🚀 go-pugleaf

On Feb 16, 2:25 pm, John Kennaugh <J...@notworking.freeserve.co.uk>
wrote in sci.physics.relativity:
> "Until the box is opened Schrodingers cat is both alive and dead"
>
> To understand why incredibly silly ideas are accepted in physics by
> intelligent people one needs to first understand the human condition.
> The human species has a very strong sheep like instinct where if enough
> people believe something everyone assumes it must be OK. As an example
> most evil in the world is not caused by evil people but by the people
> who follow them and those who accept what is happening because everyone
> else does.
>
>   "We shall have to repent, not for the evil deeds of the wicked, but for
> the silence of the good." - Martin Luther King
>
> We have evolved as pack animals and have a natural instinct to find a
> leader to follow and to match our behaviour with that of the pack (or
> tribe) we identify with. To be driven from the pack is, in evolutionary
> terms, a personal disaster. One can see how this manifests itself in the
> power of peer pressure at a young age.
>
> Adults are no more sophisticated. One can see the same desire to conform
> fuelling the economy in the form of 'fashion'. The apparently
> uncontrollable desire by intelligent people to get rid of a perfectly
> functional object just because it is no longer a fashionable colour or
> shape is an uncontrollable desire to be at one with the 'tribe'. It
> makes no logical sense.
>
> We have just seen a prime example in banking. Everyone else was lending
> money to people who may not be able to pay it back so it must be OK. I
> haven't had a bonus in my life and the salaries these people have are
> beyond my wildest dreams but I realised that property prices depend not
> on how much money an individual has, but on how much he can borrow. If
> there is a sensible fixed ratio between the amount you earn and the
> amount you can borrow then there is a sensible ceiling on house prices
> which cannot rise unless salaries rise. Financial institutions come up
> with ingenious ways of breaking the link with salary so that people
> could borrow more, house prices rose beyond the sensible ceiling and it
> was obvious to me that it would end in tears. I don't have
> qualifications in banking but I was certain that house prices would
> crash. Unfortunately I didn't realise the crass stupidity was a world
> wide phenomena and that it would have a devastating effect on my pension
> fund :o(.
>
> I don't suppose a top physicist is anymore intelligent than a top
> financier (although in all probability gets paid a great deal less).
> Modern physics has become just as silly but everyone inside of physics
> adds to the false sense of unity that says it must be OK.
>
> "The great majority of physical scientists, including practically all
> who conduct experiments in physics and are known to the world as
> scientific leaders confess, when faced with an irreconcilable criticism
> of Special Relativity, that they regard it as nonsense. They accept the
> theory because a few mathematical specialists in the subject say they
> should do so, or because they do not understand it at all but accept the
> theory as established by others and therefore a safe framework for their
> experiments."  Report on Dingle's criticism of Physics.

Special relativity regarded as nonsense:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its
epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be
questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."

Joao Magueijo, PLUS VITE QUE LA LUMIERE, Dunod, 2003, pp. 298-299:
"La racine du mal etait clairement la relativite restreinte. Tous ces
paradoxes resultaient d'effets bien connus comme la contraction des
longueurs, la dilatation du temps, ou E=mc^2, tous des predictions
directes de la relativite restreinte. (...) La consequence en etait
inevitable: pour edifier une theorie coherente de la gravite
quantique, quelle qu'elle soit, nous [Joao Magueijo et Lee Smolin]
devions commencer par abandonner la relativite restreinte. (...) Mais,
comme nous l'avons vu, celle-ci repose sur deux principes
independants. Le premier est la relativite du mouvement, le second la
constance de la vitesse de la lumiere. Une des solutions possibles a
notre probleme pouvait etre d'abandonner la relativite du mouvement.
(...) C'est une possibilite bien sur, mais nous avons choisi
l'alternative evidente: preserver la relativite du mouvement, mais
admettre qu'a de tres hautes energies, la vitesse de la lumiere ne
soit plus constante."

http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_4.3/smolin.htm
Lee Smolin: "Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered
Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his
own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein's
insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative
motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same,
no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences
of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-
legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are
relative, not absolute. SPECIAL RELATIVITY WAS THE RESULT OF 10 YEARS
OF INTELLECTUAL STRUGGLE, YET EINSTEIN HAD CONVINCED HIMSELF IT WAS
WRONG WITHIN TWO YEARS OF PUBLISHING IT."

http://www.fqxi.org/data/articles/Searching_for_the_Golden_Spike.pdf
"Loop quantum gravity also makes the heretical prediction that the
speed of light depends on its frequency. That prediction violates
special relativity, Einstein's rule that light in a vacuum travels at
a constant speed for all observers..."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E7D8143FF932A05751C1A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
light.''

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com