🚀 go-pugleaf

Not all Einsteinians are humiliated - some, by teaching any absurdity
they can imagine, are in fact the source of humiliation:

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/the-man-who-imagined-wormholes-and-schooled-hawking
"Discover Interview The Man Who Imagined Wormholes and Schooled
Hawking....Most people think of space as nothingness, the blank void
between planets, stars, and galaxies. Kip Thorne, the Feynman
Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, has spent his life
demonstrating otherwise. Space, from his perspective, is the oft-
rumpled fabric of the universe. It bends, stretches, and squeezes as
objects move through it and can even fold in on itself when faced with
the extreme entities known as black holes. He calls this view the
"warped side of the universe." Strictly speaking, Thorne does not
focus on space at all. He thinks instead of space-time, the blending
of three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time described by
Einstein’s general relativity.....String theory is now beginning to
make concrete, observational predictions which will be tested. Claims
that it is just theorists playing mental masturbation are, I think,
nonsense......Oh, I think the biggest surprise to me was the discovery
of dark energy; that most of the mass in the universe is in the form
of this dark energy that extends throughout the universe, and has an
enormous tension like an exceedingly stiff rubber band. That I found
incredible. I and most of my colleagues didn’t believe it until we saw
several completely independent pieces of observational data saying
that that’s the case......In Carl Sagan’s original version of his
novel Contact, he had his heroine traveling through a black hole to a
distant part of the universe, and he asked me for advice. I
immediately told him, “You can’t do that. Black holes can’t be used in
that way,” and I suggested he use a wormhole instead. That got me
interested in the issue of whether or not there really could be
wormholes that you could travel through, and quite quickly I came to
realize that if they did exist, it would not be hard for a very
advanced civilization to use a traversable wormhole to make a time
machine. That forced me to face the issue of self-inconsistent
histories: Could you go back and kill your father before you were
conceived? And that question led me to realize that these kinds of
thought experiments can be a very powerful way to probe the laws of
physics. I had friends who worried about whether I’d gone off the deep
end when they first heard about this, but most became enthusiastic
after they learned the details."

Clever Einsteinians are extremely humiliated by the space-time
schizophreny and the cleverest among them, mainly philosophers
(physicists are still singing "Yes we all believe in relativity,
relativity, relativity" and "Divine Einstein"), even go as far as to
hint at some return to normality:

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://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/index_files/physics%20against%20tense.doc
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/35992/title/It%E2%80%99s_Likely_That_Times_Are_Changing
"A century ago, mathematician Hermann Minkowski famously merged space
with time, establishing a new foundation for physics; today physicists
are rethinking how the two should fit together....Einsteins belief
that time is illusory did not stem from a mere devotion to Newtonian
determinism. After all, he had disregarded Newton before, rewriting
the laws of motion that underpinned deterministic philosophy in the
first place. In so doing, Einstein introduced a new notion of time,
more radical than even he at first realized. In fact, the view of time
that Einstein adopted was first articulated by his onetime math
teacher in a famous lecture delivered one century ago. That lecture,
by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena
for the presentation of physics, a new vision of the nature of reality
redefining the mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space
and Time, and it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now
known as spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists
passion for spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to
whisper about possible grounds for divorce."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com