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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 one’s 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

>

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