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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."

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