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