EINSTEIN'S ABUSE OF TIME
in [Relativity]
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From: Pentcho Valev on 7 Jul 2010 04:47 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: Pentcho Valev on 9 Jul 2010 02:09 More about the schizophreny that definitively destroyed rationality in science: http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2010/07/08/what%E2%80%99s-real-about-time/ "Kip Thorne http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/Kip-Thorne/108 , an expert on Einstein's theory of relativity and the warping of the universe, explains that when time ticks, "what I see is not always what you see." How can that be? "Galileo, Newton, and all of the great scientists before the 20th century thought of space and time as absolute and having no real intimate connection," Thorne says. "But Einstein taught us otherwise. Einstein's great insight in 1905 was to recognize that space and time are personal. Your time flows at one rate, my time flows at a different rate; you may see a space I may see as a mixture of space and time. In a very precise sense, it's hard to grasp." Thorne likes to begin with time. "Einstein's special relativity and general relativity tell us that if you move at a high speed past me and I watch clocks that you carry, those clocks will appear to me to tick more slowly than my clocks tick. But at the same time, you're going past me, and of course you see me moving relative to you; you look at my clocks, you see my clocks tick slower than yours. So I see your clocks tick slower, and you see my clocks tick slower. It's crazy!" It sounds impossible. "It's crazy," Thorne repeats, "but it's not impossible. It is possible because what you regard as two simultaneous events, occurring at the same time but at different locations in space, I don't see as simultaneous. If you have two firecrackers and you carry them with you and you move at high speed and you set them off simultaneously, measurements that I make will show the firecracker in the back go off first, the firecracker in the front go off afterward. So there are weird things in how time seems to behave in simultaneity." The critical factor here is the absolute, inviolable standardization of the speed of light, which was Einstein's great insight in his special theory of relativity. "Einstein intuited that the speed of light will be the same as measured by everyone, no matter how they move through the universe," Thorne explains. "Now, in reality, if you go deeply into the philosophy of science, what's really going on here, Einstein says, if you define the rate and flow of time in a manner that makes the laws of physics look simple - so that, for example, time is ticked in a regular way by atomic clocks, as atoms vibrate - then, having made that choice, the speed of light is the same as seen by everybody, which means that time is personal and that space is personal. It's a very deep insight." Einstein "intuited" nothing. In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally refuted the independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and confirmed the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......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 "Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann p.92: "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." James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp. 39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE LOGIQUE." Then FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced an aburd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis - length contraction - and so made the Michelson-Morley experiment confirm the independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and refute the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light. Einstein just inherited this "independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter" which was a consequence of Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis. Pentcho Valev pvalev(a)yahoo.com
From: Pentcho Valev on 10 Jul 2010 00:53 More about Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis - the true origin of Einstein's relativity: Initially (in 1892) objects moving relative to the ether had to shrink in the direction of their movement but observers sitting on those objects had to see objects at rest relative to the ether stretching. So only observers at rest relative to the ether were able to trap infinitely long objects inside infinitely short containers: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html "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. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the reference frame of a stationary observer.....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. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The runner emerges from the far door unscathed.....If the doors are kept shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it was Lorentz contracted. 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." Then the mathematics of the absurdity developed and "length contraction" became reciprocal - ANY observer was able to trap an infinitely long object inside an infinitely short container - not only observers at rest relative to the ether. Also, the reciprocity allowed observers to live in incommensurable worlds - e.g. an observer travelling with the rivet sees the bug squashed while the bug sees itself alive and kicking: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html "The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just 0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the bug....The paradox is not resolved." Pentcho Valev wrote: More about the schizophreny that definitively destroyed rationality in science: http://www.scienceandreligiontoday.com/2010/07/08/what%E2%80%99s-real-about-time/ "Kip Thorne http://www.closertotruth.com/participant/Kip-Thorne/108 , an expert on Einstein's theory of relativity and the warping of the universe, explains that when time ticks, "what I see is not always what you see." How can that be? "Galileo, Newton, and all of the great scientists before the 20th century thought of space and time as absolute and having no real intimate connection," Thorne says. "But Einstein taught us otherwise. Einstein's great insight in 1905 was to recognize that space and time are personal. Your time flows at one rate, my time flows at a different rate; you may see a space I may see as a mixture of space and time. In a very precise sense, it's hard to grasp." Thorne likes to begin with time. "Einstein's special relativity and general relativity tell us that if you move at a high speed past me and I watch clocks that you carry, those clocks will appear to me to tick more slowly than my clocks tick. But at the same time, you're going past me, and of course you see me moving relative to you; you look at my clocks, you see my clocks tick slower than yours. So I see your clocks tick slower, and you see my clocks tick slower. It's crazy!" It sounds impossible. "It's crazy," Thorne repeats, "but it's not impossible. It is possible because what you regard as two simultaneous events, occurring at the same time but at different locations in space, I don't see as simultaneous. If you have two firecrackers and you carry them with you and you move at high speed and you set them off simultaneously, measurements that I make will show the firecracker in the back go off first, the firecracker in the front go off afterward. So there are weird things in how time seems to behave in simultaneity." The critical factor here is the absolute, inviolable standardization of the speed of light, which was Einstein's great insight in his special theory of relativity. "Einstein intuited that the speed of light will be the same as measured by everyone, no matter how they move through the universe," Thorne explains. "Now, in reality, if you go deeply into the philosophy of science, what's really going on here, Einstein says, if you define the rate and flow of time in a manner that makes the laws of physics look simple - so that, for example, time is ticked in a regular way by atomic clocks, as atoms vibrate - then, having made that choice, the speed of light is the same as seen by everybody, which means that time is personal and that space is personal. It's a very deep insight." Einstein "intuited" nothing. In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment unequivocally refuted the independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and confirmed the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......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 "Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann p.92: "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." James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp. 39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE LOGIQUE." Then FitzGerald and Lorentz introduced an absurd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis - length contraction - and so made the Michelson-Morley experiment confirm the independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter established by the ether theory - an independence that was to become the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate - and refute the dependence of the speed of light on the speed of the emitter established by Newton's emission theory of light. Einstein just inherited this "independence of the speed of light of the speed of the emitter" which was a consequence of Lorentz-FitzGerald's absurd ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis. Pentcho Valev pvalev(a)yahoo.com
From: Stamenin on 10 Jul 2010 13:36 On Jul 7, 1:47 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...(a)yahoo.com> 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... > 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-uni... > "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. It is not true, the passage of light is only a false consequence of the false LT. > Pentcho Valev > pva...(a)yahoo.com
From: Pentcho Valev on 11 Jul 2010 02:17
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion Craig Callender (another influential philosopher of science) in SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts time, so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in principle. You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick, according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the world might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes impossible to say that an event happened before or after another." Clearly Callender rejects "the passage of time is an illusion", this absurd consequence of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, but if asked: Is Einstein's 1905 light postulate false? Callender would certainly reply "No!". George Orwell explains this behaviour so typical of Einsteinians: 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." 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 |