🚀 go-pugleaf

On Jun 5, 8:52 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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:
> ..................................................

More 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 falsehood of Einstein's 1905 light
postulate:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000218/00/Origins_of_contraction.pdf
Harvey Brown: "The FitzGerald-Lorentz (FL) hypothesis was of course
the result of a somewhat desperate attempt to reconcile the null
result of the 1887 Michelson-Morley (MM) experiment with the hitherto
successful Fresnel-Lorentz theory of a stationary luminiferous ether,
a medium through which the earth is assumed to move with unappreciable
drag. The MM experiment is rightly regarded today as one of the
turning points in physics, and although it is discussed widely in
textbooks, it is remarkable how much confusion still surrounds its
structure and meaning. In order then to understand the FL hypothesis,
it is necessary first to go over some welltrodden ground; sections 2
and 3 below are designed to show what the 1887 null result does and
does not imply. In particular it is shown in section 3 that IN THE
CONTEXT OF A THEORY OF LIGHT IN WHICH THE LIGHT-SPEED IS INDEPENDENT
OF THE SPEED OF THE SOURCE, A CERTAIN MOTION-INDUCED DEFORMATION OF
RIGID BODIES, OF WHICH CONTRACTION IS A SPECIAL CASE, IS REQUIRED."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/01/Minkowski.pdf
"Minkowski space-time: a glorious non-entity"
Harvey R. Brown and Oliver Pooley: "An examination of the status of
length contraction in the context of Einstein’s 1905 treatment of SR
will illustrate the way in which principle theories fail to be
explanatory. Recall that in this derivation the first conclusion drawn
from the two fundamental postulates is the invariance of the speed of
light, that it has the same constant value in all inertial frames.
This gives the ‘k-Lorentz transformations’, the Lorentz
transformations up to a velocity dependent scale factor, k. What has,
in effect, been shown is that if the speed of light as measured with
respect to frame F0 is to be found to be the same value as when
measured with respect to the ‘resting frame’ F, then rods and clocks
at rest in F0 had better contract and dilate (with respect to frame F)
in the coordinated way that is encoded in the k-Lorentz
transformations. One then appeals to the relativity principle again—
the principle entails that these coordinated contractions and
dilations must be exactly the same function of velocity for each
inertial frame, along with the principle of spatial isotropy, in order
to narrow down the deformations to just those encoded in the Lorentz
transformations. What has been shown is that rods and clocks must
behave in quite particular ways in order for the two postulates to be
true together. But this hardly amounts to an explanation of such
behaviour. Rather things go the other way around. It is because rods
and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is consistent with the
relativity principle, that light is measured to have the same speed in
each inertial frame."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/philphys/index.html
John Norton: "Neo-Lorentzians return again. A perennial topic of
debate is whether the physical effects of special relativity (e.g.
length contraction) require some sort of physical explanation that in
turn requires some sort of state of rest such as Lorentz envisaged was
supplied by his ether."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity.
Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe
depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster
when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you
age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground
floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General
relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo
Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the
Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is
right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his
instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and
time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that
it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a
malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of
stars, planets and matter."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "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.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume 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 Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
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. 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
spacetimes 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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com