🚀 go-pugleaf

The protective belt would not be protective if one too often referred
to it as "ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses". In the end postscientists come
to believe that the hypotheses are incontestable facts - e.g. "time
dilation and length contraction confirmed by cosmic muon experiments",
"gravitational time dilation confirmed by the Pound-Rebka experiment"
etc. The "confirmations" are easy to disprove but in the era of
Postscientism this does not matter - nobody cares about any proof or
disproof.

In 1850, when Postscientism was born, the protective belt had to be
built in a much more subtle way. Clausius' ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis
can be formulated in the following way:

"The premise in the Carnot theorem is false but the conclusion is
true. If the premise in an argument is false but the conclusion is so
precious as to promise career and money for generations of scientists,
the conclusion can be made true by rededucing it from another premise,
true this time."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://bertie.ccsu.edu/~dsb/naturesci/PhilSci/Lakatos.html
"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its
"hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set
out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding
defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses.
(...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the
"ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective
belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core
assumptions..."

http://www.physics.queensu.ca/~phys242/Section2_3.pdf
"Because the GTs [Galilean transformations] are clearly not consistent
with Einstein's two postulates, we are going to have to develop a new
set of transformations: the Lorentz transformations."

Historically the protective belt (Lorentz transformations) was created
before the hard core (Divine Albert's 1905 postulates). Without the
protective belt, Divine Albert's postulates (more precisely, his light
postulate) would have been immediately refuted by the Michelson-Morley
experiment:

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."

Lakatos' protective belt philosophy reflects the following dilemma.
The null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment confirms the
equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light and refutes
Einstein's 1905 light postulate (c'=c). In the absence of ad hoc
auxiliary hypotheses this is a true statement so one can accept it and
leave it at that. If, however, one wants the null result of the
Michelson-Morley experiment to confirm c'=c and refute c'=c+v, one has
to advance ad hoc auxiliary hypotheses (length contraction, time
dilation). That is, one has to procrusteanize the reality so that a
long train can be trapped inside a short tunnel or a 80m long pole
inside a 40m long barn. Also, in the procrusteanized reality a bug can
be both dead and alive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSRIyDfo_mY&mode=related&search

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."

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
pvalev@yahoo.com