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From: Pentcho Valev on 2 Jun 2010 02:09
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/31/relativity-and-relativism/
Washington Times: "A frequently heard statement of cultural relativism
goes like this: "If it feels right for you, it's OK. Who is to say
you're wrong?" One individual's experience is as "valid" as another's.
There is no "preferred" or higher vantage point from which to judge
these things. Not just beauty, but right and wrong are in the eye of
the beholder. The "I" indeed is the "ultimate measure." The special
theory of relativity imposes on the physical world a claim that is
very similar to the one made by relativism. (...) So how come the
speed of light always stays the same? Einstein argued that when the
observer moves relative to an object, distance and time always adjust
themselves just enough to preserve light speed as a constant. Speed is
distance divided by time. So, Einstein argued, length contracts and
time dilates to just the extent needed to keep the speed of light ever
the same. (...) Space and time are the alpha and omega of the physical
world. They are the stage within which everything happens. But if they
must trim and tarry whenever the observer moves, that puts "the
observer" in the driver's seat. Reality becomes observer-dependent.
Again, then, we find that the "I" is the ultimate measure. Pondering
this in Prague in the 1950s, Beckmann could not accept it. The
observer's function is to observe, he said, not to affect what's out
there. Relativity meant that two and two didn't quite add up any more
and elevated science into a priesthood of obscurity. Common sense
could no longer be trusted."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.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."

Painful doublethink in Einsteiniana (space and time are NOT a
malleable fabric and the passage of time is NOT an illusion but space
and time SHOULD BE a malleable fabric and the passage of time SHOULD
BE an illusion because Divine Albert said so):

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

http://www.evene.fr/celebre/actualite/2005-annee-einstein-114.php
"Les articles parus en 1905 dans la revue 'Annalen der Physik'
révolutionnent non seulement le petit monde de la physique, mais aussi
la perception commune de grands concepts tels que le temps, l'espace
ou la matière. Enfin...ils auraient dû... car si les théories
einsteiniennes sont aujourd'hui admises et célébrées partout dans le
monde scientifique, si une grande partie de la recherche fondamentale
a pour objectif de les développer, le commun des mortels continue
cependant à parler du temps, de l'espace, et de la matière comme il le
faisait au XIXème siècle. C'est ce que déplore Thibault Damour,
physicien et auteur d'un ouvrage passionnant intitulé 'Si Einstein
m'était conté', dans lequel il dresse un portrait scientifique du prix
Nobel. "Loin d'avoir été assimilées par tout un chacun", écrit-il,
"les révolutions einsteiniennes sont simplement ignorées." Car les
découvertes dont on parle dépassent de très loin - comme souvent - les
préoccupations purement scentifiques. Il est, de fait, encore
extrêmement complexe et ardu de comprendre la notion de temps non pas
comme un flux, un absolu, mais comme un relatif, pouvant ralentir
selon la vitesse de l'observateur."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-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/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton: "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
pvalev(a)yahoo.com
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