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More (unlimited) madness in Einsteiniana:

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/09/is-time-slowly-disappearin.html
"Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding
stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate.
They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the
universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-
gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to
call this unidentified force "dark energy". However, to this day no
one actually knows what dark energy is, or where it comes from.
Professor Jose Senovilla, and his colleagues at the University of the
Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed a mind-bending
alternative. They propose that there is no such thing as dark energy
at all, and we’re looking at things backwards. Senovilla proposes that
we have been fooled into thinking the expansion of the universe is
accelerating, when in reality, time itself is slowing down. (...)
Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the
universe using the so-called "red shift" technique. This technique
relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in
color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of
certain types that provide a sort of benchmark. However, the accuracy
of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout
the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory,
our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space
dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by
cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were
accelerating."

http://www.montgomerynews.com/articles/2010/01/29/glenside_news_globe_times_chronicle/news/doc4b635a6fb7f4a650056500.txt
"Dr. Ronald Mallett, physics professor at the University of
Connecticut and author of the book, "Time Traveler: A Scientist's
Personal Mission to Make Time Travel a Reality," speaks to Penn State
Abington student Andrew Menezes after Mallett's lecture on time travel
Thursday at the Abington campus. (...) "What I teach students is the
importance of realizing that the possibility of time travel rests on
solid physics based on the work of [Albert] Einstein," said Mallett, a
theoretical physics professor at the University of Connecticut, in an
interview before the lecture. "Einstein is the basis of my work, and
that is extremely important. His special theory of relativity is now
about 105 years old. The thing is, right in that theory is the
possibility of time travel into the future." What has become a
lifelong journey to prove the real possibility of time travel actually
started when Mallett was a boy after the devastating and sudden death
of his father, Boyd, at age 33. It was then that he got the idea to
build a time machine so that he could go back, change history by
warning his father to improve his lifestyle and thus prevent the fatal
heart attack. "He was the center of my life. His death completely
turned my life inside out," said Mallett."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Unlimited madness in Einsteiniana:

http://www.trinitynews.ie/index.php/features/features/671-could-it-be-that-the-large-hadron-collider-is-being-clock-blocked
"The alternative explanation for the series of unfortunate events that
have befallen the LHC is hardly less bizarre. Two otherwise respected
physicists are now claiming that the much hypothesized Higgs Boson
particle might have a "backward causation" effect to stop itself being
discovered. In other words, the particle does not wish to be created,
or its creation would have such cataclysmic results that the actual
universe itself does not wish for it to be created. Thus, at the
moment that it is created in the future, forces travel back in time to
sabotage the collider before it gets the chance to be made. In pop
culture terms, this is basically what happens in Back to the Future,
when Marty McFly travels back in time and accidentally erases his
future self by stopping his parents from falling in love. (...) The
only problem is that the future has cursed the project. The hypothesis
seems so bizarre as to be laughable, but for the fact that it is
supported by two leading physicists, Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels
Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa
Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan. They have
postulated this idea over the last two years, publishing it in a
series of scientific papers with titles such as "Test of Effect From
Future in Large Hadron Collider: a Proposal". (...) But perhaps we
should not mock these theories. After all, Einstein himself wrote,
"for those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past,
present and future is only an illusion"."

In Einsteiniana, time is an illusion because Divine Albert said so
(and because this follows from Einstein's 1905 false light postulate).
Yet clever Einsteinians make career and money by teaching that time is
not an illusion:

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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com