CONFLICTS IN EINSTEINIANA

In the quotes below John Norton is implicitly making the following
appeal: Brothers Einsteinians, let us stop destroying human
rationality! We should not teach the space-time idiocy, this
remarkable consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate,
anymore! Our salaries are guaranteed (the world has other problems so
nobody is going to consider our former sins) and we can safely move to
areas devoid of Divine Albert:

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."

If Sean Carroll were to publicly reply, he would say: Brothers
Einsteinians, don't listen to John Norton! Norton is clever, he knows
how to move to "areas devoid of Divine Albert" and live there. The
rest of us know nothing but Divine Albert's idiocies and can do
nothing but develop and perpetuate them. Please brothers buy my book!
After all, books as silly as Brian Greene's and Stephen Hawking's have
become bestsellers, and mine may prove even sillier:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/pl_print_carroll/
"In January, Carroll will release his own pop take on the complexities
of time with his much-anticipated debut book, From Eternity to He
The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Armchair Einsteins will
geek out on his audacious thesis. He argues that our perception of
time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and
that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands
establishes the direction in which time flows."

http://www.amazon.com/Eternity-Here-.../dp/0525951334
"In From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll argues that the arrow of time,
pointing resolutely from the past to the future, owes its existence to
conditions before the Big Bang itself-a period modern cosmology of
which Einstein never dreamed. Increasingly, though, physicists are
going out into realms that make the theory of relativity seem like
child's play. Carroll's scenario is not only elegant, it's laid out in
the same easy-to- understand language that has made his group blog,
Cosmic Variance, the most popular physics blog on the Net. From
Eternity to Here uses ideas at the cutting edge of theoretical physics
to explore how properties of spacetime before the Big Bang can explain
the flow of time we experience in our everyday lives. Carroll suggests
that we live in a baby universe, part of a large family of universes
in which many of our siblings experience an arrow of time running in
the opposite direction. It's an ambitious, fascinating picture of the
universe on an ultra-large scale, one that will captivate fans of
popular physics blockbusters like Elegant Universe and A Brief History
of Time."

Pentcho Valev