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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?
On May 28, 6:35 pm, Pentcho Valev wrote:
Doublethink and philosophy of science: 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." Karl Popper, "Quantum theory and the schism in physics". London: Hutchinson, 1982, pp. 29-30: "The decisive thing about Einstein’s theory, from my point of view, is that it has shown that Newton’s theory - which has been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which is so related to Newton’s theory that every success of Newtonian theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me, this logical situation is more important than the question which of the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the truth." Doublethink inside Einsteiniana: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic..._of_light.html Steve Carlip, Professor, University of California, Davis: "Einstein went on to discover a more general theory of relativity which explained gravity in terms of curved spacetime, and he talked about the speed of light changing in this new theory. In the 1920 book "Relativity: the special and general theory" he wrote: ". . . according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity [. . .] cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position." Since Einstein talks of velocity (a vector quantity: speed with direction) rather than speed alone, it is not clear that he meant the speed will change, but the reference to special relativity suggests that he did mean so. THIS INTERPRETATION IS PERFECTLY VALID AND MAKES GOOD PHYSICAL SENSE, BUT A MORE MODERN INTERPRETATION IS THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS CONSTANT IN GENERAL RELATIVITY." Pentcho Valev |
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juesting31
A Woman Who Fell It was rush hour and I was dashing to a train in New York City's Grand Central Terminal - As I neared the gate, a plump, middle-aged woman sprinted up from behind, lost her footing on the smooth marble floor and slid onto her back. Her momentum carried her close to my shoes. Before I could help her, however, she had scrambled up. Gaining her composure, she winked at me and said, "Do you always have beautiful women failing at your feet?" Poly aluminium ChlorideWaste water treatmentWater treatment chemicals
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Poly aluminium Chloride |
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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Doublethink and philosophy of science: 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." Karl Popper, "Quantum theory and the schism in physics". London: Hutchinson, 1982, pp. 29-30: "The decisive thing about Einsteins theory, from my point of view, is that it has shown that Newtons theory - which has been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which is so related to Newtons theory that every success of Newtonian theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me, this logical situation is more important than the question which of the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the truth." Doublethink inside Einsteiniana: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic..._of_light.html Steve Carlip, Professor, University of California, Davis: "Einstein went on to discover a more general theory of relativity which explained gravity in terms of curved spacetime, and he talked about the speed of light changing in this new theory. In the 1920 book "Relativity: the special and general theory" he wrote: ". . . according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity [. . .] cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position." Since Einstein talks of velocity (a vector quantity: speed with direction) rather than speed alone, it is not clear that he meant the speed will change, but the reference to special relativity suggests that he did mean so. THIS INTERPRETATION IS PERFECTLY VALID AND MAKES GOOD PHYSICAL SENSE, BUT A MORE MODERN INTERPRETATION IS THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT IS CONSTANT IN GENERAL RELATIVITY." More doublethink in Einsteiniana: Einstein's 1905 false light postulate is superfluous; even if "light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform", Divine Albert's Divine Special Relativity "would be unaffected": http://www.newscientist.com/channel/...elativity.html Why Einstein was wrong about relativity 29 October 2008, Mark Buchanan, NEW SCIENTIST "Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York, begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory for it." What's more, Feigenbaum claims in a paper on the arXiv preprint server that has yet to be peer-reviewed, if only the father of relativity, Galileo Galilei, had known a little more modern mathematics back in the 17th century, he could have got as far as Einstein did http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.1234). "Galileo's thoughts are almost 400 years old," he says. "But they're still extraordinarily potent. They're enough on their own to give Einstein's relativity, without any additional knowledge." (...) This was a problem if Maxwell's theory, like all good physical theories, was to follow Galileo's rule and apply for everyone. If we do not know who measures the speed of light in the equations, how can we modify them to apply from other perspectives? Einstein's workaround was that we don't have to. Faced with the success of Maxwell's theory, he simply added a second assumption to Galileo's first: that, relative to any observer, light always travels at the same speed. This "second postulate" is the source of all Einstein's eccentric physics of shrinking space and haywire clocks. And with a little further thought, it leads to the equivalence of mass and energy embodied in the iconic equation E = mc2. The argument is not about the physics, which countless experiments have confirmed. It is about whether we can reach the same conclusions without hoisting light onto its highly irregular pedestal. (...) But in fact, says Feigenbaum, both Galileo and Einstein missed a surprising subtlety in the maths - one that renders Einstein's second postulate superfluous. (...) The result turns the historical logic of Einstein's relativity on its head. Those contortions of space and time that Einstein derived from the properties of light actually emerge from even more basic, purely mathematical considerations. Light's special position in relativity is a historical accident. (...) The idea that Einstein's relativity has nothing to do with light could actually come in rather handy. For one thing, it rules out a nasty shock if anyone were ever to prove that photons, the particles of light, have mass. We know that the photon's mass is very small - less than 10-49 grams. A photon with any mass at all would imply that our understanding of electricity and magnetism is wrong, and that electric charge might not be conserved. That would be problem enough, but a massive photon would also spell deep trouble for the second postulate, as a photon with mass would not necessarily always travel at the same speed. Feigenbaum's work shows how, contrary to many physicists' beliefs, this need not be a problem for relativity." http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part, nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais, empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de futures mesures mettent enévidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle, du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat" deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-meme en serait-elle invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer, il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs plus economiques. En verite, le "premier postulat" suffit, a la condition de l'exploiter a fond." http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/onemorederivation.pdf Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon velocity." http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Rela.../dp/9810238886 Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity. This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman, Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers." http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.ph...1ebdf49c012de2 Tom Roberts: "If it is ultimately discovered that the photon has a nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the invariant speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but both Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their domains of applicability would be reduced)." Pentcho Valev |
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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?
