ETHICS IN THE ERA OF POSTSCIENTISM

Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and
other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in
them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over
one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable
activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even
greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his
points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis
etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement
on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the
Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the
University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education
Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev?
What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not
belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education
community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is
probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so
many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people
would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might
well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant
Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them
has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation
for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks
otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May
to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling
the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty
trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr
Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing
nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that
would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)."

http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html
Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List
around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and
reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the
tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own
postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of
Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of
his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion
above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential
Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One
can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the
independent variables are not specified."

The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the
One True Science:

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671
Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on
how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the
Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the
Universe must always increase to be useless."

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho Valev wrote:
Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and
other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in
them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over
one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable
activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even
greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his
points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis
etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement
on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the
Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the
University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education
Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev?
What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not
belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education
community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is
probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so
many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people
would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might
well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant
Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them
has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation
for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks
otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May
to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling
the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty
trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr
Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing
nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that
would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)."

http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html
Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List
around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and
reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the
tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own
postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of
Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of
his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion
above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential
Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One
can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the
independent variables are not specified."

The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the
One True Science:

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671
Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on
how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the
Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the
Universe must always increase to be useless."

Pentcho Valev

Athel Cornish-Bowden and Gary Bertrand are professors in the
postscientific Praetorian Guard, that is, their only function is to
destroy assailants. The fact that they feel obliged to condemn the
foundations of thermodynamics suggests that high priests have already
done so and that the verdict has been accepted by the postscientific
community:

http://pennance.us/?p=16
Clifford Truesdell: "Thermodynamics need never have been the Dismal
Swamp of Obscurity that from the first it was and that today in common
instruction it is…"

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous
that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it
just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem?
And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and
irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff?
Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions.
Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem
we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the
questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical
importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an
adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial
problems in statistical physics. (...) 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."

In other words, thermodynamics is OFFICIALLY dead but postscientists
are entitled to teach it until the death of science as a whole is
officially declared. The same holds true for relativity although high
priests found it suitable to announce its official death only
recently:

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."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valevs postings to the BTK-MCA and
other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in
them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over
ones professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable
activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even
greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his
points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis
etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement
on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the
Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the
University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education
Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev?
What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not
belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education
community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is
probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so
many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people
would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might
well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant
Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them
has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation
for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks
otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May
to September 1997, during which period Mr Valevs scheme for tangling
the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty
trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr
Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing
nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that
would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)."

http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html
Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List
around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and
reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the
tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own
postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of
Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of
his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion
above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential
Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One
can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the
independent variables are not specified."

The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the
One True Science:

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671
Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on
how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the
Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the
Universe must always increase to be useless."

Pentcho Valev

Karl Popper's ethical problems:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the
extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz
and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of
internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles
with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a
messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of
unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the
idea that Einstein’s relativity theory represents some form of
scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact.
Thus, Einstein’s other achievements are emphasised and the difference
between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48,
158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to
fit the new circumstances:
Karl Popper: "The decisive thing about Einstein’s theory, from my
point of view, is that it has shown that Newton’s theory - which has
been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be
replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which
is so related to Newton’s theory that every success of Newtonian
theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes
slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me,
this logical situation is more important than the question which of
the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the
truth" (Popper 1982, 29–30)."

Pentcho Valev

Deductive science (e.g. relativity or thermodynamics) has a
fundamental property: any anomalous result suggests that either an
axiom is false or an argument is invalid. Therefore, instead of
proclaiming experimental verification as the only sanitary procedure
in theoretical science, a procedure that unavoidably creates
camouflage in the end, philosophers of science should have coined the
simple slogan:

"Anomaly? Identify the false axiom or the invalid argument!"

Nowadays clever philosophers implicitly reject the experimental
falsification but, in conformity with the "ethics" of Postscientism,
can only offer vague or misleading (insofar as looking for a false
axiom or an invalid argument is concerned) hints instead:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous
that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it
just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem?
And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and
irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff?
Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions.
Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem
we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the
questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical
importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an
adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial
problems in statistical physics. (...) 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.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

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."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Karl Popper's ethical problems:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the
extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz
and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of
internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles
with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a
messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of
unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the
idea that Einstein's relativity theory represents some form of
scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact.
Thus, Einsteins other achievements are emphasised and the difference
between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48,
158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to
fit the new circumstances:
Karl Popper: "The decisive thing about Einstein's theory, from my
point of view, is that it has shown that Newton's theory - which has
been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be
replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which
is so related to Newton's theory that every success of Newtonian
theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes
slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me,
this logical situation is more important than the question which of
the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the
truth" (Popper 1982, 2930)."

Pentcho Valev

For 100 years the correct approach to deductive theories has been
applied only once in Einsteiniana:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...705.4507v1.pdf
Joao Magueijo and John W. Moffat: "The question is then: If Lorentz
invariance is broken, what happens to the speed of light? Given that
Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of
observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the
speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles
must be violated."

