EINSTEIN'S ABUSE OF TIME
in [Relativity]
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From: Pentcho Valev on 22 Jul 2010 00:54 When it comes to destruction of human rationality, Einsteinians know no limits: http://www.physorg.com/news198948917.html "The possibility of going back in time only to kill your ancestors and prevent your own birth has posed a serious problem for potential time travelers, not even considering the technical details of building a time machine. But a new theory proposed by physicists at MIT suggests that this grandfather paradox could be avoided by using quantum teleportation and "post-selecting" what a time traveler could and could not do. So while murdering ones relatives is unfortunately possible in the present time, such actions would be strictly forbidden if you were to try them during a trip to the past." http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1007/1007.2615v2.pdf "Einstein's theory of general relativity allows the existence of closed timelike curves, paths through spacetime that, if followed, allow a time traveler - whether human being or elementary particle - to interact with her former self." Is there any hope for science? Pentcho Valev wrote: For a century Einsteinians have been procrusteanizing their and innocent people's minds into conformity with "time dilation" or, generally, "the passage of time is an illusion" - the most schizophrenic consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/01/opinion/the-time-we-thought-we-knew.html Brian Greene: "In the early part of the 20th century, however, Albert Einstein saw through nature's Newtonian facade and revealed that the passage of time depends on circumstance and environment. He showed that the wristwatches worn by two individuals moving relative to one another, or experiencing different gravitational fields, tick off time at different rates. The passage of time, according to Einstein, is in the eye of the beholder. (...) Rudolf Carnap, the philosopher, recounts Einstein's telling him that ''the experience of the now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics.'' And later, in a condolence letter to the widow of Michele Besso, his longtime friend and fellow physicist, Einstein wrote: ''In quitting this strange world he has once again preceded me by just a little. That doesn't mean anything. For we convinced physicists the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent.'' (...) Now, however, modern physics' notion of time is clearly at odds with the one most of us have internalized. Einstein greeted the failure of science to confirm the familiar experience of time with ''painful but inevitable resignation.'' The developments since his era have only widened the disparity between common experience and scientific knowledge. Most physicists cope with this disparity by compartmentalizing: there's time as understood scientifically, and then there's time as experienced intuitively. For decades, I've struggled to bring my experience closer to my understanding. In my everyday routines, I delight in what I know is the individual's power, however imperceptible, to affect time's passage. In my mind's eye, I often conjure a kaleidoscopic image of time in which, with every step, I further fracture Newton's pristine and uniform conception. And in moments of loss I've taken comfort from the knowledge that all events exist eternally in the expanse of space and time, with the partition into past, present and future being a useful but subjective organization." 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." Fortunately, the influential philosopher of science John Norton has found it profitable to launch a campaign against the schizophreny: 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." Yet more honesty is needed - John Norton should openly declare that "the passage of time is an illusion" is a consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate. Pentcho Valev pvalev(a)yahoo.com
From: Bob Myers on 22 Jul 2010 13:26 Pentcho Valev wrote: > When it comes to destruction of human rationality, Einsteinians know > no limits: No one ever said the universe is somehow constrained to operate within the bounds of what you think makes sense. Bob M.
From: hanson on 22 Jul 2010 19:33
----[ Valev 1 : Myers 0, zero, silch, nada ]----- > Pentcho Valev wrote: When it comes to destruction of human rationality, Einsteinians know no limits: > "Bob Myers" <nospamplease(a)address.invalid> wrote: No one [1] ever said the universe is somehow constrained to operate within the bounds of what you [2] think makes sense. > hanson wrote: If you'd included Einstein in [1] & [2] you would have made sense too. Said Einstein himself: ::AE:: "as far as the laws of mathematics refer to ::AE:: reality, they are not certain; and as far as they ::AE:: are certain, they do not refer to reality." ::AE::"why would anyone be interested in getting exact ::AE:: solutions from such an ephemeral set of equations?" ::AE:: "I consider it quite possible that physics cannot be based ::AE:: on the field concept, i. e., on continuous structures. In that ::AE:: case nothing remains of my entire castle in the air, [my] ::AE:: gravitation theory included." -- Albert Einstein > --- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news(a)netfront.net --- |