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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Recently John Norton, one of the leading priests in Einsteiniana, sent
a clear message to Einsteinians all over the world: The concept of time, initially deduced from Einstein's special relativity and then deformed by Einstein's general relativity, should be rejected: http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us. How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion, an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four- dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage of time." http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html "It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter." Overexcited, the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) decided to give substantial sums of money to Einsteinians who find it profitable to develop Norton's ideas: http://www.fqxi.org/grants/large/awardees/list (...) Lee Smolin Perimeter Institute $47,500 Physical and cosmological consequences of the hypotheses of the reality of time (...) Craig Callender University of California, San Diego $102,263 What Makes Time Special (...) http://www.fqxi.org/community http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148 "Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi." http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/151 "The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." It was none other than Einstein who uttered these words. He was speaking about how our perception of time differs from the fundamental nature of time in physics. Take our perceptions first: We have a clear sense of the present moment, what came before, and what might come after. Unfortunately, physics treats time rather differently. Einstein's theory of special relativity presents us with a four-dimensional spacetime, in which the past, present and future are already mapped out. There is no special "now," just as there's no special "here." And just like spacetime does not have a fundamental direction - forcing us to move inexorably from east to west, say - time does not flow. "You have this big gap between the time of fundamental science and the time we experience," says Craig Callender, a philosopher at the University of California, San Diego. It's this gap that he has set out to narrow, using ideas from physics, evolutionary theory and cognitive science." Some Einsteinians know (others don't care) that Einstein's special relativity is based on two postulates: the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the speed of light. So if you wish to reject a deductive consequence of the theory, you will have to declare at least one of the postulates false. For the moment only the option: "Principle of relativity false, Principle of constancy of the speed of light true" seems to be permitted in Einsteiniana: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/5339/ Lorentzian theories vs. Einsteinian special relativity - a logico- empiricist reconstruction Laszlo E. Szabo "It is widely believed that the principal difference between Einstein's special relativity and its contemporary rival Lorentz-type theories was that while the Lorentz-type theories were also capable of "explaining away" the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment and other experimental findings by means of the distortions of moving measuring-rods and moving clocks, special relativity revealed more fundamental new facts about the geometry of space-time behind these phenomena. I shall argue that special relativity tells us nothing new about the geometry of space-time, in comparison with the pre- relativistic Galileo-invariant conceptions; it simply calls something else "space-time", and this something else has different properties. All statements of special relativity about those features of reality that correspond to the original meaning of the terms "space" and "time" are identical with the corresponding traditional pre- relativistic statements. It will be also argued that special relativity and Lorentz theory are completely identical in both senses, as theories about space-time and as theories about the behavior of moving physical objects." http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740 Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy) "It is remarkable that the Special Theory has thus far managed to survive largely unscathed the collapse of its essential epistemological underpinnings. One wonders how this can be so. Undoubtedly a major part of the answer is the understandable one that physicists are not epistemologists; physicists typically know no more about epistemology, the philosophy of language (e.g. problems with the verificationist criterion of semantic meaning), and ontology than philosophers typically know about physics. The precise philosophical arguments for the illogicality, falsity, or unjustifiably of the epistemological, semantic, and ontological presuppositions of the Special Theory remain, with a few exceptions, unknown among physicists. The price paid for the growth of knowledge is increased specialization, which, paradoxically, also prevents or reverses the growth of knowledge, since specialists in one field often base their work on premises that (unbeknownst to them) have been refuted or disconfirmed in another field. The only solution we can see for this problem is that the training or schooling of physicists ought to include schooling in philosophy (and, as we shall see, the converse should hold for philosophers). Perhaps this is most practicable in the form of there being thinkers who take as their specialization the intersection of physics and philosophy and the works of these thinkers, at least in "introductory formats", being a part of the education of both physicists and philosophers. If this proves unfeasible and the situation remains as it presently stands, the unpalatable situation may result that neither physicists nor philosophers are in a position to have adequately justified beliefs about space and time but only philosophers of physics (or the few thinkers who are both philosophers and physicists, such as David Albert and Bas Van Fraassen, and, from the side of physics, Niels Bohr and David Bohm, who developed philosophical theories in addition to physically interpreted equations). Apart from leaving unaddressed the epistemological and semantic presuppositions of STR, there is an even stronger factor behind physicists' unwillingness to abandon the Special Theory. The Special Theory is a part of orthodox quantum field theory (QFT) (quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics), which aims to unify the Special Theory with quantum mechanics. Physicists would be at a loss as to how to proceed if they rejected the Special Theory as unjustified, since they (for