🚀 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 in
> wavelength, 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."

Einsteinians exercising themselves in crimestop by presenting
themselves with the proposition: The Michelson-Morley experiment
"showed that the speed of light is always the same (now known to be
186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary observers as well as
moving ones":

http://www.newsweek.com/id/204892
"On July 22 the Einstein Papers Project, located at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will release the 12th volume of
letters written or received by Albert Einstein - 791 of them - plus
transcripts of several notable lectures and interviews the physicist
gave, covering the year 1921. It was a momentous 12 months. You might
think there are no new revelations to be made about him, but for
Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one key
question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that
discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the
observer's speed or direction of motion - an idea that forms the core
of special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid
out the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper? Called the
Michelson-Morley experiment, it disproved the existence of the ether,
a substance once thought to carry light waves and form an absolute
reference frame for space. In their namesake experiment, Albert
Michelson (a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1907) and Edward
Morley (a chemist) showed that the speed of light is always the same
(now known to be 186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary
observers as well as moving ones."

However stupidity is "as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult
to attain". The same Einsteinians (more precisely, John Norton is an
Editor of the Einstein Papers Project) attaining utmost intelligence:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as
evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost
universally use it as support for the light postulate of special
relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE
WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT
POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had
suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one,
the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding
train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the
speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object
emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume
that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to
Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null
result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to
contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as
we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null
result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian
ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more
or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com