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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...html?full=true
NEW SCIENTIST: Beyond space-time: Welcome to phase space "But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space. (...) One idea is to look at light arriving at the Earth from distant gamma- ray bursts. If momentum space is curved in a particular way that mathematicians refer to as "non-metric", then a high-energy photon in the gamma-ray burst should arrive at our telescope a little later than a lower-energy photon from the same burst, despite the two being emitted at the same time. Just that phenomenon has already been seen, starting with some unusual observations made by a telescope in the Canary Islands in 2005 (New Scientist, 15 August 2009, p 29). The effect has since been confirmed by NASA's Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, which has been collecting light from cosmic explosions since it launched in 2008. "The Fermi data show that it is an undeniable experimental fact that there is a correlation between arrival time and energy - high-energy photons arrive later than low- energy photons," says Amelino-Camelia. Still, he is not popping the champagne just yet. It is not clear whether the observed delays are true signatures of curved momentum space, or whether they are down to "unknown properties of the explosions themselves", as Amelino-Camelia puts it. Calculations of gamma-ray bursts idealise the explosions as instantaneous, but in reality they last for several seconds. While there is no obvious reason to think so, it is possible that the bursts occur in such a way that they emit lower-energy photons a second or two before higher-energy photons, which would account for the observed delays. In order to disentangle the properties of the explosions from properties of relative locality, we need a large sample of gamma-ray bursts taking place at various known distances (arxiv.org/abs/ 1103.5626). If the delay is a property of the explosion, its length will not depend on how far away the burst is from our telescope; if it is a sign of relative locality, it will. Amelino-Camelia and the rest of Smolin's team are now anxiously awaiting more data from Fermi." Previous shocks and horrors: 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://discovermagazine.com/2003/apr/cover "Was Einstein Wrong? What if Einstein was wrong? The day João Magueijo began to doubt Albert Einstein started inauspiciously. It was a rainy winter morning in 1995 at Cambridge University, where Magueijo was a research fellow in theoretical physics. He was tramping across a sodden soccer field, suffering from a hangover and mumbling to himself, when out of the gray a heretical idea brought him to a full stop: What if Einstein was wrong? What if, rather than being forever constant, the speed of light could change? Magueijo stood there in the downpour. What would that mean?" http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten By Jonathan Leake, Science Editor The Sunday Times - London "A group of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists." http://roychristopher.com/joao-mague...tier-cosmology "Likewise, Joao Magueijo has radical ideas, but his ideas intend to turn that Einsteinian dogma on its head. Magueijo is trying to pick apart one of Einstein's most impenetrable tenets, the constancy of the speed of light. This idea of a constant speed (about 3×106 meters/ second) is familiar to anyone who is remotely acquainted with modern physics. It is known as the universal speed limit. Nothing can, has, or ever will travel faster than light. Magueijo doesn't buy it. His VSL (Varying Speed of Light) presupposes a speed of light that can be energy or time-space dependent. Before you declare that he's out of his mind, understand that this man received his doctorate from Cambridge, has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College, London." 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.'' 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." Pentcho Valev |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
In fact, Lee Smolin's shock and horror is based on the secret
rejection of "one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory that says that the speed of light is a universal constant": http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm Lee Smolin: "Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it." http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148 "Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi." http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smol...n03_print.html Lee Smolin: "Now, here is the really interesting part: Some of the effects predicted by the theory appear to be in conflict with one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of relativity, the theory that says that the speed of light is a universal constant. It's the same for all photons, and it is independent of the motion of the sender or observer. How is this possible, if that theory is itself based on the principles of relativity? The principle of the constancy of the speed of light is part of special relativity, but we quantized Einstein's general theory of relativity. Because Einstein's special theory is only a kind of approximation to his general theory, we can implement the principles of the latter but find modifications to the former. And this is what seems to be happening!" Pentcho Valev |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
"Pentcho Valev" wrote in message ... | In fact, Lee Smolin's shock and horror is based on the secret | rejection of "one of the principles of Einstein's special theory of | relativity, the theory that says that the speed of light is a | universal constant": | | http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm | Lee Smolin: "Special relativity was the result of 10 years of | intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong | within two years of publishing it." Einstein had no intellect to struggle with, and neither does Smolin. |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Sp.../dp/0738205257
Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation Joao Magueijo p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects. Quantum gravity seemed to lack a dam - its effects wanted to spill out all over the place; and the underlying reason was none other than special relativity." Were they asked if special relativity should be taught at universities, Joao Magueijo and Lee Smolin would answer: "Of course! We have always taught it and money comes regularly!" Pentcho Valev |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physic.../dp/0618551050
