http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Initial destruction of students' rationality:

http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=AJPIAS0000690000S1000S24000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
"Student understanding of time in special relativity: Simultaneity and reference frames"
American Journal of Physics -- July 2001 -- Volume 69, Issue S1, pp. S24-S35
"This article reports on an investigation of student understanding of the concept of time in special relativity. A series of research tasks are discussed that illustrate, step-by-step, how student reasoning of fundamental concepts of relativity was probed. The results indicate that after standard instruction students at all academic levels have serious difficulties with the relativity of simultaneity and with the role of observers in inertial reference frames. Evidence is presented that suggests many students construct a conceptual framework in which the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity harmoniously co-exist."

Lifelong exercise of doublethink (obligatory even for Einsteiniana's highest priests):

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity, and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987

Brian Greene. "...we find something pretty surprising, pretty shocking: the math doesn't work if the world has 3 dimensions of space. It doesn't work if the world has 4 dimensions of space. In fact, you carry through, it doesn't work unless the universe has 10 dimensions of space, plus one dimension of time -- 11 total space-time dimensions. That comes out of the math."

Sacrificing reality to save the maths, and people say maths are not subjective!

"Sacrificing reality to save the maths, and people say maths are not subjective!"

Doing maths doesn't sacrify reality, that's a myth.
Doing maths is simply exploring our logic.
It is this quote that is very subjective.

In addition, physics today is confronted to extreme physics, in astronomy or in particle physics for example. All fields are concerned because the experimental data simply surpass our common senses. Nobofy will ever feel directly the helical structure of dna, so it will remain abstract forever. Even a picture of a dna molecule is an abstraction.

We are bent to call "reality" what we can touch with our fingers or see with our eyes.
But science today is very very far away from that primitive reality.
Therefore, there is an unavoidable part of "abstraction" since the observation are not directly through our common senses.

But abstraction doesn't mean subjectivity.
Mathematics are abstract by definition, but there is absolutely no place for subjectivity.

If the 10 dimension story leads to an experimental contradiction, the maths will not be wrong, only some hypothesis will have been wrong.
If the 10 dimension story appears to be true exprimentally, then it will suggest the hypothesis where not bad and the mathematics were extremely useful to bring us there.

Re: Anonym, EXERCISE OF DOUBLETHINK IN EINSTEINIANA August 24 2009, 10:36 AM

bob s "Sacrificing reality to save the maths, and people say maths are not subjective!"

Anonym: "Doing maths doesn't sacrify reality, that's a myth."

Creating extra dimensions (9) to support the maths is subjective.

Anonym: "Doing maths is simply exploring our logic."

That does not say much for your logic.

Anonym: "It is this quote that is very subjective."

Which quote?

Anonym: "In addition, physics today is confronted to extreme physics,..."

Yes, and the "extreme physics" is the result of subjective maths.

Anonym: "All fields are concerned because the experimental data simply surpass our common senses."

That's because you (they), for the most part, don't have any common sense.

Anonym: "Nobofy will ever feel directly the helical structure of dna, so it will remain abstract forever."

There is empirical data to support DNA, not so for the 9 extra dimensions.

Anonym: "Even a picture of a dna molecule is an abstraction."

That does not support 9 extra dimensions.

Anonym: "We are bent to call "reality" what we can touch with our fingers or see with our eyes. But science today is very very far away from that primitive reality.
Therefore, there is an unavoidable part of "abstraction" since the observation are not directly through our common senses."

Following that abstract logic, God does exist!

Anonym: "But abstraction doesn't mean subjectivity."

Abstraction is subjective.

Anonym: "Mathematics are abstract by definition,..."

String Theory maths are abstract...

Anonym: "...but there is absolutely no place for subjectivity."

...and subjective by definition.

Anonym: "If the 10 dimension story leads to an experimental contradiction, the maths will not be wrong, only some hypothesis will have been wrong."

Until such time the 9 extra dimensions will remain subjective.

Anonym: "If the 10 dimension story appears to be true exprimentally, then it will suggest the hypothesis where not bad and the mathematics were extremely useful to bring us there."

If if if! If Dorthy could only click her heels three times for you, Dunderland would be real! Faerie tales do not come true.

