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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."

Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the
end camouflages the real problem:

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
"Einstein postulated, first, that the laws of physics don't prefer one
reference frame over another, as long as each is moving at a constant
velocity. Second, he said that c, the speed of light, will appear
exactly the same to every observer, in every frame of reference. A
century later, that second postulate still defies common sense. It
says that if you're driving down the highway at a quarter the speed of
light, you'll still see the photons from your headlights racing ahead
of you at light speed--not three-quarters light speed. If I'm coming
from the opposite direction at half light speed, I'll still see your
photons approaching at c--not 1.5 times c. Since speed is just space
divided by time, and we both agree about the speed of light, we can't
possibly agree about space and time. You say my clock is too slow and
my yardstick has shrunk (not to mention my whole car). Maddeningly, I
say the same about you. The one thing we agree on, aside from c
itself, is the distance covered by the photons in the weird new
reference frame of four-dimensional spacetime. It might be a relief to
learn that physicists were talking about chucking this deeply strange
theory. But just as Einstein made only minute corrections to Newton in
everyday life--to really feel the effects of special relativity, you
have to move at a large fraction of light speed--the proposed changes
to relativity would have only subtle, hard-to-detect effects. Yet the
stakes are big: the quest for a single theory that would unite general
relativity, Einstein's later theory describing gravity, with quantum
mechanics, the theory describing the forces inside the atom.
Physicists are taking many paths to this "quantum gravity" grail, but
in all of them spacetime itself, instead of being continuous, is made
of quantum bits. "It's like the difference between sand and water,"
says Giovanni Amelino-Camelia of La Sapienza University in Rome--
except that the spacetime grains could be around a hundred billion
billionth the size of an atomic nucleus. At this "Planck length,"
named after the father of quantum physics, gravity would no longer be
described by general relativity but by the new theory."

http://www.spacetimecenter.org/conferences/2008/Henry.pdf
Teaching Special Relativity: Minkowski trumps Einstein
Richard Conn Henry
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
The Johns Hopkins University
"Students find physics difficult - I am thinking of first-year
undergraduate university physics majors. I found it difficult myself,
and it took me almost 40 years of teaching physics to fully understand
the reasons for the perceived "difficulty." Why do students who find
mathematics easy to understand, find physics difficult to
understand?....How grotesquely badly we teach special relativity
encapsulates the practical problem of teaching physics to the freshman
physics major. I have never found a single freshman physics textbook
that teaches Minkowski spacetime; I have never found a single text on
General Relativity that mentions "Einstein's two
postulates.".....There is no doubt that, historically, Albert
Einstein, in 1905, did introduce two postulates (and also, that it is
he who discovered special relativity). But the second of these
postulates (the one concerning the constancy of c, just in case Reese
has confused you!) did not survive the year. In September of 1905
Einstein published a development from relativitythe discovery of the
implication that E = mc2 , and in this new paper he mentions a single
postulate only. But the paper contains a sweet footnote: "The
principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is of course
contained in Maxwell's equations." How I love that "of course!"
Einstein was human!......Antique postulates that are not of anything
but historical interest to genuine physicists are presented to
students as "Special Relativity.".....I feel that the time has come to
relegate the "two postulates" to the dustbin of history, and to teach
special relativity to undergraduates (or indeed, to middle school
students) the Minkowski way."

http://www.worldscibooks.com/chemistry/etextbook/6469/6469_preface.pdf
Arieh Ben-Naim: "I believe that the time is ripe to acknowledge that
the term entropy, as originally coined by Clausius, is an unfortunate
choice. Moreover, it is also a misleading term both in its meaning in
ancient and in contemporary Greek. On this matter, I cannot do any
better than Leon Cooper (1968). Cooper cites the original passage from
Clausius: in choosing the word "Entropy," Clausius wrote: "I prefer
going to the ancient languages for the names of important scientific
quantities, so that they mean the same thing in all living tongues. I
propose, accordingly, to call S the entropy of a body, after the Greek
word "transformation." I have designedly coined the word entropy to be
similar to energy, for these two quantities are so analogous in their
physical significance, that an analogy of denominations seems to be
helpful." Right after quoting Clausius' explanation on his reasons for
the choice of the word "Entropy," Cooper commented: "By doing this,
rather than extracting a name from the body of the current language
(say: lost heat), he succeeded in coining a word that meant the same
thing to everybody: nothing." I fully agree with Coopers comment;
however, I have two additional comments, and contrary to Cooper, I
venture into taking the inevitable conclusion: First, I agree that
"entropy means the same thing to everybody: nothing." But more than
that, entropy is also a misleading term....Finally, I believe that the
time has come to reach the inevitable conclusion that “entropy” is a
misnomer and should be replaced by either missing information or
uncertainty."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com