POSTSCIENTISTS AND (MISSING) SCIENTISTS

http://io9.com/5667872/does-entropy-...-it-make-time?
"The Second Law says, colloquially, that things fall apart, or that
things get more and more disordered with time, but this isn't quite
right. What it really says is that the total entropy of a closed
system increases with time. (...) Dave Goldberg is the author, with
Jeff Blomquist, of "A User's Guide to the Universe: Surviving the
Perils of Black Holes, Time Paradoxes, and Quantum Uncertainty." He is
an Associate Professor of Physics at Drexel University."

If Dave Goldberg were a scientist, he would know how "closed system"
is defined and readers would not be misled. But more importantly, he
would have a strong desire to explicitly verify the validity of the
deductive chain connecting the final conclusion, "The entropy always
increases", with Clausius' 1850 initial argument:

http://www.mdpi.org/lin/clausius/clausius.htm
"Ueber die bewegende Kraft der Wärme", 1850, Rudolf Clausius: "Carnot
assumed, as has already been mentioned, that the equivalent of the
work done by heat is found in the mere transfer of heat from a hotter
to a colder body, while the quantity of heat remains undiminished. The
latter part of this assumption--namely, that the quantity of heat
remains undiminished--contradicts our former principle, and must
therefore be rejected... (...) It is this maximum of work which must
be compared with the heat transferred. When this is done it appears
that there is in fact ground for asserting, with Carnot, that it
depends only on the quantity of the heat transferred and on the
temperatures t and tau of the two bodies A and B, but not on the
nature of the substance by means of which the work is done. (...) If
we now suppose that there are two substances of which the one can
produce more work than the other by the transfer of a given amount of
heat, or, what comes to the same thing, needs to transfer less heat
from A to B to produce a given quantity of work, we may use these two
substances alternately by producing work with one of them in the above
process. At the end of the operations both bodies are in their
original condition; further, the work produced will have exactly
counterbalanced the work done, and therefore, by our former principle,
the quantity of heat can have neither increased nor diminished. The
only change will occur in the distribution of the heat, since more
heat will be transferred from B to A than from A to B, and so on the
whole heat will be transferred from B to A. By repeating these two
processes alternately it would be possible, without any expenditure of
force or any other change, to transfer as much heat as we please from
a cold to a hot body, and this is not in accord with the other
relations of heat, since it always shows a tendency to equalize
temperature differences and therefore to pass from hotter to colder
bodies."

Dave Goldberg will never verify the validity of the deductive chain
that has produced the precious conclusion "The entropy always
increases". Of all his colleagues not one could think of a reason why
the validity of this chain should be verified. They are all
postscientists.

Pentcho Valev

Jos Uffink refers to the fact that the set of systems to which the
second law of thermodynamics (version "Entropy always increases in an
isolated system") applies is void:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/313/
p. 4: "Even deliberate attempts at careful formulation of the Second
Law sometimes end up in a paradox. One sometimes finds a formulation
which admits that thermodynamics aims only at the description of
systems in equilibrium states, and that, strictly speaking, a system
does not always have an entropy during a process. The Second Law, in
this view, refers to processes of an isolated system that begin and
end in equilibrium states and says that the entropy of the final state
is never less than that of the initial state (Sklar 1974, p. 381). The
problem is here that, by definition, states of equilibrium remain
unchanged in the course of time, unless the system is acted upon.
Thus, an increase of entropy occurs only if the system is disturbed,
i.e. when it is not isolated."

That is, this version of the second law implicitly presupposes the
activity of an external OPERATOR that is to at least "disturb" the
system initially. But once the external operator is found to be
indispensable, the question:

"Can the operator's activity trigger a violation of some of the
versions of the second law of thermodynamics?"

becomes crucial. Of all thermodynamicists all over the world not one
could think of a reason why this question should be asked, let alone
answered. They are all postscientists.