Still "Lorentz invariance is broken" is misleading. An absurdity
cannot be just "broken". Magueijo and Moffat should have written:

"The question is then: If Lorentz invariance is absurd, as its
consequences known as "reciprocal length contraction" and "reciprocal
time dilation" suggest, what happens to the speed of light? Given that
Lorentz invariance follows from two postulates -- (1) relativity of
observers in inertial frames of reference and (2) constancy of the
speed of light--it is clear that either or both of those principles
must be violated."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Deductive science (e.g. relativity or thermodynamics) has a
fundamental property: any anomalous result suggests that either an
axiom is false or an argument is invalid. Therefore, instead of
proclaiming experimental verification as the only sanitary procedure
in theoretical science, a procedure that unavoidably creates
camouflage in the end, philosophers of science should have coined the
simple slogan:

"Anomaly? Identify the false axiom or the invalid argument!"

Nowadays clever philosophers implicitly reject the experimental
falsification but, in conformity with the "ethics" of Postscientism,
can only offer vague or misleading (insofar as looking for a false
axiom or an invalid argument is concerned) hints instead:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous
that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it
just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem?
And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and
irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff?
Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions.
Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem
we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the
questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical
importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an
adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial
problems in statistical physics. (...) 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.amazon.com/Relativity-Sim.../dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

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."

Pentcho Valev

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
"The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and
research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who
raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A
winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of
Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are
then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics.
Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of
elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing
question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these
circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on
scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of
realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the
theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of
professional discourse."

A somewhat outdated account of the situation. Relativists are no
longer relativists (they have all left the sinking ship recently) and,
accordingly, do not have to admit anything. Antirelativists reclaiming
old Newtonian physics are marginalised automatically, without any
quarrel - the world of Postscientism simply does not hear their wails.
Imagine a musician reclaiming this kind of music:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqgHCksUQok (Part 1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1OS0bSsI_k (Part 2)
(Anne-Sophie Mutter plays Giuseppe Tartini "The Devil's Trill")

This musician would likewise be marginalised automatically in the
world of rap music.

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Karl Popper's ethical problems:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/con...ent=a909857880
Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the
extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz
and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of
internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles
with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a
messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of
unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the
idea that Einstein's relativity theory represents some form of
scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact.
Thus, Einsteins other achievements are emphasised and the difference
between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48,
158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to
fit the new circumstances:
Karl Popper: "The decisive thing about Einstein's theory, from my
point of view, is that it has shown that Newton's theory - which has
been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be
replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which
is so related to Newton's theory that every success of Newtonian
theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes
slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me,
this logical situation is more important than the question which of
the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the
truth" (Popper 1982, 2930)."

Pentcho Valev

W. H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality of Science, Routledge, London,
1981, pp. 70-71: "For Popper a theory is scientific if and only if it
is falsifiable. This means that it must entail some basic statement
which could turn out to be false, thereby falsifying the theory. How
do theories entail basic statements? The short answer is that they do
not. If we think of a theory as the set of postulates such as the laws
of Newtonian mechanics together with their deductive consequences, we
shall not find among those consequences any basic statements. In order
to derive a testable prediction from a theory we need to specify
initial conditions together with a host of auxiliary hypotheses."

The problem emerging at the end of Newton-Smith's text is purely
ethical. The choice of auxiliary hypotheses unavoidably involves some
arbitrariness so one can bias it in favour of either falsifying or
saving the theory. Needless to say, saving predominates - e.g.
FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced the auxiliary hypothesis known as
"length contraction" and saved the ether theory for a while. If they
had not introduced it, the ether theory would have been falsified,
Newton's emission theory of light confirmed and Divine Albert's Divine
Theory nonexistent.

Pentcho Valev

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/Einstein1905.pdf
Albert Einstein: "I certainly knew that the principle of the constancy
of the velocity of light is something quite independent of the
relativity postulate; and I considered what would be more probable,
the principle of the constancy of c, as was demanded by Maxwell’s
equations, or the constancy of c, exclusively for an observer sitting
at the light source. I decided in favor of the first..."

Einstein is simply lying: Maxwell's equations presupposed that the
speed of light was VARIABLE and obeyed the equation c'=c+v, where c is
the speed of light relative to the ether and v is the speed of the
observer relative to the ether. So the only reasonable choice
consistent with the Michelson-Morley experiment was "the constancy of
c, exclusively for an observer sitting at the light source", that is,
the prediction of Newton's emission theory of light.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho Valev wrote:
Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valev’s postings to the BTK-MCA and
other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in
them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over
one’s professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable
activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even
greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his
points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis
etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement
on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the
Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the
University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education
Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev?
What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not
belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education
community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is
probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so
many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people
would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might
well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant
Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them
has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation
for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks
otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May
to September 1997, during which period Mr Valev’s scheme for tangling
the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty
trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr
Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing
nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that
would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)."

http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html
Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List
around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and
reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the
tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own
postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of
Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of
his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion
above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential
Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One
can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the
independent variables are not specified."

The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the
One True Science:

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/boz...nishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.ex...=0&O=D&P=31671
Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on
how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the
Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the
Universe must always increase to be useless."

Pentcho Valev