The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next Lee Smolin pp. 226-228: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate. It turns out that you can, and working this out has been one of the most exciting things I've had the good fortune to participate in during my career. (...) The second postulate of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is universal, appears to be almost contradictory in itself. Why? Consider a single photon, tracked by two observers. Assume that the two observers move with respect to each other. If they measure the speed of that single photon, we would normally expect them to get different answers, because this is the way normal objects behave. If I see a bus pull ahead of me at what looks to me like a speed of 10 kilometers an hour because I am in a car screaming down the highway at 140 kilometers per hour, an observer standing on the side of the road will see the bus moving at 150 km/hour. But if I observe a photon under the same circumstances, special relativity says that the roadside observer will measure the photon to have the same speed that I think it has. So why is this not a contradiction? The key is that we do not measure speed directly. Speed is a ratio: it is a certain distance per a certain time. The central realization of Einstein is that different observers measure a photon to have the same speed, even if they are moving with respect to each other, because they measure space and time differently. Their measurements of time and distance vary from each other in such a way that one speed, that of light, is universal. But if we can do this for one constant, why not for another? Could we play the trick for distance as well? That is, we understand that, generally, observers measure a moving meter stick to be less than a meter long. This will be true for most lengths, but can we arrange things so that when we finally get all the way down to the Planck length, the effect goes away? This means that if a stick is exactly a Planck-length long, all observers will agree on its length, even if it is moving. Could we then have two universal quantities, a speed and a length?" Lee Smolin, your construal of the theory of relativity as a series of tricks is quite correct but some additional information is needed. You have "changed only the second postulate" but do not give the new formulation. Here is the original one: http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/ "...light is always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is independent of the state of motion of the emitting body." Please formulate your new version just as succinctly as Einstein did. Needless to say, it would be quite grotesque if your new version does not change a single word in Einstein's original formulation. Pentcho Valev |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
Einsteiniana's priests know no limits:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_...an_barbour.pdf Aspects of Time, Julian Barbour, Warwick, August 24th 2011 Alternative Title: Was Spacetime Glorious Historical Accident? "Time will not be fused with space but emerge from the timeless shape dynamics of space. Absolute simultaneity restored!" Poor believers are deadly tired. They don't sing "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity" anymore. An army of desperate Gollums gradually realizing that the Precious is gone forever: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIYfoeBOhTU Where once was light Now darkness falls Where once was love Love is no more .................................. These tears you cry Have come too late Take back the lies The hurt, the blame And you will weep When you face the end alone You are lost You can never go home You are lost You can never go home. Pentcho Valev |
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EINSTEINIANA: SHOCK AND HORROR AGAIN
Einsteiniana's priests really know no limits:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ase-space.html "But did Einstein's revolution go far enough? Physicist Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, doesn't think so. He and a trio of colleagues are aiming to take relativity to a whole new level, and they have space-time in their sights. They say we need to forget about the home Einstein invented for us: we live instead in a place called phase space. (...) What they discovered is shocking: observers living in a curved momentum space will no longer agree on measurements made in a unified space-time. That goes entirely against the grain of Einstein's relativity. He had shown that while space and time were relative, space-time was the same for everyone. For observers in a curved momentum space, however, even space-time is relative. (...) According to Smolin, relative locality saves the day. Let's say you were patient enough to wait around while a black hole evaporated, a process that could take billions of years. Once it had vanished, you could ask what happened to, say, an elephant that once succumbed to its gravitational grip. But as you look back to the time at which you thought the elephant had fallen in, you would find that locations in space-time had grown so fuzzy and uncertain that there would be no way to tell whether the elephant actually fell into the black hole or narrowly missed it. The information-loss paradox dissolves. (...) Smolin and colleagues' model does not yet include gravity, but once it does, Majid says, observers will not agree on measurements in momentum space either. So if both space-time and momentum space are relative, where does objective reality lie? What is the true fabric of reality? Smolin's hunch is that we will find ourselves in a place where space- time and momentum space meet: an eight-dimensional phase space that represents all possible values of position, time, energy and momentum. In relativity, what one observer views as space, another views as time and vice versa, because ultimately they are two sides of a single coin - a unified space-time. Likewise, in Smolin's picture of quantum gravity, what one observer sees as space-time another sees as momentum space..." Smolin & Company, is there any rationality left in Einsteiniana's schizophrenic world? If yes, you are right to try to destroy the remnants but I don't think the answer is "yes". Perhaps, by superimposing a smaller number of idiocies, you would get the same prestige and money. Pentcho Valev |
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