http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the end camouflages the real problem:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
"Einstein postulated, first, that the laws of physics don't prefer one reference frame over another, as long as each is moving at a constant velocity. Second, he said that c, the speed of light, will appear exactly the same to every observer, in every frame of reference. A century later, that second postulate still defies common sense. It says that if you're driving down the highway at a quarter the speed of light, you'll still see the photons from your headlights racing ahead of you at light speed--not three-quarters light speed. If I'm coming from the opposite direction at half light speed, I'll still see your photons approaching at c--not 1.5 times c. Since speed is just space divided by time, and we both agree about the speed of light, we can't possibly agree about space and time. You say my clock is too slow and my yardstick has shrunk (not to mention my whole car). Maddeningly, I say the same about you. The one thing we agree on, aside from c itself, is the distance covered by the photons in the weird new reference frame of four-dimensional spacetime. It might be a relief to learn that physicists were talking about chucking this deeply strange theory. But just as Einstein made only minute corrections to Newton in everyday life--to really feel the effects of special relativity, you have to move at a large fraction of light speed--the proposed changes to relativity would have only subtle, hard-to-detect effects. Yet the stakes are big: the quest for a single theory that would unite general relativity, Einstein's later theory describing gravity, with quantum mechanics, the theory describing the forces inside the atom. Physicists are taking many paths to this "quantum gravity" grail, but in all of them spacetime itself, instead of being continuous, is made of quantum bits. "It's like the difference between sand and water," says Giovanni Amelino-Camelia of La Sapienza University in Rome--except that the spacetime grains could be around a hundred billion billionth the size of an atomic nucleus. At this "Planck length," named after the father of quantum physics, gravity would no longer be described by general relativity but by the new theory."
http://www.spacetimecenter.org/conferences/2008/Henry.pdf
Teaching Special Relativity: Minkowski trumps Einstein
Richard Conn Henry
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
The Johns Hopkins University
"Students find physics difficult - I am thinking of first-year undergraduate university physics majors. I found it difficult myself, and it took me almost 40 years of teaching physics to fully understand the reasons for the perceived "difficulty." Why do students who find mathematics easy to understand, find physics difficult to understand?....How grotesquely badly we teach special relativity encapsulates the practical problem of teaching physics to the freshman physics major. I have never found a single freshman physics textbook that teaches Minkowski spacetime; I have never found a single text on General Relativity that mentions "Einstein's two postulates.".....There is no doubt that, historically, Albert Einstein, in 1905, did introduce two postulates (and also, that it is he who discovered special relativity). But the second of these postulates (the one concerning the constancy of c, just in case Reese has confused you!) did not survive the year. In September of 1905 Einstein published a development from relativitythe discovery of the implication that E = mc2 , and in this new paper he mentions a single postulate only. But the paper contains a sweet footnote: "The principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is of course contained in Maxwell's equations." How I love that "of course!" Einstein was human!......Antique postulates that are not of anything but historical interest to genuine physicists are presented to students as "Special Relativity.".....I feel that the time has come to relegate the "two postulates" to the dustbin of history, and to teach special relativity to undergraduates (or indeed, to middle school students) the Minkowski way."
http://www.worldscibooks.com/chemistry/etextbook/6469/6469_preface.pdf
Arieh Ben-Naim: "I believe that the time is ripe to acknowledge that the term entropy, as originally coined by Clausius, is an unfortunate choice. Moreover, it is also a misleading term both in its meaning in ancient and in contemporary Greek. On this matter, I cannot do any better than Leon Cooper (1968). Cooper cites the original passage from Clausius: in choosing the word "Entropy," Clausius wrote: "I prefer going to the ancient languages for the names of important scientific quantities, so that they mean the same thing in all living tongues. I propose, accordingly, to call S the entropy of a body, after the Greek word "transformation." I have designedly coined the word entropy to be similar to energy, for these two quantities are so analogous in their physical significance, that an analogy of denominations seems to be helpful." Right after quoting Clausius' explanation on his reasons for the choice of the word "Entropy," Cooper commented: "By doing this, rather than extracting a name from the body of the current language (say: lost heat), he succeeded in coining a word that meant the same thing to everybody: nothing." I fully agree with Coopers comment; however, I have two additional comments, and contrary to Cooper, I venture into taking the inevitable conclusion: First, I agree that "entropy means the same thing to everybody: nothing." But more than that, entropy is also a misleading term....Finally, I believe that the time has come to reach the inevitable conclusion that entropy is a misnomer and should be replaced by either missing information or uncertainty."