the most part) believe that this would require them to reject QFT. In the light of this dependence on Special Relativity, physicists are not likely to abandon it unless it is observationally disconfirmed and there is an observationally adequate theory available to replace it. In fact, there is a theory that is not merely observationally equivalent to the Special Theory, but also observationally superior to it, namely Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory. Lorentz's theory is regarded by many physicists who have studied Lorentzian theory, such as J.S. Bell, to be observationally equivalent to the Special Theory. However a Lorentzian or neo-Lorentzian theory is, in fact, observationally superior to the Special Theory (a fact that Bell, surprisingly, did not point out), since a Lorentzian theory, in contrast to the Special Theory, is consistent with the relations of absolute, instantaneous simultaneity..." http://hps.elte.hu/PIRT.Budapest/ Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy In the Interpretations of Relativity Theory, Budapest 4-6 September 2009 "The objective of the conference is to discuss the mathematical, physical and philosophical elements in the physical interpretations of Relativity Theory (PIRT); the physical and philosophical arguments and commitments shaping those interpretations and the various applications of the theory, especially in relativistic cosmology and relativistic quantum theory. The organizing committee is open for discussion of recent advances in investigations of the mathematical, logical and conceptual structure of Relativity Theory, as well as for analysis of the cultural, ideological and philosophical factors that have roles in its evolution and in the development of the modern physical world view determined to a considerable extent by that theory. The conference intends to review the fruitfulness of orthodox Relativity, as developed from the Einstein-Minkowski formulation, and to suggest how history and philosophy of science clarify the relationship between the accepted relativistic formal structure and the various physical interpretations associated with it. While the organizing committee encourages critical investigations and welcomes both Einsteinian and non-Einsteinian (Lorentzian, etc.) approaches, including the recently proposed ether-type theories, it is assumed that the received formal structure of the theory is valid and anti-relativistic papers will not be accepted." Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
On May 31 Pentcho Valev wrote:
For the moment only the option: "Principle of relativity false, Principle of constancy of the speed of light true" seems to be permitted in Einsteiniana... Yet: http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5237I.pdf Craig Callender: "Scientists are free to devise models of the world wherein (say) the absolute speed of light is not constant. To be taken seriously, however, the comment is not an idle one but rather one embedded in an alterative systematization of a comparable range of phenomena. It's a conceivable physical possibility. In fact it's interesting that one way this possibility is challenged (e.g., Ellis and Uzan 2005) is by pointing out how much the rest of the system hangs on the speed of light being constant - it's a way of pointing out that the scientist hasn't yet discharged her obligation to fit the new possibility into a large and equally good system." Craig Callender, I suspect you have never thought of Newton's emission theory of light where "the absolute speed of light is not constant": 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." Unfortunately, driven by doublethink, John Norton disturbs your "protective stupidity" and explains that "the Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE": http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc John Norton: "These efforts were long misled by an exaggeration of the importance of one experiment, the Michelson-Morley experiment, even though Einstein later had trouble recalling if he even knew of the experiment prior to his 1905 paper. This one experiment, in isolation, has little force. Its null result happened to be fully compatible with Newton's own emission theory of light. Located in the context of late 19th century electrodynamics when ether-based, wave theories of light predominated, however, it presented a serious problem that exercised the greatest theoretician of the day." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf John Norton: "In addition to his work as editor of the Einstein papers in finding source material, Stachel assembled the many small clues that reveal Einstein's serious consideration of an emission theory of light; and he gave us the crucial insight that Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity. Even today, this point needs emphasis. The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE." 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." Craig Callender, is crimestop so strong that you are unable to think even of what John Norton says? How about the following text by Banesh Hoffmann (perhaps it paralyzes you completely): 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." Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
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." Revolution in science? No of course. Just extracting additional career and money from a "heresy" which is in fact camouflage (deviates the attention from Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate). Both authors ("an international team of leading philosophers and physicists") and readers continue to sing, invariably, "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity" (How wrong Thomas Kuhn was!): 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. Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Repercussions in France: Einsteiniana's local godfather (Thibault
