🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <gardner.714364794@bruce.cs.monash.edu.au> gardner@cs.monash.edu.au () writes:
<>In article <snodgras.714201251@crash> snodgras@crash.cts.com (John Snodgrass) writes:
<>      With our entire cosmology wrapped around it, it is amazing to realize
<>that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for the existence of time.
<>(Space in the geometrical sense is the same way.) This makes such notions
<>as 'time dilation' even more absurd, since they are predicated on something
<>else which itself has not been demonstrated. Of course, this doesn't stop
<>anyone from believing in it.
<
<Huh? I must have missed something here. I thought that experiments in the
<'60's confirmed relativistic predictions of time-dilation by showing that
<the half-lives of radioactive particles travelling at relativistic speeds
<were time-dilated (relative to our frame of reference, that is, and perhaps
<this is all you mean when attack the concept of absolute time).

There are two possibilities I see for interpreting Snodgrass's statement.

1. "Time dilation" is a poor choice of terminology.  It suggests that
absolute time is being stretched out somehow relative to another absolute
time, or something like that.

2. The experiments conducted to verify time dilation were not "pure"
observations but were "theory-laden."  The design and the interpretation
of the experiment were drenched with assumptions about the existence of
absolute time and other similarly dubious philosophical assumptions.  What
is needed is a total revamping of all our scientific concepts (a paradigm
shift) that removes all traces of imposing mathematics on reality.  After
this revolution the experiments in question will be seen in a totally
different light and we will wonder why on earth we ever referred to them as
"verifications of time dilation."

I can accept 1, but 2, which from reading some of Snodgrass's other
articles seems to me to be the more accurate reading, is a bit much for me
to swallow.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949