🚀 go-pugleaf

> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
>
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-22.html#twentytwo
> George Orwell: "He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
> presented himself with propositions - "the Party says the earth is
> flat", "the party says that ice is heavier than water" - and trained
> himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
> contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
> reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
> instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
> his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
> an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
> the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
> was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
>
> George Orwell's text modified so as to describe a physics student's
> self-education:
>
> "He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself
> with propositions - "Einsteiniana says that, when the observer starts
> moving towards the light source, the Doppler effect is due to shift inwavelength, not to shift in the speed of light", "Einsteiniana says
> that, in accordance with Einstein's 1905 light postulate, a 80m long
> pole can safely be trapped inside a 40m long barn" - and trained
> himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
> contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
> reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
> instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
> his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
> an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
> the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
> was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."

John Norton, the cleverest Einsteinian, exercising himself in and
teaching crimestop. The TEXT IN CAPITALS is an obvious stupidity but
John Norton and his students sincerely believe in it:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/big_bang/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer
were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now
pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would
mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to
have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."

Without the "protective stupidity" John Norton would have to explain
that it is the speed of light that varies with the frequency when the
observer starts hurrying towards the source of light.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com