Pentcho Valev wrote:
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." Doublethink at the Perimeter Institute. "The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered": http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm Lee Smolin: "Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now- legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS OF INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS WRONG WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT." Joao Magueijo, PLUS VITE QUE LA LUMIERE, Dunod, 2003, pp. 298-299: "La racine du mal etait clairement la relativite restreinte. Tous ces paradoxes resultaient d'effets bien connus comme la contraction des longueurs, la dilatation du temps, ou E=mc^2, tous des predictions directes de la relativite restreinte. (...) La consequence en etait inevitable: pour edifier une theorie coherente de la gravite quantique, quelle qu'elle soit, nous [Joao Magueijo et Lee Smolin] devions commencer par abandonner la relativite restreinte. (...) Mais, comme nous l'avons vu, celle-ci repose sur deux principes independants. Le premier est la relativite du mouvement, le second la constance de la vitesse de la lumiere. Une des solutions possibles a notre probleme pouvait etre d'abandonner la relativite du mouvement. (...) C'est une possibilite bien sur, mais nous avons choisi l'alternative evidente: preserver la relativite du mouvement, mais admettre qu'a de tres hautes energies, la vitesse de la lumiere ne soit plus constante." 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." 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.'' "....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": http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/Out...al_Relativity/ Perimeter Institute: "Modern Physics - Special Relativity. Fast is different. You might have heard that "a moving clock runs slowly" and "a moving object occupies less space." What, exactly, does this mean, and how did Einstein discover these amazing properties of space and time? Join us on an adventure into Einstein's universe and find out why these strange-sounding properties are actually perfectly natural and easy to understand." Pentcho Valev |
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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?
Pentcho Valev wrote:
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." This text is particularly relevant: "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": http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...ity/index.html John Norton: "Is Special Relativity Paradoxical?....Now this is a serious problem. Either the car can or cannot be trapped fully within the garage, but not both. (Or so it would seem.) The garage attendant says: There are two events: "Left door shut": I closed the left door before the car struck it. "Right door shut": I closed the right door after the car passed. And these events happened at the same time. Therefore the car was fully enclosed. The car driver says: "There are two events. "Left door shut": You closed the left door before the car struck it. "Right door shut": You closed the right door after the car passed. But these events did not happened at the same time. You closed the left door first. Then--later--you closed the right door AFTER THE FRONT OF THE CAR HAD ALREADY BURST THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR. Therefore the car was never fully enclosed...... Therefore there is no observer independent fact as to whether the car was ever fully enclosed in the garage." Note that John Norton introduces BURSTING THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR (what if the door is strong enough?) which is only valid for the car driver, not for the garage attendant. Note also that Philosopher John Norton is the cleverest Einsteinian: http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen George Orwell: "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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PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE DEAD?
Pentcho Valev wrote:
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." This text is particularly relevant: "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": http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...ity/index.html John Norton: "Is Special Relativity Paradoxical?....Now this is a serious problem. Either the car can or cannot be trapped fully within the garage, but not both. (Or so it would seem.) The garage attendant says: There are two events: "Left door shut": I closed the left door before the car struck it. "Right door shut": I closed the right door after the car passed. And these events happened at the same time. Therefore the car was fully enclosed. The car driver says: "There are two events. "Left door shut": You closed the left door before the car struck it. "Right door shut": You closed the right door after the car passed. But these events did not happened at the same time. You closed the left door first. Then--later--you closed the right door AFTER THE FRONT OF THE CAR HAD ALREADY BURST THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR. Therefore the car was never fully enclosed...... Therefore there is no observer independent fact as to whether the car was ever fully enclosed in the garage." Note that John Norton introduces BURSTING THROUGH THE CLOSED LEFT DOOR (what if the door is strong enough?) which is only valid for the car driver, not for the garage attendant. Note also that Philosopher John Norton is the cleverest Einsteinian: http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen George Orwell: "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." In the absence of doublethink John Norton would have concluded: "Einstein's 1905 light postulate entails trapping a long car inside a short garage. This is REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM par excellence. Therefore Einstein's 1905 light postulate is FALSE." In fact, guided by doublethink, Einsteinians convert REDUCTIO AD ABSURDUM into a demonstration of the glorious ability of Divine Albert's Divine Theory to produce breathtaking miracles. So the long train is short (if trapped inside a short tunnel), the 80m long pole is 40m long (if trapped inside a 40m long barn and Einsteinians have forgotten to reopen the doors of the barn "pretty quickly"), the bug is both dead and alive: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSRIy...elated&search= http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/ph...barn_pole.html "These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn....So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn." http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu.../bugrivet.html On the other hand, doublethink forces the clever Einsteinian to constantly return to the reality with which "he is playing tricks". "The process has to be conscious": http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html "General relativity knits together space, time and gravity. Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodie...age/index.html John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of "now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such rigid doses.....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." Pentcho Valev |
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