Pentcho Valev

In the era of Postscientism all observations and experiments
gloriously confirm Divine Albert's Divine Theory by definition. Yet
occasionally Einsteiniana's priests find it exciting to shock
believers:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...c-results.html
"In 2005, researchers at the MAGIC gamma-ray telescope on La Palma in
the Canary Islands were studying gamma-ray bursts emitted by the black
hole in the centre of the Markarian 501 galaxy, half a billion light
years away. The burst's high-energy gamma rays arrived at the
telescope 4 minutes later than the lower-energy rays. Both parts of
the spectrum should have been emitted at the same time. So is the time
lag due to the high-energy radiation travelling slower through space?
That wouldn't make sense: it would contravene one of the central
tenets of special relativity. According to Einstein, all
electromagnetic radiation always travels through vacuum at the cosmic
speed limit the speed of light. The energy of the radiation should be
absolutely irrelevant."

The shock is temporary of course. According to other observations,
"since all the gamma rays arrived within nine-tenths of a second
apart, they must have all traveled at almost exactly the same
speed":

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80...instein-right/
"New results are in from the Fermi Space Telescope, which settled into
orbit in the summer of 2008, and the findings seem to prove Albert
Einstein right once again. Man, that guy was good. (...) But the study
of the Fermi Telescopes results, published in Nature, declares that
since all the gamma rays arrived within nine-tenths of a second apart,
they must have all traveled at almost exactly the same speed. (...)
Physicists working with the Fermi Telescope will keep looking for new
evidence. But for now, says study coauthor Peter F. Michelson, "I take
it as a confirmation that Einstein is still right" [The New York
Times]."

Believers fiercely sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in
relativity, relativity, relativity" all night long; in the morning
they tumble to the floor, start tearing their clothes and go into
convulsions.

Classical confirmations of Divine Albert's Divine Theory:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...to-albert.html
New Scientist: Ode to Albert
"Enter another piece of luck for Einstein. We now know that the light-
bending effect was actually too small for Eddington to have discerned
at that time. Had Eddington not been so receptive to Einstein's
theory, he might not have reached such strong conclusions so soon, and
the world would have had to wait for more accurate eclipse
measurements to confirm general relativity."

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-.../dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking: "Einsteins prediction of light deflection could not
be tested immediately in 1915, because the First World War was in
progress, and it was not until 1919 that a British expedition,
observing an eclipse from West Africa, showed that light was indeed
deflected by the sun, just as predicted by the theory. This proof of a
German theory by British scientists was hailed as a great act of
reconciliation between the two countries after the war. It is ionic,
therefore, that later examination of the photographs taken on that
expedition showed the errors were as great as the effect they were
trying to measure. Their measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of
knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in
science."

http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar...out-relativity
"The eclipse experiment finally happened in 1919 (youre looking at it
on this very page). Eminent British physicist Arthur Eddington
declared general relativity a success, catapulting Einstein into fame
and onto coffee mugs. In retrospect, it seems that Eddington fudged
the results, throwing out photos that showed the wrong outcome. No
wonder nobody noticed: At the time of Einsteins death in 1955,
scientists still had almost no evidence of general relativity in
action."