Damour) continues to teach, fiercely, the "new conceptualization of time" based on Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate but a more insiginificant member (Etienne Klein), influenced by John Norton, Craig Callender and Lee Smolin, begs to disagree. Still the crimestop continues to be in force: Etienne Klein would never inform the French public that the properties of time he rejects are in fact consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate: http://www-cosmosaf.iap.fr/Damour1.htm Thibault Damour: "En 1905, Einstein (après d'importants travaux de Lorentz et de Poincaré) apporta un premier bouleversement conceptuel des 4 catégories fondamentales de la physique du 19ième siècle, à travers sa théorie de la "relativité restreinte". Cette théorie unifie les deux catégories séparées d'Espace et de Temps en une nouvelle catégorie: celle d'Espace-Temps. L'Espace-Temps est quadri- dimensionnel, donné a priori, et muni d'une géométrie de Poincaré- Minkowski. Il définit le cadre d' "existence continuée" (c'est-à-dire de l'existence conçue dans toute sa durée) de la réalité. (...) L'Espace-Temps de la Relativité Restreinte a apporté plusieurs bouleversements des anciennes catégories: (...) (ii) l'existence de l'instant présent" (du "maintenant") comme portant la seule réalité de l'étant est fortement mise en doute car il devient incompatible avec la structure géométrique de l'Espace-Temps de sélectionner une famille de "tranches" horizontales correspondant à "l'écoulement du temps"..." http://www.academie-sciences.fr/acti...ein_Damour.pdf Thibault Damour: "Mentionnons pour finir qu'Einstein prenait au sérieux l'impact existentiel de la révolution conceptuelle apportée par la théorie de la Relativité, et notamment l'impossibilité de donner un sens objectif au «maintenant» et plus généralement au passage subjectif du temps. Il exprima cette idée de façon prégnante dans la lettre de condoléances qu'il écrivit le 21 mars 1955 (un mois avant sa propre mort) à la famille de son ami intime, Michele Besso, qui venait de mourir : «Voilà qu'il m’a de nouveau précédé de peu en quittant ce monde étrange. Cela ne signifie rien. Pour nous, physiciens dans l'âme, la séparation entre passé, présent et avenir ne garde que la valeur d'une illusion, si tenace soit-elle.»" http://www.psycho-energie.fr/double/...hibault-damour Thibault Damour: "Le formalisme de la relativité einsteinienne dit que le temps est une illusion..." http://www-llb.cea.fr/Phocea/Vie_des...php?id_ast=761 Two-day conference "Le Temps" (jointly with Séminaire Poincaré), IHP, 4 et 18 décembre 2010 http://www.bourbaphy.fr/damourtemps.pdf Thibault Damour: "Textbook presentations of Special Relativity often fail to convey the revolutionary nature, with respect to the "common conception of time", of the seminal paper of Einstein in June 1905. It is true that many of the equations, and mathematical considerations, of this paper were also contained in a 1904 paper of Lorentz, and in two papers of Poincaré submitted in June and July 1905. It is also true that the central informational core of a physical theory is defined by its fundamental equations, and that for some theories (notably Quantum Mechanics) the fundamental equations were discovered before their physical interpretation. However, in the case of Special Relativity, the egregious merit of Einstein was, apart from his new mathematical results and his new physical predictions (notably about the comparison of the readings of clocks which have moved with respect to each other) the conceptual breakthrough that the rescaled "local time" variable t' of Lorentz was "purely and simply, the time", as experienced by a moving observer. This new conceptualization of time implied a deep upheaval of the common conception of time. (...) The paradigm of the special relativistic upheaval of the usual concept of time is the twin paradox. Let us emphasize that this striking example of time dilation proves that time travel (towards the future) is possible. As a gedanken experiment (if we neglect practicalities such as the technology needed for reaching velocities comparable to the velocity of light, the cost of the fuel and the capacity of the traveller to sustain high accelerations), it shows that a sentient being can jump, "within a minute" (of his experienced time) arbitrarily far in the future, say sixty million years ahead, and see, and be part of, what (will) happen then on Earth. This is a clear way of realizing that the future "already exists" (as we can experience it "in a minute"). No wonder that many people, attached to the usual idea of an external flow of time, refused to believe that the travelling twin will come back younger than his sedentary brother." 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.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." Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
French thinkers translated Callender's paper (where the absurd
consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate had been rejected) and are now waiting for John Norton, Craig Callender and Lee Smolin to give additional instructions. The Great Revolution in Science seems to be just around the corner: http://www.pourlascience.fr/ewb_page...iona-26041.php Craig CALLENDER: "Einstein lança l'assaut suivant en éliminant la simultanéité absolue. D'après sa théorie de la relativité restreinte, la détermination des événements qui se produisent au même instant dépend du mouvement de l'observateur. La véritable arène des événements n'est ni le temps ni l'espace, mais leur réunion : l'espace- temps. Deux observateurs se déplaçant à des vitesses différentes ne seront pas d'accord sur l'instant ni sur le lieu où se produit un événement, mais ils seront d'accord sur sa localisation dans l'espace- temps. L'espace et le temps sont ainsi des concepts plus secondaires. Einstein n'a fait qu'empirer les choses en 1915 avec sa théorie de la relativité générale, qui étend la relativité restreinte à des situations où la gravitation est présente." There is always a Great Revolution in Science "just around the corner" in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=5538 Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?" http://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/cover "Was Einstein Wrong? What if Einstein was wrong? The day João Magueijo began to doubt Albert Einstein started inauspiciously. It was a rainy winter morning in 1995 at Cambridge University, where Magueijo was a research fellow in theoretical physics. He was tramping across a sodden soccer field, suffering from a hangover and mumbling to himself, when out of the gray a heretical idea brought him to a full stop: What if Einstein was wrong? What if, rather than being forever constant, the speed of light could change? Magueijo stood there in the downpour. What would that mean?" http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten By Jonathan Leake, Science Editor The Sunday Times - London "A group of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...pagewanted=all "As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said. ''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light.'' http://www.lauralee.com/news/relativitychallenged.htm Question: Jumping off a bandwagon is risky - surely you could have committed career suicide by suggesting something as radical as a variable speed of light? Magueijo: That's true. Maybe I wouldn't have been so carefree if I hadn't had this Royal Society fellowship: it gives a safety net for 10 years. You can go anywhere and do whatever you want as long as you're productive. Question: So you're free to be the angry young man of physics? Magueijo: Maybe it comes across that I'm bitter and twisted, but if you're reading a book, the body language is lost. You're talking to me face to face: you can see I'm really playing with all this. I'm not an angry young man, I'm just being honest. There's no hard feelings. I may say offensive things, but everything is very good natured. Question: So why should the speed of light vary? Magueijo: It's more useful to turn that round. The issue is more why should the speed of light be constant? The constancy of the speed of light is the central thing in relativity but we have lots of problems in theoretical physics, and these probably result from assuming that relativity works all the time. Relativity must collapse at some point... http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Se...lden_Spike.pdf "Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at a constant speed for all observers..." 