🚀 go-pugleaf

It is no longer "the beginning of the end"; rather, we are nearing
"the end of the end":

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/alarm-sounded-over-demise-of-physics-teaching-1888528.html
Alarm sounded over demise of physics teaching
By Richard Garner, Education Editor
"Hundreds of state secondary schools are failing to enter a single
pupil for A-level physics, MPs were told today. Professor Peter Main,
director of education and science at the Institute of Physics, said
the figure was as high as 500. "This is a very, very serious problem,"
he added."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Open Letter to: Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society

Copy to: Professor John Pethica, Physical Secretary and Vice-
President, Professor Sir Michael Berry, Sir Peter Williams CBE,
Treasurer and Vice-President, Professor Lorna Casselton, Foreign
Secretary and Vice-President

Dear Dr. Rees,

Classical thermodynamics has been dead for a long time so when in 2001
a respected scientist, Jos Uffink, declared that a version of the
second law of thermodynamics ("Entropy always increases") is a RED
HERRING, this sounded like an epitaph officially putting an end to any
further discussion:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "The historian of science and mathematician Truesdell made
a detailed study of the historical development of thermodynamics in
the period 1822-1854. He characterises the theory, even in its present
state, as 'a dismal swamp of obscurity' and 'a prime example to show
that physicists are not exempt from the madness of crowds'. He is
outright cynical about the respect with which nonmathematicians treat
the Second Law: "Clausius verbal statement of the second law makes no
sense [. . . ]. All that remains is a Mosaic prohibition; a century of
philosophers and journalists have acclaimed this commandment; a
century of mathematicians have shuddered and averted their eyes from
the unclean. Seven times in the past thirty years have I tried to
follow the argument Clausius offers [. . . ] and seven times has it
blanked and gravelled me. [. . . ] I cannot explain what I cannot
understand." From this anthology it emerges that although many
prominent physicists are firmly convinced of, and express admiration
for the Second Law, there are also serious complaints, especially from
mathematicians, about a lack of clarity and rigour in its formulation.
At the very least one can say that the Second Law suffers from an
image problem: its alleged eminence and venerability is not perceived
by everyone who has been exposed to it. What is it that makes this
physical law so obstreperous that every attempt at a clear formulation
seems to have failed? Is it just the usual sloppiness of physicists?
Or is there a deeper problem? And what exactly is the connection with
the arrow of time and irreversibility? Could it be that this is also
just based on bluff? Perhaps readers will shrug their shoulders over
these questions. Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better
understanding of the problem we should turn to more recent,
statistical theories. But even then the questions we are about to
study have more than a purely historical importance. The problem of
reproducing the Second Law, perhaps in an adapted version, remains one
of the toughest, and controversial problems in statistical
physics.....This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."

Einstein's relativity is younger than thermodynamics so its own
epitaph came only recently:

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."

The problem is that, despite Thomas Kuhn's revolutionary dreams, there
is no tumultuous "paradigm change"; rather, false theories just
silently die, burying with themselves an essential part of human
culture:

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SISTA/markovsky/reports/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As
the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are
"riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes
that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an
elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this
confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6
of his book "The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics" 1822-1854
(Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of
obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the
writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and
Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the
(thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational
Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

http://www.renewamerica.us/columns/hutchison/080616
"Like bronze idols that are hollow inside, Einstein built a cluster of
"Potemkin villages," which are false fronts with nothing behind them.
Grigori Potemkin (17391791) was a general-field marshal, Russian
statesman, and favorite of Empress Catherine the Great. He is alleged
to have built facades of non-existent villages along desolate
stretches of the Dnieper River to impress Catherine as she sailed to
the Crimea in 1787. Actors posing as happy peasants stood in front of
these pretty stage sets and waved to the pleased Empress. This
incident reminds me of the story of Eleanor Roosevelt's Moscow tour
guide who showed her the living quarters of communist party bosses and
claimed that these were the apartments of the average Russian worker.
The incredibly gullible first lady was delighted. Like Catherine, the
sentimental Eleanor was prone to wishful thinking and was easily
deceived. What has all this to do with Einstein? The science
establishment has a powerful romantic desire to believe in Einstein.
Therefore, they are not only fooled by Einstein's tricks, they are
prepared to defend his Potemkin villages."

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock
Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages
57-78
"The gatekeepers of professional physics in the universities and
research institutes are disinclined to support or employ anyone who
raises problems over the elementary inconsistencies of relativity. A
winnowing out process has made it very difficult for critics of
Einstein to achieve or maintain professional status. Relativists are
then able to use the argument of authority to discredit these critics.
Were relativists to admit that Einstein may have made a series of
elementary logical errors, they would be faced with the embarrassing
question of why this had not been noticed earlier. Under these
circumstances the marginalisation of antirelativists, unjustified on
scientific grounds, is eminently justifiable on grounds of
realpolitik. Supporters of relativity theory have protected both the
theory and their own reputations by shutting their opponents out of
professional discourse."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/may/22/highereducation.education
Harry Kroto: "The wrecking of British science....The scientific method
is based on what I prefer to call the inquiring mindset. It includes
all areas of human thoughtful activity that categorically eschew
"belief", the enemy of rationality. This mindset is a nebulous mixture
of doubt, questioning, observation, experiment and, above all,
curiosity, which small children possess in spades. I would argue that
it is the most important, intrinsically human quality we possess, and
it is responsible for the creation of the modern, enlightened portion
of the world that some of us are fortunate to inhabit. Curiously, for
the majority of our youth, the educational system magically causes
this capacity to disappear by adolescence.....Do I think there is any
hope for UK? I am really not sure."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/22/schools.g2
"We are nearing the end of the "World Year of Physics", otherwise
known as Einstein Year, as it is the centenary of his annus mirabilis
in which he made three incredible breakthroughs, including special
relativity. In fact, it was 100 years ago yesterday that he published
the most famous equation in the history of physics: E=mc2. But instead
of celebrating, physicists are in mourning after a report showed a
dramatic decline in the number of pupils studying physics at school.
The number taking A-level physics has dropped by 38% over the past 15
years, a catastrophic meltdown that is set to continue over the next
few years. The report warns that a shortage of physics teachers and a
lack of interest from pupils could mean the end of physics in state
schools. Thereafter, physics would be restricted to only those
students who could afford to go to posh schools. Britain was the home
of Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday and Paul Dirac, and Brits made world-
class contributions to understanding gravity, quantum physics and
electromagnetism - and yet the British physicist is now facing
extinction. But so what? Physicists are not as cuddly as pandas, so
WHO CARES IF WE DISAPPEAR?"

Dr. Rees, the Royal Society bestowed Einstein on humankind in 1919;
now it is time for redemption. I am sure you are considering some kind
of redemption:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/6057362/Give-scientists-the-freedom-to-be-wrong.html
Martin Rees: "Over the past week, two stories in the press have
suggested that scientists have been very wrong about some very big
issues. First, a new paper seemed to suggest that dark energy the
mysterious force that makes up three quarters of the universe, and is
pushing the galaxies further apart might not even exist. (...) Cynics
said that Einstein might as well have gone fishing from 1920 onwards,
given the failure of much of his research." Lord Rees is President of
the Royal Society

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3338512/Think-big-like-Einstein.html
Martin Rees: "Cynics have said that Einstein might as well have gone
fishing from 1920 onwards. Although there's something rather noble
about the way he persevered in his attempts to reach far beyond his
grasp, in some respects THE EINSTEIN CULT SENDS THE WRONG SIGNAL."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com