🚀 go-pugleaf

Now that "dark energy" is a miracle no longer acceptable in
Einsteiniana, will Lord Martin Rees and Einsteiniana Brotherhood in
general be so kind as to free the world from other miracles which have
destroyed, perhaps irreversibly, human rationality:

http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/blackholes.asp
Lord Martin Rees 2004: "Good science fiction should respect the
fundamental constraints of physical law. In that sprit, it is worth
mentioning that an observer could, in principle, observe the far
future in what, subjectively, seemed quiet a short time. According to
Einstein, the speed of a clock depends on where you are and how you're
moving. If your subjective clock ran very slowly compared to the
cosmic clock, you could travel "fast forward" into the future. This
would happen if you were moving at a velocity close to the speed of
light. Furthermore, strong gravity would distort time; clocks on a
neutron star would run 20 or 30 percent slower. Near a black hole, the
distortions would be even greater. If you were to fall into one, your
future would be finite; you would be ripped apart - spaghettified - by
ever more violent gravitational forces. However, a more prudent
astronaut who managed to get into the closest possible orbit around a
rapidly spinning hole without falling into it would also have
interesting experiences, space-time is so distorted there that his
clock would run arbitrarily slow and he could, therefore, in a
subjectively short period, view an immensely long future timespan in
the external universe."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have
suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big
issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the
mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is
pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) And if
we do arrive at such a unified theory, will it invalidate the efforts
of Newton and Einstein or all of the modern physicists who have tried
to explain the inexplicable? Not a bit of it. Scientists know that
they can never reach finality. Cynics said that Einstein might as well
have gone fishing from 1920 onwards, given the failure of much of his
research." Lord Rees is President of the Royal Society

This seems to be the real beginning of the shock and horror announced
a few years ago:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2003/04/waseinsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is
the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here
stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of
the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few
maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be
constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great
Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of
relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor
Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such
laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now
also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the
rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are
actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book,
Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as
even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is
Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same -
186,000 miles a second in a vacuum. There is growing evidence that
light moved much faster during the early stages of our universe. Rees,
Hawking and others are so concerned at the impact of such ideas that
they recently organised a private conference in Cambridge for more
than 30 leading cosmologists."

I think Einstein should have gone fishing even before 1920 since, as I
explain below, "deductive theories are either absolutely true or
absolutely false". Unlike today's Einsteinians Einstein knew this
quite well:

Albert Einstein: "If the speed of light is the least bit affected by
the speed of the light source, then my whole theory of relativity and
theory of gravity is false."

Philosophers of science have devised strange concepts such as
verisimilitude (proximity to truth) and pessimistic induction (all
theories in the past proved partially false so present and future
theories are partially false as well) which contradict the deductive
method. Consider Einstein's 1905 light postulate:

http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/www/   "...light is
always propagated in empty space with a definite velocity c which is
independent of the state of motion of the emitting body."

By a theory I shall mean the deductive closure of the postulate, that
is, the set of all its consequences deduced validly and in the absence
of false or absurd auxiliary hypotheses. If the light postulate is
true, then all its consequences are true.

If Einstein's 1905 light postulate is false, then its antithesis, the
equation c'=c+v given by Newton's emission theory of light, is true.
Then the respective theory (the set of all consequences of the
antithesis deduced validly and in the absence of false or absurd
auxiliary hypotheses) is absolutely true in the sense that all its
conclusions are true.

Clearly if "theory" is properly defined the concepts of truth content
and falsity content are irrelevant. Deductive theories are either
absolutely true or absolutely false.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com