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OFFICIAL MAVERICKS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM
The following "mavericks" are allowed to say anything since they know
where to stop (other mavericks are cranks, crackpots, trolls etc. by definition): http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2...usd-professor/ "Clean-cut and middle-aged, a tenured professor at a conservative Catholic university, Sheehan is hardly a rebel. Yet for years, he and a few other physicists have been pressing peers to re-examine the Second Law of Thermodynamics, one of the most celebrated and cherished tenets of physics. (...) But Sheehan suggests big things are possible if even the tiniest of violations can be proven, and ultimately exploited in an economically feasible way. For example, it might become possible to convert ambient heat into an infinite energy source, he said." http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/ Jos Uffink: "The Second Law made its appearance in physics around 1850, but a half century later it was already surrounded by so much confusion that the British Association for the Advancement of Science decided to appoint a special committee with the task of providing clarity about the meaning of this law. However, its final report (Bryan 1891) did not settle the issue. Half a century later, the physicist/philosopher Bridgman still complained that there are almost as many formulations of the second law as there have been discussions of it (Bridgman 1941, p. 116). And even today, the Second Law remains so obscure that it continues to attract new efforts at clarification. A recent example is the work of Lieb and Yngvason (1999)......The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' (1980, p. 6) and 'a prime example to show that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds' (ibid. p. 8).......Clausius' verbal statement of the second law makes no sense.... All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition ; a century of philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment ; a century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from the unclean.....Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to follow the argument Clausius offers....and seven times has it blanked and gravelled me.... I cannot explain what I cannot understand.....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.prospect-magazine.co.uk/a...ls.php?id=5538 Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?" http://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.'' Consider the official maverick Joao Magueijo for instance. He wants to drop Einstein's 1905 false light postulate but then stops and the postulate remains intact: Joao simply believes or is forced to believe that the false postulate was gloriously confirmed by the Michelson- Morley experiment: http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257 Joao Magueijo: "I am by profession a theoretical physicist. By every definition I am a fully credentialed scholar-graduate work and Ph.D. at Cambridge, followed by a very prestigious research fellowship at St. John's College, Cambridge (Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam formerly held this fellowship), then a Royal Society research fellow. Now I'm a lecturer (the equivalent of a tenured professor in the United States) at Imperial College. (...) A missile fired from a plane moves faster than one fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the missile's speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its speed with respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus that of the train. You might think that the same should happen to light: Light flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what the Michelson-Morley experiments showed was that this was not the case: Light always moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that if I take a light ray and ask several observers moving with respect to each other to measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree on the same apparent speed!" Knowing where to stop is called by George Orwell "crimestop": http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com...html#seventeen George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity." Pentcho Valev |
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