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Artistic liars in Einsteiniana:

http://thebulletin.us/articles/2010/02/23/news/local_state/doc4b843f64ae2a8298144444.txt
"According to Dr. Ron Mallett, professor of physics at University of
Connecticut, the question isn't whether time travel is possible, but,
instead, when it will happen. (...) Mr. Mallett is no stereotypical
mad scientist who mumbles Einstein's Theory of Relativity and physics
jargon to a roomful of science geeks. More showman than scientist, Mr.
Mallett entertained the crowded room of students, faculty, and staff
with humor, stories, charts, and cartoons - making the complicated
world of physics understandable to the average Joe. With necks craned
and eyes glued to the front of the room, the saying held true: "You
could hear a pin drop" during Mr. Mallet's presentation. (...) After
reading H.G. Wells' novel The Time Machine, Mr. Mallett became focused
on one goal: to build a time machine so he could go back in time to
see his father again and warn him about his impending heart attack.
(...) Based on Einstein's work, Mr. Mallett has developed a time
travel theory using light. In layman's terms - if light can create
gravity, and gravity can affect time, then light can affect time. He
hopes to prove this theory in the lab by using laser lights and
reflective mirrors. In a recent research development, Mr. Mallett is
now getting help - man power as well as funding - from his alma mater.
The Penn State Electro Optic Center located in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania is collaborating with Mr. Mallett to test the first part
of his theory - the gravitational affect of light."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

John Norton teaches this:

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: "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."

But John Norton teaches this as well:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/origins_pathway/index.html
John Norton: "An emission theory fails. So Einstein would have found
himself in an impossible position. The speed of light cannot vary with
the speed of the emitter; presumably it must be a constant, as
Maxwell's theory had urged all along. Yet in addition, Einstein was
convinced that the principle of relativity must obtain in
electrodynamic theory. How can both obtain? They require the speed of
light to be the same for all inertial observers? The footnote already
quoted above points us to Einstein's next step. "The difficulty to be
overcome lay in the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum,
which I first believed had to be given up. Only after years of
[jahrelang] groping did I notice that the difficulty lay in the
arbitrariness of basic kinematical concepts." The key to the puzzle is
the relativity of simultaneity. If Einstein gives up the absoluteness
of simultaneity, then the principle of relativity and the constancy of
the speed of light are compatible after all. The price paid for the
compatibility is that we must allow that space and time behaves rather
differently than Newton told us."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Special_relativity_adding/index.html
John Norton: "This special role for the speed of light sometimes
arouses special wonder. What is so special about light, we may be
drawn to ask, that everything else takes such special note of it? Once
one starts along this path, all sorts of confusions may arise. Is it
that light is used for communication and finding things out? Does
everything somehow respond to how we find things out? Does special
relativity still work in the dark? Well--you can forget all this
mystical mumbo-jumbo, if ever it attracted you. There is nothing
special about light. It's space and time that is special. They have
properties we don't expect. Space and time are such that rapidly
moving objects shrink and their processes slow down. For a long time,
we didn't notice these effects because we did not have a thorough
account of a probe of space and time that moves very fast. That
changed in the nineteenth century when we developed good theories of
light. It is the probe that moves very fast and, for the first time,
begins to reveal to us that space and time are not quite what we
thought."

George Orwell explains John Norton's behaviour:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
of the truth."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners
of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is
a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the
best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest
from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the
understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the
less sane."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com