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.....But there is another possibility. This is that the principle of relativity is preserved, but Einstein's special theory of relativity requires modification so as to allow photons to have a speed that depends on energy. The most shocking thing I have learned in the last year is that this is a real possibility. A photon can have an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of relativity! This was understood a few years ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in this issue through work I did with Joao Magueijo, a very talented young cosmologist at Imperial College, London. During the two years I spent working there, Joao kept coming to me and bugging me with this problem.....These ideas all seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get it. I was sure it was wrong! But Joao kept bugging me and slowly I realized that they had a point. We have since written several papers together showing how Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a new version of special relativity in which the speed of light can depend on energy." Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/152
The Crystallizing Universe Kate Becker wrote: "The view that the past, the present and the future are of exactly the same physical character seems to be supported by Einstein's special theory of relativity..." This view is DEDUCED in Einstein's special theory of relativity, and if you don't accept it, you should suggest which of the two postulates - the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the speed of light - is false. Any different discussion amounts to crimestop: http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17 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." Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "There are occasions in which our best science requires us to dismiss some fact of experience as an illusion. All our ordinary experience of water and air is that they are perfectly continuous fluids. Yet our best science tells us that is an illusion. On a sufficiently fine scale both have the granularity of molecules. The appearance of continuity is an illusion. But it is one that is readily explicable by the extremely small size of atoms. Again, light appears to us to propagate instantaneously in ordinary experience. Yet it is essential for relativity theory that it have a finite speed of propagation. So we dismiss the appearance of instantaneous propagation as an illusion. Once again, it is readily explicable by the extremely short propagation times needed, which are well below those we can discern in ordinary processes. Now consider the passage of time. Is there a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion." Norton's euphemism "We don't find passage in our present theories" is deciphered by Thibault Damour: http://www.psycho-energie.fr/double/...hibault-damour Thibault Damour: "Le formalisme de la relativité einsteinienne dit que le temps est une illusion..." In a world different from Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world John Norton would be regarded as a fierce antirelativist. In Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world he is just "the subtlest practitioner of 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 |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Self-mutilation of Einsteiniana's minds:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/op...t-we-knew.html Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed that the wris****ches worn by two individuals moving relative to one another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics' notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization." http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-7.html George Orwell: "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?" Pentcho Valev |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
Doublethink in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world:
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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...sim/index.html John Norton: "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." 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 |
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FQXi AGAINST EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/129
"Now Horava, at the University of California, Berkeley, claims to have found a solution that is both simple and - in physics terms, at least - sacrilegious. To make the two theories gel, he argues, you need to throw out Einstein's tenet that time is always relative, never absolute. Horava's controversial idea is based on the fact that the description of space and time in the quantum and relativistic worlds are in conflict. Quantum theory harks back to the Newtonian concept that time is absolute - an impassive backdrop against which events take place. In contrast, general relativity tells us that space and time are fundamentally intertwined; two events can only be marked relative to one another, and not relative to an absolute background clock. Einstein's subjective notion of time is well accepted and is the hallmark of Lorentz invariance, the property that lies at the heart of general relativity. "Lorentz invariance is not actually fundamental to a theory of quantum gravity," says Horava. "But the problem so far has been that many cosmologists are wedded to the concept." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...705.4507v1.pdf Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat: "The question is then: If Lorentz invariance is broken, what happens to the speed of light? Given that Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles must be violated." Eternal silence in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world: http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17 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." Pentcho Valev |
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