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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 |
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PRESENTISM AGAINST ETERNALISM
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 |
#4
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PRESENTISM AGAINST ETERNALISM
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 |
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