http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses
Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud: "L'expédition britannique envoie deux équipes
indépendantes sur le trajet de l'éclipse : l'une dirigée par Andrew
Crommelin dans la ville de Sobral, dans le nord du Brésil, l'autre
conduite par Eddington lui-même sur l'île de Principe, en face de
Libreville, au Gabon. Le matériel embarqué est des plus sommaires au
regard des moyens actuels : une lunette astronomique de seulement 20
cm de diamètre en chaque lieu, avec un instrument de secours de 10 cm
à Sobral. Pour éviter l'emploi d'une monture mécanique trop lourde à
transporter, la lumière est dirigée vers les lunettes par de simples
miroirs mobiles, ce qui se révélera être une bien mauvaise idée. La
stratégie est assez complexe. Il s'agit d'exposer des plaques
photographiques durant l'éclipse pour enregistrer la position d'un
maximum d'étoiles autour du Soleil, puis de comparer avec des plaques
témoins de la même région du ciel obtenues de nuit, quelques mois plus
tard. La différence des positions entre les deux séries de plaques,
avec et sans le Soleil, serait la preuve de l'effet de la relativité
et le résultat est bien sûr connu à l'avance. Problème non
négligeable : la différence attendue est minuscule. Au maximum, au
bord même du Soleil, l'écart prévu est seulement de un demi dix-
millième de degré, soit très précisément 1,75 seconde d'arc (1,75"),
correspondant à l'écart entre les deux bords d'une pièce de monnaie
observée à 3 km de distance ! Or, quantités d'effets parasites peuvent
contaminer les mesures, la qualité de l'émulsion photographique, les
variations dans l'atmosphère terrestre, la dilatation des miroirs...
Le jour J, l'équipe brésilienne voit le ciel se dégager au dernier
moment mais Eddington n'aperçoit l'éclipse qu'à travers les nuages !
Sa quête est très maigre, tout juste deux plaques sur lesquelles on
distingue à peine cinq étoiles. Pressé de rentrer en Angleterre,
Eddington ne prend même pas la précaution d'attendre les plaques
témoins. Les choses vont beaucoup mieux à Sobral : 19 plaques avec
plus d'une dizaine d'étoiles et huit plaques prises avec la lunette de
secours. L'équipe reste sur place deux mois pour réaliser les fameuses
plaques témoins et, le 25 août, tout le monde est en Angleterre.
Eddington se lance dans des calculs qu'il est le seul à contrôler,
décidant de corriger ses propres mesures avec des plaques obtenues
avec un autre instrument, dans une autre région du ciel, autour
d'Arcturus. Il conclut finalement à une déviation comprise entre 1,31"
et 1,91" : le triomphe d'Einstein est assuré ! Très peu sûr de sa
méthode, Eddington attend anxieusement les résultats de l'autre
expédition qui arrivent en octobre, comme une douche froide : suivant
une méthode d'analyse rigoureuse, l'instrument principal de Sobral a
mesuré une déviation de seulement 0,93". La catastrophe est en vue.
S'ensuivent de longues tractations entre Eddington et Dyson,
directeurs respectifs des observatoires de Cambridge et de Greenwich.
On repêche alors les données de la lunette de secours de Sobral, qui a
le bon goût de produire comme résultat un confortable 1,98", et le
tour de passe-passe est joué. Dans la publication historique de la
Royal Society, on lit comme justification une simple note : "Il reste
les plaques astrographiques de Sobral qui donnent une déviation de
0,93", discordantes par une quantité au-delà des limites des erreurs
accidentelles. Pour les raisons déjà longuement exposées, peu de poids
est accordé à cette détermination." Plus loin, apparaît la conclusion
catégorique: "Les résultats de Sobral et Principe laissent peu de
doute qu'une déviation de la lumière existe au voisinage du Soleil et
qu'elle est d'une amplitude exigée par la théorie de la relativité
généralisée d'Einstein." Les données gênantes ont donc tout simplement
été escamotées."

http://alasource.blogs.nouvelobs.com...-deuxieme.html
"D'abord il [Einstein] fait une hypothèse fausse (facile à dire
aujourd'hui !) dans son équation de départ qui décrit les relations
étroites entre géométrie de l'espace et contenu de matière de cet
espace. Avec cette hypothèse il tente de calculer l'avance du
périhélie de Mercure. Cette petite anomalie (à l'époque) du mouvement
de la planète était un mystère. Einstein et Besso aboutissent
finalement sur un nombre aberrant et s'aperçoivent qu'en fait le
résultat est cent fois trop grand à cause d'une erreur dans la masse
du soleil... Mais, même corrigé, le résultat reste loin des
observations. Pourtant le physicien ne rejeta pas son idée. "Nous
voyons là que si les critères de Popper étaient toujours respectés, la
théorie aurait dû être abandonnée", constate, ironique, Etienne Klein.
Un coup de main d'un autre ami, Grossmann, sortira Einstein de la
difficulté et sa nouvelle équation s'avéra bonne. En quelques jours,
il trouve la bonne réponse pour l'avance du périhélie de Mercure..."

