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From: John Jones on 25 Dec 2009 19:47
Pentcho Valev wrote:
> A couple of weeks ago I posted on PHILOS-L, a philosophy list with
> 4,853 subscribers, the following quotation:
>
> http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0911&L=philos-l&T=0&O=D&P=50126
> Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
> Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
> 57-78.
> "The triumph of relativity theory represents the triumph of ideology
> not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of
> science."
>
> Philosophers of science remained silent. For the sake of argument, let
> us assume that they possess dignity which prevents them from
> discussing Peter Hayes quoted by Pentcho Valev. The assumption is
> wrong. In 2001 Jos Uffink, an influential philosopher of science,
> published a text equivalent to "The triumph of thermodynamics
> represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of
> physics but also in the philosophy of science":
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
> Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
> to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
> law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
> statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
> attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
> Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
> arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
> actually a RED HERRING."
>
> For eight years no philosopher of science has discussed or even
> referred to this text. Uffink himself seems to have forgotten it
> completely. Another influential philosopher of science, John Norton,
> published texts which, combined with a few other texts, suggest that
> Einstein's 1905 false light postulate has in fact killed theoretical
> physics. Other philosophers of science remained silent:
>
> http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
> John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully
> relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field
> transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying
> Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an
> emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived.
> There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to
> classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a
> light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves
> past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v
> and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining
> characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the
> emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an
> emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to
> be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state
> in the present. AS LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY LIGHT,
> ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of
> objections would render an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE."
>
> 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."
>
> http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/Einstein/Einstein_pdf/Einstein_eloge.pdf
> Louis de Broglie: "Tout d'abord toute id�e de "grain" se trouvait
> expuls�e de la th�orie de la Lumi�re : celle-ci prenait la forme d'une
> "th�orie du champ" o� le rayonnement �tait repr�sent� par une
> r�partition continue dans l'espace de grandeurs �voluant contin�ment
> au cours du temps sans qu'il f�t possible de distinguer, dans les
> domaines spatiaux au sein desquels �voluait le champ lumineux, de tr�s
> petites r�gions singuli�res o� le champ serait tr�s fortement
> concentr� et qui fournirait une image du type corpusculaire. Ce
> caract�re � la fois continu et ondulatoire de la lumi�re se trouvait
> prendre une forme tr�s pr�cise dans la th�orie de Maxwell o� le champ
> lumineux venait se confondre avec un certain type de champ
> �lectromagn�tique."
>
> http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576
> John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field
> dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
> Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics
> cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous
> structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air,
> including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of
> contemporary physics."
> John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha,
> hm, ha ha ha."
>
> http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
> Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second
> postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin
> that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together.
> Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate
> farce!....The speed of light is c+v."
>
> Recently John Norton suggested that the conclusion that the separation
> between past, present and future is an illusion, a conclusion directly
> following from Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, should be
> abandoned. Other philosophers of science remained silent:
>
> http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june232009/einstein_lessons_dj_6-22-09.php
> "For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
> present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious" - Albert
> Einstein
>
> 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.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, 1 Mar 2009: "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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