A century of worshipping, singing "Divine Einstein", persecuting heretics, trapping long trains inside short tunnels, travelling into both the future and the past (without killing the grandmother), squeezing themselves through Kip Thorne's wormholes etc. Einsteinians did the job perfectly but now they feel humiliation and hatred:

http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)
Humiliated Einsteinians: "Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

"... its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be questionable ..."

Who cares as long as it is supported experimentally.
Epistemology, phylosophy, ontology, religion are all unverified productions of human mind.
Once a way is found to verify exprimentally human ideas and to create new ideas from experience, then it is named science.

Clearly this book is about science.
And this threat is maybe not about phylosophy either, but about sectarian polemics, typical of some archaic cultures. The title of the threat speeks for himself.

>>Epistemology, phylosophy, ontology, religion are all unverified productions of human mind.< <br>
What a bliss of arrogance! In fact "scientific mind" is of the lowest level among all human spiritual endeavors EVER! And that arrogance is going to KILL EXISTENCE forever. That way, men are really digging a black hole for themselves.

Or if you wish, what you today think "is verified" tomorrow (if any) will be a BIG SCARRY LAUGH. For instance, those TRs, they are nothing but the laugh from the very beginning.

God bless

Pentcho Valev wrote:
> A century of worshipping, singing "Divine Einstein", persecuting
> heretics, trapping long trains inside short tunnels, travelling into
> both the future and the past (without killing the grandmother),
> squeezing themselves through Kip Thorne's wormholes etc. Einsteinians
> did the job perfectly but now they feel humiliation and hatred:
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
> Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
> Contemporary Philosophy)
> Humiliated Einsteinians: "Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory,
> however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen
> to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."

Humiliated Einsteinians are leaving the sinking ship (but hope to make even more money as reborn):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5683551.ece
"Professor Stephen Hawking: Einstein had futile quest....PROFESSOR Stephen Hawking is to publish a controversial new book suggesting Albert Einsteins lifelong search for a theory of everything was probably a mistake....One of his previous books, A Brief History of Time, became an international best-seller, and the new one is also expected to sell well. Hawking said in a recent lecture, published on his website, www.hawking.org. uk: "Some people will be very disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory. I used to belong to that camp, but I have changed my mind. Im now glad that our search for understanding will never come to an end."

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."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Rebis,

Why is it arrogant to remember that science (I meant exact sciences) is based on an experimental verification methodology?
And also why do you assume that I value phylosophy less than physics?
I just wanted to say that phylosophy has no role in the understanding of physics.
Have you ever heard about an experimental verification of a phylosophy, or of a religion?

"Epistemology, phylosophy, ontology, religion are all unverified productions of human mind." What a bliss of arrogance! In fact "scientific mind" is of the lowest level among all human spiritual endeavors EVER! And that arrogance is going to KILL EXISTENCE forever. That way, men are really digging a black hole for themselves.

Also what do you mean by "value".
I did not try to convince anybody that a certain activity is more valuable than another?
Exact sciences have a unique value for technological advancement and for the understanding of our universe.
However, I don't wish to see the world governed by technocrats or physicists.
Nor do I wish to see it governed by religious fundamentalists.
Politics has a place, as well as phylosophy.
I think that democracy is caring for the weak and for the minorities and that it is the only way for progress against war, poverty, decadence.
And I have not learned that in a course of theoretical physics.

My point was that phylosophy has no place in physics, as far as only the physical world is under discussion.
But of course phylosophy has a natural place when we have to decide about our lives and the impacts of science on our lives.

> > A century of worshipping, singing "Divine Einstein", persecuting
> > heretics, trapping long trains inside short tunnels, travelling into
> > both the future and the past (without killing the grandmother),
> > squeezing themselves through Kip Thorne's wormholes etc. Einsteinians
> > did the job perfectly but now they feel humiliation and hatred:
>
> > http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
> > Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
> > Contemporary Philosophy)
> > Humiliated Einsteinians: "Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory,
> > however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen
> > to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."
>
> Humiliated Einsteinians are leaving the sinking ship (but hope to make
> even more money as reborn):
>
> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article5683551.ece
> "Professor Stephen Hawking: Einstein had futile quest....PROFESSOR
> Stephen Hawking is to publish a controversial new book suggesting
> Albert Einsteins lifelong search for a theory of everything was
> probably a mistake....One of his previous books, A Brief History of
> Time, became an international best-seller, and the new one is also
> expected to sell well. Hawking said in a recent lecture, published on
> his website,www.hawking.org. uk: "Some people will be very
> disappointed if there is not an ultimate theory. I used to belong to
> that camp, but I have changed my mind. Im now glad that our search
> for understanding will never come to an end."
>
> 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."

