🚀 go-pugleaf

Humiliated Einsteinians don't believe that a long train can be short
(if trapped inside a short tunnel), that a 80m long pole can be 40m
long (if trapped inside a 40m long barn), and that a bug can be both
dead and alive, but they are forced to teach all those absurd
corollaries of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate (for career and
money):

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

http://www.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....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."

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html

Sometimes the humiliation is unbearable and Harvey Brown, the
President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, gets
even more confused: it seems to him that the absurdities are no more
corollaries of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate; rather,
Einstein's 1905 false light postulate is a corollary of the
absurdities:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/01/Minkowski.pdf
Harvey R. Brown and Oliver Pooley: "One then appeals to the relativity
principle again—the principle entails that these coordinated
contractions and dilations must be exactly the same function of
velocity for each inertial frame, along with the principle of spatial
isotropy, in order to narrow down the deformations to just those
encoded in the Lorentz transformations. What has been shown is that
rods and clocks must behave in quite particular ways in order for the
two postulates to be true together. But this hardly amounts to an
explanation of such behaviour. Rather things go the other way around.
It is because rods and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is
consistent with the relativity principle, that light is measured to
have the same speed in each inertial frame."

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603
"Harvey Brown thinks that most philosophers are confused about
relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the
relativistic effects of length contraction and time
dilation.....According to (what Brown alleges is) the dominant view
among substantivalists, the geometrical structure of Minkowski
spacetime plays some role in explaining why moving rods shrink and why
moving clocks run slow. Brown rejects this view. He asserts, instead,
that in order to explain why moving rods shrink we must appeal to the
dynamical laws governing the forces that hold the parts of the rod
together. The geometry of Minkowski spacetime plays no role in this
explanation.....He thinks that good answers to these questions say
something about the way in which the forces holding the parts of the
rod together depend on velocity of the rod. Only that is a story of
what causes the particles to get closer together, and so what causes
the rod to shrink."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com