🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 31, 6:56 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/
> MINKOWSKI SPACE-TIME: A GLORIOUS NON-ENTITY
> Harvey Brown and Oliver Pooley
> "It is argued that Minkowski space-time cannot serve as the deep
> structure within a "constructive" version of the special theory of
> relativity, contrary to widespread opinion in the philosophical
> community."
>
> 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."
>
> http://www.routledge-philosophy.com/books/Einstein-Relativity-and-Abs...
> "Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
> original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
> physicists who have come together to reassess the contemporary
> paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
> since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
> and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativity's
> relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics,
> and physics."
>
> http://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/
> "On Finding 'Real' Time in Quantum Mechanics" (draft) Absolute
> Simultaneity. (Eds) W.L. Craig and Q. Smith. NY: OxfordUniversity
> Press, 2007.
> 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.1 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
> spacetime's 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.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/975547d7-2d00-433a-b7e3-4a...
> John Stachel: "It is not so well known that there was "another
> Einstein," who from 1916 on was skeptical about the continuum as a
> foundational element in physics..." Albert Einstein: "I consider it
> entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept,
> that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole
> castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also
> nothing of the rest of contemporary physics."
>
> http://ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/publication/lna/detail/lna40/pgs/...
> Jean Eisenstaedt: "Il n'y a alors aucune raison theorique a ce que la
> vitesse de la lumiere ne depende pas de la vitesse de sa source ainsi
> que de celle de l'observateur terrestre ; plus clairement encore, il
> n'y a pas de raison, dans le cadre de la logique des Principia de
> Newton, pour que la lumiere se comporte autrement - quant a sa
> trajectoire - qu'une particule materielle. Il n'y a pas non plus de
> raison pour que la lumiere ne soit pas sensible a la gravitation.
> Bref, pourquoi ne pas appliquer a la lumiere toute la theorie
> newtonienne ? C'est en fait ce que font plusieurs astronomes,
> opticiens, philosophes de la nature a la fin du XVIIIeme siecle. Les
> resultats sont etonnants... et aujourd'hui nouveaux."
>
> Translation from French: "Therefore there is no theoretical reason why
> the speed of light should not depend on the speed of the source and
> the speed of the terrestrial observer as well; even more clearly,
> there is no reason, in the framework of the logic of Newton's
> Principia, why light should behave, as far as its trajectory is
> concerned, differently from a material particle. Neither is there any
> reason why light should not be sensible to gravitation. Briefly, why
> don't we apply the whole Newtonian theory to light? In fact, that is
> what many astronomers, opticians, philosophers of nature did by the
> end of 18th century. The results are surprising....and new nowadays."
>
> Pentcho Valev
> pva...@yahoo.com

xxein:  Where was John Baez?

It doesn't matter anyway.  The physic is not his either.