http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses
Jean-Marc Bonnet-Bidaud: "L'épilogue du dernier test de la relativité,
celui de l'orbite de Mercure, est encore plus passionnant. Ce fut en
réalité un test a posteriori de la théorie, puisque la prédiction a
fait suite à l'observation et ne l'a pas précédée. L'accord est
stupéfiant. Le décalage observé dans la position de Mercure est de
43,11" par siècle, tandis que la prédiction de la relativité est de
42,98" par siècle ! Cette révision de l'horloge cosmique est toujours
considérée comme le grand succès d'Einstein, mais elle est encore sous
l'épée de Damoclès. En effet, des scientifiques soupçonnent que le
Soleil pourrait ne pas être rigoureusement sphérique et un
"aplatissement" réel introduirait une correction supplémentaire. La
précision actuelle deviendrait alors le talon d'Achille compromettant
le bel accord de la théorie."

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AAS...21530404H
Open Questions Regarding the 1925 Measurement of the Gravitational
Redshift of Sirius B
Jay B. Holberg Univ. of Arizona.
"In January 1924 Arthur Eddington wrote to Walter S. Adams at the Mt.
Wilson Observatory suggesting a measurement of the "Einstein shift" in
Sirius B and providing an estimate of its magnitude. Adams' 1925
published results agreed remarkably well with Eddington's estimate.
Initially this achievement was hailed as the third empirical test of
General Relativity (after Mercury's anomalous perihelion advance and
the 1919 measurement of the deflection of starlight). IT HAS BEEN
KNOWN FOR SOME TIME THAT BOTH EDDINGTON'S ESTIMATE AND ADAMS'
MEASUREMENT UNDERESTIMATED THE TRUE SIRIUS B GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT BY
A FACTOR OF FOUR."

http://www.cieletespace.fr/evenement...taient-fausses
Jean-Marc Bonnet Bidaud: "Autour de l'étoile brillante Sirius, on
découvre une petite étoile, Sirius B, à la fois très chaude et très
faiblement lumineuse. Pour expliquer ces deux particularités, il faut
supposer que l'étoile est aussi massive que le Soleil et aussi petite
qu'une planète comme la Terre. C'est Eddington lui-même qui aboutit à
cette conclusion dont il voit vite l'intérêt : avec de telles
caractéristiques, ces naines blanches sont extrêmement denses et leur
gravité très puissante. Le décalage vers le rouge de la gravitation
est donc 100 fois plus élevé que sur le Soleil. Une occasion inespérée
pour mesurer enfin quelque chose d'appréciable. Eddington s'adresse
aussitôt à Walter Adams, directeur de l'observatoire du mont Wilson,
en Californie, afin que le télescope de 2,5 m de diamètre Hooker
entreprenne les vérifications. Selon ses estimations, basées sur une
température de 8 000 degrés de Sirius B, mesurée par Adams lui-même,
le décalage vers le rouge prédit par la relativité, en s'élevant à 20
km/s, devrait être facilement mesurable. Adams mobilise d'urgence le
grand télescope et expose 28 plaques photographiques pour réaliser la
mesure. Son rapport, publié le 18 mai 1925, est très confus car il
mesure des vitesses allant de 2 à 33 km/s. Mais, par le jeu de
corrections arbitraires dont personne ne comprendra jamais la logique,
le décalage passe finalement à 21 km/s, plus tard corrigé à 19 km/s,
et Eddington de conclure : "Les résultats peuvent être considérés
comme fournissant une preuve directe de la validité du troisième test
de la théorie de la relativité générale." Adams et Eddington se
congratulent, ils viennent encore de "prouver" Einstein. Ce résultat,
pourtant faux, ne sera pas remis en cause avant 1971. Manque de chance
effectivement, la première mesure de température de Sirius B était
largement inexacte : au lieu des 8 000 degrés envisagés par Eddington,
l'étoile fait en réalité près de 30 000 degrés. Elle est donc beaucoup
plus petite, sa gravité est plus intense et le décalage vers le rouge
mesurable est de 89 km/s. C'est ce qu'aurait dû trouver Adams sur ses
plaques s'il n'avait pas été "influencé" par le calcul erroné
d'Eddington. L'écart est tellement flagrant que la suspicion de fraude
a bien été envisagée."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.delcotimes.com/articles/2...b635950366.txt
"Mead's book on "Quantum Foundations of Electromagnetism" forecasts
that we will look back on the last 70 years as a kind of Dark Age for
physics. Certainly there has been little significant progress and
major institutions like the American Physical Society have become so
ossified that anyone questioning their dogma is simply told "this is
the consensus view so you must be wrong." No effort is made to provide
a scientific response showing an actual reason why. This is evident in
global warming climate disruption as well as particle physics."

