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Deductive science (e.g. relativity or thermodynamics) has a
fundamental property: any anomalous result suggests that either an
axiom is false or an argument is invalid. Therefore, instead of
proclaiming experimental verification as the only sanitary procedure
in theoretical science, a procedure that unavoidably creates
camouflage in the end, philosophers of science should have coined the
simple slogan:

"Anomaly? Identify the false axiom or the invalid argument!"

Nowadays clever philosophers implicitly reject the experimental
falsification but, in conformity with the "ethics" of Postscientism,
can only offer vague or misleading (insofar as looking for a false
axiom or an invalid argument is concerned) hints instead:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "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Thermodynamics is obsolete; for a better understanding of the problem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."

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."

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/passage/index.html
John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "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 wrote:

Karl Popper's ethical problems:

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909857880
Peter Hayes: "Popper obscures but does not altogether hide the
extraordinary implications of his tentative suggestion that Lorentz
and Newton may not have been superseded after all. We see a kind of
internal duel in which Popper the falsificationist scientist wrestles
with Popper the ideological defender of Einstein. The result is a
messy draw in which, through what can only be called a series of
unsatisfactory auxiliary hypotheses, Popper attempts to retain the
idea that Einstein's relativity theory represents some form of
scientific advance even in if absolute space and time remain intact.
Thus, Einsteins other achievements are emphasised and the difference
between Einstein and Lorentz is minimised (Popper 1982, 29, 35, 48,
158). Finally, the very concept of scientific advance is adapted to
fit the new circumstances:
Karl Popper: "The decisive thing about Einstein's theory, from my
point of view, is that it has shown that Newton's theory - which has
been more successful than any other theory ever proposed - can be
replaced by an alternative theory which is of wider scope, and which
is so related to Newton's theory that every success of Newtonian
theory is also a success for that theory, and which in fact makes
slight adjustments to some results of Newtonian theory. So for me,
this logical situation is more important than the question which of
the two theories is in fact the better approximation to the
truth" (Popper 1982, 2930)."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com