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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev? What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)." http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the independent variables are not specified." The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the One True Science: http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to "energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked, he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to scientists who need the concept for their work." http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671 Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the Universe must always increase to be useless." Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERICS OF POSTSCIENTISICS BY ROAMIN IN THE GLOMIN
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies: http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev? What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)." http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the independent variables are not specified." The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the One True Science: http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to "energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked, he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to scientists who need the concept for their work." http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671 Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the Universe must always increase to be useless." Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
Athel Cornish-Bowden and Gary Bertrand are professors in the
postscientific Praetorian Guard, that is, their only function is to destroy assailants. The fact that they feel obliged to condemn the foundations of thermodynamics suggests that high priests have already done so and that the verdict has been accepted by the postscientific community: http://pennance.us/?p=16 Clifford Truesdell: "Thermodynamics need never have been the Dismal Swamp of Obscurity that from the first it was and that today in common instruction it is…" http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics. (...) This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time- asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING." In other words, thermodynamics is OFFICIALLY dead but postscientists are entitled to teach it until the death of science as a whole is officially declared. The same holds true for relativity although high priests found it suitable to announce its official death only recently: 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 wrote: Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies: http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valevs postings to the BTK-MCA and other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over ones professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev? What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May to September 1997, during which period Mr Valevs scheme for tangling the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)." http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the independent variables are not specified." The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the One True Science: http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to "energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked, he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to scientists who need the concept for their work." http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671 Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the Universe must always increase to be useless." Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
Karl Popper's ethical problems:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the idea that Einstein’s relativity theory represents some form of scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact. Thus, Einstein’s other achievements are emphasised and the difference between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48, 158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to fit the new circumstances: Karl Popper: "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" (Popper 1982, 29–30)." Pentcho Valev |
#5
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
Deductive science (e.g. relativity or thermodynamics) has a
fundamental property: any anomalous result suggests that either an axiom is false or an argument is invalid. Therefore, instead of proclaiming experimental verification as the only sanitary procedure in theoretical science, a procedure that unavoidably creates camouflage in the end, philosophers of science should have coined the simple slogan: "Anomaly? Identify the false axiom or the invalid argument!" Nowadays clever philosophers implicitly reject the experimental falsification but, in conformity with the "ethics" of Postscientism, can only offer vague or misleading (insofar as looking for a false axiom or an invalid argument is concerned) hints instead: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics. (...) This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time- asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING." 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.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 wrote: Karl Popper's ethical problems: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the idea that Einstein's relativity theory represents some form of scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact. Thus, Einsteins other achievements are emphasised and the difference between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48, 158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to fit the new circumstances: Karl Popper: "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" (Popper 1982, 2930)." Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
For 100 years the correct approach to deductive theories has been
applied only once in Einsteiniana: 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." Still "Lorentz invariance is broken" is misleading. An absurdity cannot be just "broken". Magueijo and Moffat should have written: "The question is then: If Lorentz invariance is absurd, as its consequences known as "reciprocal length contraction" and "reciprocal time dilation" suggest, 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." Pentcho Valev wrote: Deductive science (e.g. relativity or thermodynamics) has a fundamental property: any anomalous result suggests that either an axiom is false or an argument is invalid. Therefore, instead of proclaiming experimental verification as the only sanitary procedure in theoretical science, a procedure that unavoidably creates camouflage in the end, philosophers of science should have coined the simple slogan: "Anomaly? Identify the false axiom or the invalid argument!" Nowadays clever philosophers implicitly reject the experimental falsification but, in conformity with the "ethics" of Postscientism, can only offer vague or misleading (insofar as looking for a false axiom or an invalid argument is concerned) hints instead: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical physics. (...) This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time- asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING." 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.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 |
#7
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
"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." A somewhat outdated account of the situation. Relativists are no longer relativists (they have all left the sinking ship recently) and, accordingly, do not have to admit anything. Antirelativists reclaiming old Newtonian physics are marginalised automatically, without any quarrel - the world of Postscientism simply does not hear their wails. Imagine a musician reclaiming this kind of music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqgHCksUQok (Part 1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1OS0bSsI_k (Part 2) (Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Giuseppe Tartini "The Devil's Trill") This musician would likewise be marginalised automatically in the world of rap music. Pentcho Valev wrote: Karl Popper's ethical problems: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880 Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the idea that Einstein's relativity theory represents some form of scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact. Thus, Einsteins other achievements are emphasised and the difference between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48, 158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to fit the new circumstances: Karl Popper: "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" (Popper 1982, 2930)." Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, Routledge, London,
1981, pp. 70-71: "For Popper a theory is scientific if and only if it is falsifiable. This means that it must entail some basic statement which could turn out to be false, thereby falsifying the theory. How do theories entail basic statements? The short answer is that they do not. If we think of a theory as the set of postulates such as the laws of Newtonian mechanics together with their deductive consequences, we shall not find among those consequences any basic statements. In order to derive a testable prediction from a theory we need to specify initial conditions together with a host of auxiliary hypotheses." The problem emerging at the end of Newton-Smith's text is purely ethical. The choice of auxiliary hypotheses unavoidably involves some arbitrariness so one can bias it in favour of either falsifying or saving the theory. Needless to say, saving predominates - e.g. FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced the auxiliary hypothesis known as "length contraction" and saved the ether theory for a while. If they had not introduced it, the ether theory would have been falsified, Newton's emission theory of light confirmed and Divine Albert's Divine Theory nonexistent. Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Einstein1905.pdf
Albert Einstein: "I certainly knew that the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is something quite independent of the relativity postulate; and I considered what would be more probable, the principle of the constancy of c, as was demanded by Maxwell’s equations, or the constancy of c, exclusively for an observer sitting at the light source. I decided in favor of the first..." Einstein is simply lying: Maxwell's equations presupposed that the speed of light was VARIABLE and obeyed the equation c'=c+v, where c is the speed of light relative to the ether and v is the speed of the observer relative to the ether. So the only reasonable choice consistent with the Michelson-Morley experiment was "the constancy of c, exclusively for an observer sitting at the light source", that is, the prediction of Newton's emission theory of light. Pentcho Valev |
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ETHICS IN THE CLERICS OR ERA IN ERROR OR A BRA TOO FAR?
Pentcho Valev wrote:
Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies: http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev? What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)." http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the independent variables are not specified." The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the One True Science: http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to "energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked, he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to scientists who need the concept for their work." http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671 Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the Universe must always increase to be useless." Pentcho Valev |
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