🚀 go-pugleaf

Athel Cornish-Bowden and Gary Bertrand are professors in the
postscientific Praetorian Guard, that is, their only function is to
destroy assailants. The fact that they feel obliged to condemn the
foundations of thermodynamics suggests that high priests have already
done so and that the verdict has been accepted by the postscientific
community:

http://pennance.us/?p=16
Clifford Truesdell: "Thermodynamics need never have been the Dismal
Swamp of Obscurity that from the first it was and that today in common
instruction it is…"

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "What is it that makes this physical law so obstreperous
that every attempt at a clear formulation seems to have failed? Is it
just the usual sloppiness of physicists? Or is there a deeper problem?
And what exactly is the connection with the arrow of time and
irreversibility? Could it be that this is also just based on bluff?
Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over these questions.
Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem
we should turn to more recent, statistical theories. But even then the
questions we are about to study have more than a purely historical
importance. The problem of reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an
adapted version, remains one of the toughest, and controversial
problems in statistical physics. (...) 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."

In other words, thermodynamics is OFFICIALLY dead but postscientists
are entitled to teach it until the death of science as a whole is
officially declared. The same holds true for relativity although high
priests found it suitable to announce its official death only
recently:

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 wrote:

Postscientists destroying the One True Science's enemies:

http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "Reading Mr Valevs postings to the BTK-MCA and
other news groups and trying to answer all the nonsense contained in
them incurs the risk of being so time-consuming that it takes over
ones professional time completely, leaving none for more profitable
activities. On the other hand, not answering them incurs the even
greater risk that some readers of the news group may think that his
points are unanswerable and that thermodynamics, kinetics, catalysis
etc. rest on as fragile a foundation as he pretends. (...) Puzzlement
on this subject extends even to Bulgaria, as B. V. Toshev, head of the
Departments of Physical Chemistry and of Chemistry Education at the
University of Sofia, noted in a message to the Chemistry Education
Discussion List in April 2005, when he asked: "Who is Pentcho Valev?
What is his education? Nobody in Bulgaria knows that. He does not
belong either to the researchers or to the Bulgarian education
community. I even wonder if he is a real man?!" (...) There is
probably no law in science that has been tested so thoroughly, by so
many people, over such a long period. (Why? Because lots of people
would like it to be wrong, and if they could find a loophole it might
well make them very rich; as Benno ter Kuile pointed out, an instant
Nobel prize would be only a minor part of the rewards). None of them
has been able to disprove it, so the only reasonable interpretation
for the reasonable person is that it is true. Mr Valev thinks
otherwise, and there was a great deal of discussion of this during May
to September 1997, during which period Mr Valevs scheme for tangling
the threads was so successful that you will have great difficulty
trying to follow any of the arguments. Suffice it to say that if Mr
Valev really believed what he was saying he would not be writing
nonsense on this news group, he would be building the machine that
would make him the richest man in Bulgaria (or even the world)."

http://web.mst.edu/~gbert/hoaxes.html
Gary Bertrand: "The Troll disappeared from the Chem Ed Discussion List
around 2007, then apparently re-located to the West Coast and
reappeared in 2008 with a new persona. This one repeatedly posted the
tired old quotes about Relativity, and responded repeatedly to his own
postings. Only recently, has he ventured back into the area of
Thermodynamics, where he clearly doesn't understand the postings of
his predecessors. (...) In continuing his silliness from a discussion
above, the Troll refutes the validity of Partial Differential
Equations, while blaming it on the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One
can prove a lot of things with partial differential equations if the
independent variables are not specified."

The same postscientists freeing the world from the stranglehold of the
One True Science:

http://www.beilstein-institut.de/bozen2004/proceedings/CornishBowden/CornishBowden.htm
ATHEL CORNISH-BOWDEN: "The concept of entropy was introduced to
thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for
it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to
"energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same
to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked,
he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to
everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult
concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished
mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own
major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of
entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to
the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is
absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical
equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to
scientists who need the concept for their work."

http://mailer.uwf.edu/listserv/wa.exe?A2=ind0910&L=chemed-l&T=0&O=D&P=31671
Gary Bertrand: "Whether or not the Second Law is useless depends on
how you are stating the Second Law. I said what I consider to be the
Second Law. And yes, I find the statement that the entropy of the
Universe must always increase to be useless."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com