Article View: sci.physics.relativity
Article #1107Re: EXERCISE OF DOUBLETHINK IN EINSTEINIANA
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:33
Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:33
90 lines
6939 bytes
6939 bytes
Einsteiniana's highest priests are not the only postscientists that exercise themselves in doublethink "with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie". Thermodynamicists are by no means worse at that: ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SISTA/markovsky/reports/06-46.pdf "From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)." Pentcho Valev wrote: http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth." Sometimes Einsteiniana's highest priests break the rule "the lie always one leap ahead of the truth" and exercise themselves in doublethink with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie: 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." Einsteiniana's highest priests can only indulge in this luxury when the postscientific decay is well advanced and the difference between truth and lie does not exist anymore. Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com
Technical Details
Message-ID:
<e3092ed8-ea21-4980-a37f-407810a6bff4@r39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com>Path:
arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!r39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mailReferences:
<a60770f8-02d0-4e93-9371-766c404104ea@a26g2000yqn.googlegroups.com> <dd765d73-75ec-4b42-9c2c-b911c0855af0@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <193bcd3e-8d5d-465e-b042-1ec87d1b9fbd@38g2000yqr.googlegroups.com> <9c0435d5-c89a-49be-8f41-78d169586481@t13g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>Show Full Headers
Complete Article Headers
X-Google-Thread: 237b8ad48,63d50491b31f39df X-Google-Attributes: gid237b8ad48,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!r39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique Subject: Re: EXERCISE OF DOUBLETHINK IN EINSTEINIANA Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 01:33:09 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 90 Message-ID: <e3092ed8-ea21-4980-a37f-407810a6bff4@r39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> References: <a60770f8-02d0-4e93-9371-766c404104ea@a26g2000yqn.googlegroups.com> <dd765d73-75ec-4b42-9c2c-b911c0855af0@c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com> <193bcd3e-8d5d-465e-b042-1ec87d1b9fbd@38g2000yqr.googlegroups.com> <9c0435d5-c89a-49be-8f41-78d169586481@t13g2000yqn.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 89.215.201.46 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1252830789 20616 127.0.0.1 (13 Sep 2009 08:33:09 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:33:09 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: r39g2000yqm.googlegroups.com; posting-host=89.215.201.46; posting-account=Lz-LbgoAAABPDavKeW-eYeobwLHD_cvQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)