🚀 go-pugleaf

Nobody is defending dead relativity anymore. Einsteinians are
organizing a conference:

http://www.phil-inst.hu/~szekely/PIRT_BUDAPEST/

but cannot find famous invited speakers (see "Main speakers") and are
forced to extend deadline:

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.philos-l/browse_frm/thread/bc465b3e33922a2e?

Where are famous Einsteinians now? They are all leaving the sinking
ship in panic:

http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but
until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both,
our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I realized I
didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in these
heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions to
work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the right
track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight less. So,
I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."

http://www.cuindependent.com/news/2009/apr/17/brian-greene-comes-cu/
"The CU community is one step closer to understanding complex
scientific theories after a visit from Brian Green, a well-known
physicist. Greene, a physicist and author of "The Elegant Universe,"
was warmly greeted by a packed auditorium at Macky on Wednesday.
Opening with gracious statements that reflected his humor and
humility, Greene was well received by the Boulder community and the
student body. (...) EINSTEIN'S THEORY WAS BRILLIANT YET FLAWED, for it
contradicted another theory. "It solved one problem only to open a
whole 'nother can of worms," Greene said."

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