Humiliated Einsteinians are trying to forget Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, in the same way in which humiliated physicists have forgotten "classical" versions of the so-called second law of thermodynamics. The two falsehoods killed theoretical science and converted scientists into worshippers and convulsionaries:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026801.500-why-einstein-was-wrong-about-relativity.html
"Why Einstein was wrong about relativity.....IMAGINE you are on a bicycle, pedalling across the cosmos. A beam of light - perhaps sent off by a distant collapsing star - zings past you. How fast are you and the light approaching each other? You are travelling at hardly any speed, so the answer will be more or less exactly light's speed through the interstellar vacuum, around 300 million metres a second. Now imagine you abandon pedal power for the day. Bowling along in your spaceship at half light speed, you meet another light pulse head-on. What is your speed of approach now? Surely it is just your speed plus that of the light: in total, one and a half times light speed. Wrong. Your speed of approach will be the speed of light, no more - and that's true however fast you are travelling. Welcome to the weird world of Einstein's special relativity, where as things move faster they shrink, and where time gets so distorted that even talking about events being simultaneous is pointless. That all follows, as Albert Einstein showed, from the fact that light always travels at the same speed, however you look at it. Really? Mitchell Feigenbaum, a physicist at The Rockefeller University in New York, begs to differ. He's the latest and most prominent in a line of researchers insisting that Einstein's theory has nothing to do with light - whatever history and the textbooks might say. "Not only is it not necessary," he says, "but there's absolutely no room in the theory for it."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
"In the eyes of many modern physicists, the theory has acquired a somewhat dubious status. They regard classical thermodynamics as a relic from a bygone era... Indeed, the view that thermodynamics is obsolete is so common that many physicists use the phrase 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' to denote some counterpart of this law in the kinetic theory of gases or in statistical mechanics."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Humiliated Einsteinians don't believe that a long train can be short (if trapped inside a short tunnel), that a 80m long pole can be 40m long (if trapped inside a 40m long barn), and that a bug can be both dead and alive, but they are forced to teach all those absurd corollaries of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate (for career and money):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSRIyDfo_mY&mode=related&search=

http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn....So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn."

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html

Sometimes the humiliation is unbearable and Harvey Brown, the President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, gets even more confused: it seems to him that the absurdities are no more corollaries of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate; rather, Einstein's 1905 false light postulate is a corollary of the absurdities:

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/01/Minkowski.pdf
Harvey R. Brown and Oliver Pooley: "One then appeals to the relativity principle againthe principle entails that these coordinated contractions and dilations must be exactly the same function of velocity for each inertial frame, along with the principle of spatial isotropy, in order to narrow down the deformations to just those encoded in the Lorentz transformations. What has been shown is that rods and clocks must behave in quite particular ways in order for the two postulates to be true together. But this hardly amounts to an explanation of such behaviour. Rather things go the other way around. It is because rods and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is consistent with the relativity principle, that light is measured to have the same speed in each inertial frame."

http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603
"Harvey Brown thinks that most philosophers are confused about relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation.....According to (what Brown alleges is) the dominant view among substantivalists, the geometrical structure of Minkowski spacetime plays some role in explaining why moving rods shrink and why moving clocks run slow. Brown rejects this view. He asserts, instead, that in order to explain why moving rods shrink we must appeal to the dynamical laws governing the forces that hold the parts of the rod together. The geometry of Minkowski spacetime plays no role in this explanation.....He thinks that good answers to these questions say something about the way in which the forces holding the parts of the rod together depend on velocity of the rod. Only that is a story of what causes the particles to get closer together, and so what causes the rod to shrink."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Not all Einsteinians are humiliated - some, by teaching any absurdity they can imagine, are in fact the source of humiliation:

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/nov/the-man-who-imagined-wormholes-and-schooled-hawking
"Discover Interview The Man Who Imagined Wormholes and Schooled Hawking....Most people think of space as nothingness, the blank void between planets, stars, and galaxies. Kip Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, has spent his life demonstrating otherwise. Space, from his perspective, is the oft-rumpled fabric of the universe. It bends, stretches, and squeezes as objects move through it and can even fold in on itself when faced with the extreme entities known as black holes. He calls this view the "warped side of the universe." Strictly speaking, Thorne does not focus on space at all. He thinks instead of space-time, the blending of three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time described by Einsteins general relativity.....String theory is now beginning to make concrete, observational predictions which will be tested. Claims that it is just theorists playing mental masturbation are, I think, nonsense......Oh, I think the biggest surprise to me was the discovery of dark energy; that most of the mass in the universe is in the form of this dark energy that extends throughout the universe, and has an enormous tension like an exceedingly stiff rubber band. That I found incredible. I and most of my colleagues didnt believe it until we saw several completely independent pieces of observational data saying that thats the case......In Carl Sagans original version of his novel Contact, he had his heroine traveling through a black hole to a distant part of the universe, and he asked me for advice. I immediately told him, You cant do that. Black holes cant be used in that way, and I suggested he use a wormhole instead. That got me interested in the issue of whether or not there really could be wormholes that you could travel through, and quite quickly I came to realize that if they did exist, it would not be hard for a very advanced civilization to use a traversable wormhole to make a time machine. That forced me to face the issue of self-inconsistent histories: Could you go back and kill your father before you were conceived? And that question led me to realize that these kinds of thought experiments can be a very powerful way to probe the laws of physics. I had friends who worried about whether Id gone off the deep end when they first heard about this, but most became enthusiastic after they learned the details."

Clever Einsteinians are extremely humiliated by the space-time schizophreny and the cleverest among them, mainly philosophers (physicists are still singing "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity" and "Divine Einstein"), even go as far as to hint at some return to normality:

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://philosophy.ucsd.edu/faculty/ccallender/index_files/physics%20against%20tense.doc
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.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/35992/title/It%E2%80%99s_Likely_That_Times_Are_Changing
"A century ago, mathematician Hermann Minkowski famously merged space with time, establishing a new foundation for physics; today physicists are rethinking how the two should fit together....Einsteins belief that time is illusory did not stem from a mere devotion to Newtonian determinism. After all, he had disregarded Newton before, rewriting the laws of motion that underpinned deterministic philosophy in the first place. In so doing, Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper about possible grounds for divorce."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com