Article View: sci.physics.relativity
Article #860CATASTROPHE IN PHYSICS
From: Pentcho Valev
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:56
Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:56
146 lines
10043 bytes
10043 bytes
Einsteinians would never give the account of their century-long activity that an "enemy" would give: http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce!....The speed of light is c+v." Still sometimes accounts produced in Einsteiniana are surprisingly similar to Bryan Wallace's one: the catastrophe in physics is often described in an equivalent way and only the ultimate cause, Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, is more or less camouflaged. It seems Einsteiniana's unbearable absurdities are capable of bursting even minds that create and teach them, minds totally alien to any rationality: http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576 John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles." Albert Einstein 1954: "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary physics." John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha, hm, ha ha ha." http://discovermagazine.com/2009/sep/06-discover-interview-roger-penrose-says-physics-is-wrong-string-theory-quantum-mechanics "Roger Penrose Says Physics Is Wrong, From String Theory to Quantum Mechanics" http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6873094/Large-Hadron-Collider-failure-will-leave-science-back-in-the-wilderness.html "Former Harvard professor Shahriar Afshar said that failure to find the particle would bring current scientific theory tumbling down like a house of cards with nothing to replace it. The controversial physicist, whose Afshar experiment has already found a loophole in quantum theory, said that unless the scienitific community starts contemplating a "plan B", failure could lead to "chaos and infighting". He said failure will undermine more than a hundred years of scientific theory..." http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track but until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or both, our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I realized I didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in these heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions to work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the right track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight less. So, I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity." 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." 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 RELATIVITY, 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." Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com
Technical Details
Message-ID:
<02904789-91af-439f-8537-8bfce7e1d093@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>Path:
arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com!not-for-mailShow Full Headers
Complete Article Headers
X-Google-Thread: 237b8ad48,23faf0bb9b4b9dbf,start X-Google-Attributes: gid237b8ad48,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Pentcho Valev <pvalev@yahoo.com> Newsgroups: sci.physics.relativity,sci.physics,fr.sci.physique,fr.sci.astrophysique Subject: CATASTROPHE IN PHYSICS Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:56:20 -0800 (PST) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 146 Message-ID: <02904789-91af-439f-8537-8bfce7e1d093@j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 89.215.201.48 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1261997780 14506 127.0.0.1 (28 Dec 2009 10:56:20 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:56:20 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: j19g2000yqk.googlegroups.com; posting-host=89.215.201.48; posting-account=Lz-LbgoAAABPDavKeW-eYeobwLHD_cvQ User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322),gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe)