PRESENTISM AGAINST ETERNALISM

Arthur Eddington stunned by the absurdity of length contraction, the
famous consequence of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light
postulate:

http://www.amazon.com/Space-Time-Gra.../dp/0521337097
Space, Time and Gravitation: An Outline of the General Relativity
Theory
Arthur S. Eddington
"It is the reciprocity of these appearances - that each party should
think the other has contracted - that is so difficult to realise. Here
is a paradox beyond even the imagination of Dean Swift: Gulliver
regarded the Lilliputians as a race of dwarfs; and the Lilliputians
regarded Gulliver as a giant. That is natural. If the Lilliputians had
appeared dwarfs to Gulliver, and Gulliver had appeared a dwarf to the
Lilliputians - but no! that is too absurd for fiction, and is an idea
only to be found in the sober pages of science."

If Eddington had illustrated the above text with the bug-rivet
"paradox", his book "Space, Time and Gravitation" would have put an
end to Einstein's relativity:

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu.../bugrivet.html
"The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is
similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the
bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it
looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's
point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just
0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the
bug....The paradox is not resolved."

Pentcho Valev

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/2308...qg_vp_3_dd.pdf
PRESENTISM AND QUANTUM GRAVITY
by Bradley Monton
Department of Philosophy, University of Kentucky
"I am a presentist: I believe that only presently existing things
exist. Contrast presentism with eternalism: the eternalist believes
that past, present, and future things all exist. Assuming that there
are three spatial dimensions, the eternalist believes that the
universe is fourdimensional, and while there are different events in
different regions of this so-called "block universe", the universe as
a whole does not change. The presentist, in contrast, believes that
the universe is three-dimensional. (...) The point of this paper is
not to argue for presentism, but to defend presentism from a
particular type of argument that is often taken to refute it. The form
of the argument is as follows:
(1) Presentism is incompatible with relativity theory (usually the
focus is on special relativity).
(2) Relativity theory is our most fundamental theory of physics.
(3) Presentism is incompatible with our most fundamental theory of
physics. (From (1) and (2).)
(4) Presentism is false. (From (3).)
(...) But regardless of the strength of the arguments for presentism,
the presentist is not required to endorse a non-traditional
understanding of relativity. The presentist can simply say that
presentism is incompatible with special and general relativity, and
hence special and general relativity are false."

How can special relativity be false? It is based on two postulates -
the principle of relativity and the principle of constancy of the
speed of light - so one of the postulates must be false. Which one?
This is an absolute-crimestop question in Einsteiniana:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17
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

http://www.bourbaphy.fr/damourtemps.pdf
Thibault Damour: "Textbook presentations of Special Relativity often
fail to convey the revolutionary nature, with respect to the "common
conception of time", of the seminal paper of Einstein in June 1905. It
is true that many of the equations, and mathematical considerations,
of this paper were also contained in a 1904 paper of Lorentz, and in
two papers of Poincaré submitted in June and July 1905. It is also
true that the central informational core of a physical theory is
defined by its fundamental equations, and that for some theories
(notably Quantum Mechanics) the fundamental equations were discovered
before their physical interpretation. However, in the case of Special
Relativity, the egregious merit of Einstein was, apart from his new
mathematical results and his new physical predictions (notably about
the comparison of the readings of clocks which have moved with respect
to each other) the conceptual breakthrough that the rescaled "local
time" variable t' of Lorentz was "purely and simply, the time", as
experienced by a moving observer. This new conceptualization of time
implied a deep upheaval of the common conception of time. (...) The
paradigm of the special relativistic upheaval of the usual concept of
time is the twin paradox. Let us emphasize that this striking example
of time dilation proves that time travel (towards the future) is
possible. As a gedanken experiment (if we neglect practicalities such
as the technology needed for reaching velocities comparable to the
velocity of light, the cost of the fuel and the capacity of the
traveller to sustain high accelerations), it shows that a sentient
being can jump, "within a minute" (of his experienced time)
arbitrarily far in the future, say sixty million years ahead, and see,
and be part of, what (will) happen then on Earth. This is a clear way
of realizing that the future "already exists" (as we can experience it
"in a minute")."

