between tB and tA, when the ladder (in his reference frame) is
inside the barn. (...) The ladder will of course not fit nicely: it
will bend, or break, or poke through the door. But the fact is that it
is caught."

http://www.quebecscience.qc.ca/Revolutions
Stéphane Durand: "Pour mieux comprendre le phénomène de ralentissement
du temps, il est préférable d'aborder un autre phénomène tout aussi
paradoxal: la contraction des longueurs. Car la vitesse affecte non
seulement l'écoulement du temps, mais aussi la longueur des objets.
Ainsi, une fusée en mouvement apparaît plus courte que lorsqu'elle est
au repos. Là aussi, plus la vitesse est grande, plus la contraction
est importante. Et, comme pour le temps, les effets ne deviennent
considérables qu'à des vitesses proches de celle de la lumière. Dans
la vie de tous les jours, cette contraction est imperceptible.
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."

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://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

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.edge.org/3rd_culture/smol...n03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the
effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of
the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory
that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the
same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the
sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself
based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy
of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized
Einstein's general theory of relativity. Because Einstein's special
theory is only a kind of approximation to his general theory, we can
implement the principles of the latter but find modifications to the
former. And this is what seems to be happening!"

Be careful, Lee Smolin! The thought:

"The principle of constancy of the speed of light advanced by Einstein
in 1905 is false"

may prove fatal:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-2
George Orwell: "The consequences of every act are included in the act
itself. (...) Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS
death."

Pentcho Valev

John Norton teaches believers to reject Newtonian spacetime and
worship Einstein-Minkowski spacetime:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...sim/index.html
John Norton: "In Newtonian spacetimes, there is only one way to do
this, so a Newtonian spacetime unstacks into a unique set of spaces.
In this sense, space and time remain distinct even if we represent the
physics in a spacetime. In a relativistic (i.e. Minkowski) spacetime,
the relativity of simultaneity tells us that there are many ways to do
this; there is no unique, preferred unstacking. In this sense, space
and time get fused together and this fusion is the real novelty of the
spacetime approach in relativity theory. This novelty is surely what
Hermann Minkowski had in mind when he wrote in the introduction to his
famous lecture "Space and Time" of 1908: "The views of space and time
which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of
experimental physics and therein lies their strength. They are
radical. Henceforth space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to
fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality."

Believers react to John Norton's teaching:

http://www.haverford.edu/physics/songs/divine.htm
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein
Not Maxwell, Curie, or Bohr!
He explained the photo-electric effect,
And launched quantum physics with his intellect!
His fame went glo-bell, he won the Nobel --
He should have been given four!
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein,
Professor with brains galore!
No-one could outshine Professor Einstein --
Egad, could that guy derive!
He gave us special relativity,
That's always made him a hero to me!
Brownian motion, my true devotion,
He mastered back in aught-five!
No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein,
Professor in overdrive!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity.
Yes we all believe in relativity, 8.033, relativity.
Einstein's postulates imply
That planes are shorter when they fly.
Their clocks are slowed by time dilation
And look warped from aberration.
We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity.
Yes we all believe in relativity, 8.033, relativity.

John Norton teaches believers to reject Einstein-Minkowski spacetime
and worship Newtonian spacetime:

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.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."

The ecstasy reaches its maximum: believers tumble to the floor, start
tearing their clothes and go into convulsions.

Pentcho Valev