Dark Age? Impossible! Divine Albert's Divine Theory is so bright:

http://www.examiner.com/coast-to-coa...ready-possible
"Astrophysicist J. Richard Gott, author of "Time Travel in Einstein's
Universe: The Physical Possibilities of Travel Through Time," was the
guest last night on Coast to Coast AM Radio. George Noory was the
host, the topic was time travel, and Gott says we're already doing it!
(...) Gott explains that Einstein's Theory of Generelativity helps
explain how traveling backwards in time might be possible. According
to Gott, the theory was, if you could somehow travel faster than the
speed of light you could travel back in time. However, Einstein showed
that that's not possible. But Einstein's Theory of Generelativity
explains the possibility of using curved space time to create a loop
or short cut that would allow one to travel a distance into the future
and then loop back around to the past. Because this theory doesn't
allow for one to be able to travel any farther back in time than the
date the machine is created, you'd always be returning to the point in
time where you started. According to Gott, the fact that you couldn't
travel into the past beyond the creation of the time machine explains
why we're not constantly overrun with time travelers."

Can you imagine anything brighter than that?

Pentcho Valev

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."

Norton and Stachel do care about Einstein's interpretation of the
Michelson-Morley experiment; they are happy that Einstein did not use
this experiment as support for his 1905 constant-speed-of-light
postulate. This is not true of course - Einstein did use the
experiment as support for the false postulate:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstrac...66838A 639EDE
The New York Times, April 19, 1921
"Michelson showed that relative to the moving co-ordinate system K1,
the light traveled with the same velocity as relative to K, which is
contrary to the above observation. How could this be reconciled?
Professor Einstein asked."

To Norton and Stachel, the fact that "later writers almost universally
use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity"
sounds normal. They are right - in the era of Postscientism, universal
lying is a norm. More details he

