🚀 go-pugleaf

On Mar 21, 9:04 am, Pentcho Valev <pva...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Clever Einsteinians (mainly philosophers) clearly see the absurdity
> and even danger (for Einsteiniana of course) involved in Einstein's
> famous "relativity of simultaneity" and are desperately trying to get
> rid of the concept, in incredibly convoluted ways:
>
> http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00002760/01/ReaTimePTS.pdf
> Brian Pitts: "Relativistic physics causes a difficulty for A-theorist
> in that the lack of absolute simultaneity in STR and GTR casts doubt
> on the objectivity of temporal becoming. I have demonstrated the
> possibility of deriving Einstein's equations using a modified
> Lagrangian density L from GTR, where the new L contained absolute
> simultaneity....The relativistic twin paradox is the context for one
> argument sketch. If one twin stays home while the other travels, the
> travelling twin will be younger upon his return than the homebody
> sibling. If the travelling twin merely takes an airplane around the
> world, this age difference will be negligible and well within the
> modest precision of common-sense judgments of presentness, as Huggett
> notes. But if the travelling twin takes a rocket into distant space
> and then returns, he might be years younger than his homebody sibling.
> Let us assume that each twin has his own local flow of time and that
> it is given by his relativistic proper time. Let the traveller leave
> at age 30, and return at age 35 to meet his 40-year-old twin sister.
> Though the twins' presents matched adequately before the traveller
> left, after his return their presents disagree by five years even when
> they embrace. It would be most peculiar if, upon the traveller's
> return, the two twins' consciousnesses are years apart when their
> bodies embrace; then each would encounter not his real twin, but an
> unconscious zombie (in basically the sense of David Chalmers
> (Chalmers, 1996)). Such a result is, I take it, a reductio ad
> absurdum. To be sure, the space travelling twin story is merely a
> thought experiment, unlike the airplane case. But this story (apart
> from the talk of presents) is the conventional wisdom about the twin
> paradox in relativity. If this conventional wisdom is accepted, then
> giving each person his own local flow, and having it correspond to
> relativistic proper
> time, leads to the absurdity of zombies.....Whether a theist or not,
> one also presumably needs to ground intersubjective simultaneity in
> the context of cosmic twin paradox scenarios, and a global present
> appears to be the one obvious solution. It therefore seems plausible,
> though not absolutely certain, that the experience of temporal
> passage, etc., that one should infer a global present, not merely
> local presents. It seems appropriate, then, to want absolute
> simultaneity to appear in the laws of physics."
>
> 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 Theory, 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."
>
> 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."

More desperate attempts to get rid of Einstein's schizophrenic
"relativity of simultaneity". Note that schizophreny in Einstein's
world is contagious and critics of Einsteiniana are not exempt from
it. If the proponent claims that the greenness of the crocodile
exceeds its length, any counterargument advanced by the critic would
be schizophrenic (that was one of the reasons why Herbert Dingle
failed to refute the idiotic twin paradox):

http://www.bristol.ac.uk/philosophy/current/undergrad/studyguide/physics.html
"Another important issue in contemporary space-time philosophy
concerns the nature of simultaneity. It was well known since
Einstein’s work that simultaneity is not absolute in the special
theory of relativity. Events that are simultaneous in one frame of
reference may not be so in another. Adolf Grünbaum further argued,
following Reichenbach, that the definition of simultaneity in special
relativity is conventional. This is because the one-way speed of light
is not fixed by the theory, only the two-way (or ‘return’) speed is.
Winnie derived space-time transformations more general still than the
Lorentz transformations of relativity theory. But is simultaneity
conventional also in the General Theory of Relativity?"

> Some day the world will realize in horror that the problem has always
> had a solution much simpler than the solutions clever Einsteinians
> (mainly philosophers) offer:
>
> http://blog.oup.com/2009/03/relativity/
> The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science: "In the thought
> experiment Einstein often described, an observer on an embankment sees
> a light flash from the middle of a passing railroad carriage equipped
> with a mirror at either end. According to relativity, an observer
> seated at the center of the car would see the light returned from the
> mirrors simultaneously. But the observer on the embankment would see
> the flash from the forward mirror after that from the rear: the light
> has farther to go to meet and return from the forward than from the
> rear mirror, and the speed of light by hypothesis is the same in both
> directions. On a ballistic theory of light, the return flashes occur
> simultaneously for both parties: to the traveling observer, the light
> has the same speed in both directions; to the stationary one, the
> speed in the forward direction exceeds that in the opposite direction
> by twice the speed of the carriage."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com