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http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
of the truth."

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june232009/einstein_lessons_dj_6-22-09.php
"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious" - Albert
Einstein

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that
the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The
idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our
best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this
passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions
are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an
illusion....Following from the work of Einstein, Minkowski and many
more, physics has given a wonderfully powerful conception of space and
time. Relativity theory, in its most perspicacious form, melds space
and time together to form a four-dimensional spacetime. The study of
motion in space and and all other processes that unfold in them merely
reduce to the study of an odd sort of geometry that prevails in
spacetime. In many ways, time turns out to be just like space. In this
spacetime geometry, there are differences between space and time. But
a difference that somehow captures the passage of time is not to be
found. There is no passage of time. There are temporal orderings. We
can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and
everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those
stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments
to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of
"now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it
would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture
one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works
with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a
happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did
bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news
of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such
rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a
comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it
as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one.
We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to
preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured
all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the
stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/07/01/world-science-festival-time-since-einstein/
"There are many theoretical physicists who think the flow of time is
an illusion," he says. "And I think that's a great mistake…according
to quantum physics you don't know the outcome of events until they
happen. We know what happened in the past, there's a time called the
present when things are happening, and there's a time in the future
which is not yet determined. That's my view on it, which is not a very
widely supported one." A professor emeritus of applied mathematics at
the University of Capetown, Ellis is the co-author with Stephen
Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time, and investigates
the physical foundations of the flow of time."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com