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
57-78
Peter Hayes: "In the interwar period there was a significant school of
thought that repudiated Einstein's theory of relativity on the grounds
that it contained elementary inconsistencies. Some of these critics
held extreme right-wing and anti-Semitic views, and this has tended to
discredit their technical objections to relativity as being
scientifically shallow. This paper investigates an alternative
possibility: that the critics were right and that the success of
Einstein's theory in overcoming them was due to its strengths as an
ideology rather than as a science. The clock paradox illustrates how
relativity theory does indeed contain inconsistencies that make it
scientifically problematic. These same inconsistencies, however, make
the theory ideologically powerful. The implications of this argument
are examined with respect to Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper's accounts of
the philosophy of science. (...) The prediction that clocks will move
at different rates is particularly well known, and the problem of
explaining how this can be so without violating the principle of
relativity is particularly obvious. The clock paradox, however, is
only one of a number of simple objections that have been raised to
different aspects of Einstein's theory of relativity. (Much of this
criticism is quite apart from and often predates the apparent
contradiction between relativity theory and quantum mechanics.) It is
rare to find any attempt at a detailed rebuttal of these criticisms by
professional physicists. However, physicists do sometimes give a
general response to criticisms that relativity theory is syncretic by
asserting that Einstein is logically consistent, but that to explain
why is so difficult that critics lack the capacity to understand the
argument. In this way, the handy claim that there are unspecified,
highly complex resolutions of simple apparent inconsistencies in the
theory can be linked to the charge that antirelativists have only a
shallow understanding of the matter, probably gleaned from misleading
popular accounts of the theory. (...) The argument for complexity
reverses the scientific preference for simplicity. Faced with obvious
inconsistencies, the simple response is to conclude that Einstein's
claims for the explanatory scope of the special and general theory are
overstated. To conclude instead that that relativity theory is right
for reasons that are highly complex is to replace Occam's razor with a
potato masher. (...) The defence of complexity implies that the novice
wishing to enter the profession of theoretical physics must accept
relativity on faith. It implicitly concedes that, without an
understanding of relativity theory's higher complexities, it appears
illogical, which means that popular "explanations" of relativity are
necessarily misleading. But given Einstein's fame, physicists do not
approach the theory for the first time once they have developed their
expertise. Rather, they are exposed to and probably examined on
popular explanations of relativity in their early training. How are
youngsters new to the discipline meant to respond to these accounts?
Are they misled by false explanations and only later inculcated with
true ones? What happens to those who are not misled? Are they supposed
to accept relativity merely on the grounds of authority? The argument
of complexity suggests that to pass the first steps necessary to join
the physics profession, students must either be willing to suspend
disbelief and go along with a theory that appears illogical; or fail
to notice the apparent inconsistencies in the theory; or notice the
inconsistencies and maintain a guilty silence in the belief that this
merely shows that they are unable to understand the theory. The
gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and research
institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who raises
problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A
winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of
Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are
then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics.
Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of
elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing
question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these
circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on
scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of
realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the
theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of
professional discourse. (...) The argument that Einstein fomented an
ideological rather than a scientific revolution helps to explain of
one of the features of this revolution that puzzled Kuhn: despite the
apparent scope of the general theory, very little has come out of it.
Viewing relativity theory as an ideology also helps to account for
Poppers doubts over whether special theory can be retained, given
experimental results in quantum mechanics and Einsteins questionable
approach to defining simultaneity. Both Kuhn and Popper have looked to
the other branch of the theory - Popper to the general and Kuhn to the
special - to try and retain their view of Einstein as a revolutionary
scientist. According to the view proposed here, this only indicates
how special and general theories function together as an ideology, as
when one side of the theory is called into question, the other can be
called upon to rescue it. The triumph of relativity theory represents
the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics bur also
in the philosophy of science. These conclusions are of considerable
interest to both theoretical physics and to social epistemology. It
would, however, be naïve to think that theoretical physicists will
take the slightest notice of them."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
John Norton: "During this time, Einstein gave long and serious
consideration to emission theories of light. In them, the speed of a
light beam is c, not with respect to the ether, but with respect to
the emitter. These emission theories were Einstein's best and perhaps
only hope of realizing a principle of relativity in electrodynamics,
prior to his recognition that these efforts would require a new theory
of space and time."

In the era of Postscientism one can safely reject both Einstein's "new
theory of space and time" and Newton's emission theory of light.
Nobody cares - science has died long ago:

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.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.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.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.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."

Pentcho Valev

On 10 ديسمبر, 13:46, Pentcho Valev wrote:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Chasing.pdf
John Norton: "During this time, Einstein gave long and serious
consideration to emission theories of light. In them, the speed of a
light beam is c, not with respect to the ether, but with respect to
the emitter. These emission theories were Einstein's best and perhaps
only hope of realizing a principle of relativity in electrodynamics,
prior to his recognition that these efforts would require a new theory
of space and time."

In the era of Postscientism one can safely reject both Einstein's "new
theory of space and time" and Newton's emission theory of light.
Nobody cares - science has died long ago:

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.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.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.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.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."

Pentcho Valev




Thank you Pentcho Valev

The postscientific method:

http://bertie.ccsu.edu/naturesci/PhilSci/Lakatos.html
"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its
"hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set
out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding
defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses.
(...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the
"ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective
belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core
assumptions..."

http://wendang.baidu.com/view/c06265...fb84a8e55.html
Karl Popper: "On the other hand, I also realized that we must not
exclude immunizations, not even all which introduce ad hoc auxiliary
hypothesis. (...) All this shows not only that some degree of
dogmatism is fruitful, even in science, but also that logically
speaking falsifiability or testability cannot be regarded as a very
sharp criterion."

Initially the "protective belt" of Einstein's relativity appeared as
the FitzGerald-Lorentz ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis introducing an
absurd length contraction; then it developed into the Lorentz
transformations. Without the protective belt, Einstein's false
constant-speed-of-light postulate would have been immediately refuted
by the Michelson-Morley experiment:

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.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."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

Pentcho Valev