A clue to the solution of the presentism/eternalism debate:

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is true, then the
future "already exists".

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is false, then
the future does not yet exist.

Finally, if the future does not yet exist and Einstein's 1905 constant-
speed-of-light postulate is false, how does the speed of light vary
with v, the speed of the light source relative to the observer? The
Michelson-Morley experiment says that the equation c'=c+v given by
Newton's emission theory of light is the true antithesis of the false
1905 postulate.

Pentcho Valev

http://discovermagazine.com/2000/dec/cover
"Imagine a universe with no past or future, where time is an illusion
and everyone is immortal. Welcome to that world, says physicist Julian
Barbour. (...) In Barbour's universe, every moment of every
individual's life - birth, death, and everything in between - exists
forever. "Each instant we live," Barbour says, "is, in essence,
eternal." That means each and every one of us is immortal. Like the
perpetually unmoving lovers in Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we are
"for ever panting, and for ever young." We are also for ever aged and
decrepit, on our deathbeds, in the dentist's chair, at Thanksgivings
with our in-laws, and reading these words. Barbour fully realizes how
outrageous the notion of a world without time sounds. "I still have
trouble accepting it," he says. But then, common sense has never been
a reliable guide to understanding the universe... (...) What makes the
two versions of time so different? Time in the quantum realm has no
remarkable properties at all. In theories of quantum mechanics, time
is essentially taken for granted; it simply regularly ticks away in
the background, just as it does in our own lives. Like a clock at a
sporting event, it provides an invisible framework in which events
unfold. That's not the case in Einstein's general theory of
relativity."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...erse-tick.html
"It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher
based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is
hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in
physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The
trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with
relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose
geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."

http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. Following from the work of
Einstein, Minkowski and many more, physics has given a wonderfully
powerful conception of space and time. Relativity theory, in its most
perspicacious form, melds space and time together to form a four-
dimensional spacetime. The study of motion in space and all other
processes that unfold in them merely reduce to the study of an odd
sort of geometry that prevails in spacetime. In many ways, time turns
out to be just like space. In this spacetime geometry, there are
differences between space and time. But a difference that somehow
captures the passage of time is not to be found. There is no passage
of time."

Do Julian Barbour and John Norton differ in any respect? They don't.
Both belong to the "subtlest practitioners of doublethink" in
Einsteiniana and gain career and money by expressing their devotion to
both the lie and the truth:

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. (...) 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."

The quotations by John Norton may leave the impression that he is more
committed to the truth than to the lie. That is not the case: in
Einsteiniana the lie is "always one leap ahead of the truth" and in
his courses Norton teaches the lie without even mentioning the truth:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teachi...sim/index.html
John Norton: "In Newtonian spacetimes, there is only one way to do
this, so a Newtonian spacetime unstacks into a unique set of spaces.
In this sense, space and time remain distinct even if we represent the
physics in a spacetime. In a relativistic (i.e. Minkowski) spacetime,
the relativity of simultaneity tells us that there are many ways to do
this; there is no unique, preferred unstacking. In this sense, space
and time get fused together and this fusion is the real novelty of the
spacetime approach in relativity theory. This novelty is surely what
Hermann Minkowski had in mind when he wrote in the introduction to his
famous lecture "Space and Time" of 1908: "The views of space and time
which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of
experimental physics and therein lies their strength. They are
radical. Henceforth space by itself and time by itself, are doomed to
fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will
preserve an independent reality."

A clue to the solution of the presentism/eternalism debate:

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is true, then we
have "a universe with no past or future, where time is an illusion and
everyone is immortal".

If Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate is false, then we
don't have "a universe with no past or future, where time is an
illusion and everyone is immortal".

Finally, if we don't have "a universe with no past or future, where
time is an illusion and everyone is immortal" and Einstein's 1905
constant-speed-of-light postulate is false, how does the speed of
light vary with v, the speed of the light source relative to the
observer? The Michelson-Morley experiment says that the equation c'=c
+v given by Newton's emission theory of light is the true antithesis
of the false 1905 postulate.

Pentcho Valev