Post-truth or post-sanity world?

"The Oxford Dictionaries named 'post-truth' as their 2016 Word of the Year. It must sound alien to scientists. Science's quest for knowledge about reality presupposes the importance of truth, both as an end in itself and as a means of resolving problems. How could truth become passé? [...] Post-truth refers to blatant lies being routine across society, and it means that politicians can lie without condemnation. This is different from the cliché that all politicians lie and make promises they have no intention of keeping — this still expects honesty to be the default position. In a post-truth world, this expectation no longer holds." http://www.nature.com/news/post-trut...plexed-1.21054

My comment in Natu

Science has long gone past post-truth - nowadays "post-sanity" describes the situation better. Consider this:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
David Morin, Introduction to Classical Mechanics With Problems and Solutions, Chapter 11, p. 14: "Twin A stays on the earth, while twin B flies quickly to a distant star and back. [...] For the entire outward and return parts of the trip, B does observe A's clock running slow, but enough strangeness occurs during the turning-around period to make A end up older. Note, however, that a discussion of acceleration is not required to quantitatively understand the paradox..."

That is, all along, the traveling twin observes himself aging faster than his stationary brother, but, as the traveling twin turns around for a very brief period, "enough strangeness occurs" and his distant stationary brother suddenly gets very old and dies. Finally, although the turnaround's spooky action at a distance is crucial, it can be ignored in the calculations.

Examples of this kind may help one realize that Einstein's schizophrenic world is much more advanced than Big Brother's schizophrenic world:

https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/o/orw...hapter1.7.html
"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"

Pentcho Valev

Julia Shaw in Scientific American: "I'm a Scientist, and I Don't Believe in Facts. They say that we have found ourselves in a world lost to emotion, irrationality, and a weakening grasp on reality. That lies don't faze us, and knowledge doesn't impress us. That we are post-truth, post-fact. But, is this actually a bad thing? I'm a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and "the truth" some time last year." https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...ieve-in-facts/

Julia Shaw should't have "abandoned the idea of facts and the truth". Of the following two statements one is both "fact" and "truth", the other is "falsehood":

Statement 1: The speed of light varies with the speed of the light source.

Statement 2: The speed of light is independent of the speed of the light source.

In 1887 (prior to FitzGerald and Lorentz advancing the ad hoc length contraction hypothesis) the Michelson-Morley experiment UNEQUIVOCALLY confirmed Statement 1 and refuted Statement 2. However scientists were all etherists at that time (that is, strongly believed in Statement 2) and fabricated, ad hoc, the absurd length contraction - the experiment became "compatible" with what it had originally refuted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emission_theory
"Emission theory, also called emitter theory or ballistic theory of light, was a competing theory for the special theory of relativity, explaining the results of the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887. [...] The name most often associated with emission theory is Isaac Newton. In his corpuscular theory Newton visualized light "corpuscles" being thrown off from hot bodies at a nominal speed of c with respect to the emitting object, and obeying the usual laws of Newtonian mechanics, and we then expect light to be moving towards us with a speed that is offset by the speed of the distant emitter (c ± v)."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/1743/2/Norton.pdf
"The Michelson-Morley experiment is fully compatible with an emission theory of light that CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
Banesh Hoffmann, Relativity and Its Roots, p.92: "There are various remarks to be made about this second principle. For instance, if it is so obvious, how could it turn out to be part of a revolution - especially when the first principle is also a natural one? Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous."

So the falsehood (Statement 2) has been established and worshiped for more than a century, it killed physics in the end, but Statement 1 remains and will always be both "fact" and "truth".

Pentcho Valev

All consequences of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate are absurd, even idiotic. One of them, length contraction, implies that unlimitedly long objects can gloriously be trapped inside unlimitedly short containers:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physic...barn_pole.html
John Baez: "These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn. [...] So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. [...] If it does not explode under the strain and it is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be trapped in a compressed state inside the barn."

See, at 7:12 in the video below, how the train is trapped "in a compressed state" inside the tunnel:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrqj88zQZJg
"Einstein's Relativistic Train in a Tunnel Paradox: Special Relativity"

It is not difficult to realize that trapping unlimitedly long objects inside unlimitedly short containers implies infinite compressibility and drastically violates the law of conservation of energy. The trapped object, in trying to restore its original volume ("spring back to its natural shape"), would produce an enormous amount of work the energy for which comes from nowhere.

At 9:01 in the above video Sarah sees the train falling through the hole, and in order to save Einstein's relativity, the authors of the video inform the gullible world that Adam as well sees the train falling through the hole. However Adam can only see this if the train undergoes an absurd disintegration first, as shown at 9:53.

Clearly we have reductio ad absurdum: An absurd disintegration is required - it does occur in Adam's reference frame but doesn't in Sarah's. Conclusion: The underlying premise, Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, is false.

The shift to post-sanity in 1905:

http://negrjp.fotoblog.uol.com.br/im...0819051851.jpg

http://plus.maths.org/issue37/featur...ein/index.html
John Barrow FRS: "Einstein restored faith in the unintelligibility of science. Everyone knew that Einstein had done something important in 1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody could tell you exactly what it was. When Einstein was interviewed for a Dutch newspaper in 1921, he attributed his mass appeal to the mystery of his work for the ordinary person: "Does it make a silly impression on me, here and yonder, about my theories of which they cannot understand a word? I think it is funny and also interesting to observe. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to them...it impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of the mysterious." Relativity was a fashionable notion. It promised to sweep away old absolutist notions and refurbish science with modern ideas. In art and literature too, revolutionary changes were doing away with old conventions and standards. All things were being made new. Einstein's relativity suited the mood. Nobody got very excited about Einstein's brownian motion or his photoelectric effect but relativity promised to turn the world inside out."

Pentcho Valev