"Creating extra dimensions (9) to support the maths is subjective. "

Where is the subjectivity?
These dimensions are not "created" at all.
These dimensions are simply an hypothesis.

Nine dimension are objctively not more abstract than the concept of wavefunction or even than the Newton's laws. These last are two examples of how mathematics are used to represent our knowledge.

Newton has been able to summarize many observations by the law "F=ma" and to specialize this law for gravity by F=kmm'/r². This is simpler than a wavefunction but I don't see this could be considered as less abstract or more subjective than a wavefunction. This is just the best tool that is known (still) today to represent the motion of bodies not too small and much below the speed of light.

For the wavefunction, this is just the same as for "F=ma". As Feynman said:

"If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics."

Physicist have been very clever at building quantum mechanics, doing so by even at least three different logical path (Schrodinger, Dirac, Feynman). But it is wize to say that none of then understand quantum mechanics, they "just" know how it works. The maths are there to represent this knowledge in an operational way: this means that rules are precisely defined so as to allow a comparison to the experiments.

This may be disappointing, but there nothing else on the menu.
Anybody who can do better can show it to the world, and also nobody is obliged to study physics.

Personally, I am not disappointed.
On the contrary, I am quite impressed by the overall logic and the unity of the little part of physics that I have learned.
My reading of Landau and Lifchiz has been determining.
Landau in his series shows how the least action principle covers the whole physics.

Landau shows several time how the assumption of a least action principle combined with basic symmetries and "simplicity" leads to all fundamental laws of nature:

- classical mechanics (relativistic and non-relativistic when v - classical electromagnetism
- classical electrodynamics (motion of charges particles)
- general relativity
- quantum electrodynamics
- special cases of the above

Today the least action principle is a reference used for guessing the direction to go.
That's how it works: science is mainly guessing on the basis of our past experience, and trying the new hypothesis with new experiments.

If you know another way to guess -for example- how physics works at the Plack scales, just show it to world or simply show the results of this secret method.

Of course, the discussion above applies to the fundamental laws of physics.
Hydraulics doesn't show much "abstraction" of course.
Well ... the least action principle is also useful in hydraulics.

Re: Anonym, EXERCISE OF DOUBLETHINK IN EINSTEINIANA August 24 2009, 5:21 PM

bob s "Creating extra dimensions (9) to support the maths is subjective. "

Anonym: "Where is the subjectivity?"

So, your argument boils down to you not knowing the difference between "subjective" and "objective" and the rest of your chatter is an attempt to conceal your ignorance.

On Aug 24 Pentcho Valev wrote:
>http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two
> contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both
> of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories
> must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with
> reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself
> that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it
> would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to
> be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and
> hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since
> the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while
> retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To
> tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any
> fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary
> again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed,
> to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take
> account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably
> necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to
> exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is
> tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this
> knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead
> of the truth."
>
> Initial destruction of students' rationality:
>
>http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=AJPIAS0000690000S1000S24000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes
> "Student understanding of time in special relativity: Simultaneity and
> reference frames"
> American Journal of Physics -- July 2001 -- Volume 69, Issue S1, pp.
> S24-S35
> "This article reports on an investigation of student understanding of
> the concept of time in special relativity. A series of research tasks
> are discussed that illustrate, step-by-step, how student reasoning of
> fundamental concepts of relativity was probed. The results indicate
> that after standard instruction students at all academic levels have
> serious difficulties with the relativity of simultaneity and with the
> role of observers in inertial reference frames. Evidence is presented
> that suggests many students construct a conceptual framework in which
> the ideas of absolute simultaneity and the relativity of simultaneity
> harmoniously co-exist."
>
> Lifelong exercise of doublethink (obligatory even for Einsteiniana's
> highest priests):
>
>http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article.php?story=20050422141509987
> Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity,
> and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like
> an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized
> into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time
> that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what
> happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It
> still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's
> wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is
> wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy
> in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So
> it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and
> juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million
> times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

Sometimes Einsteiniana's highest priests break the rule "the lie always one leap ahead of the truth" and exercise themselves in doublethink with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie:

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."

Einsteiniana's highest priests can only indulge in this luxury when the postscientific decay is well advanced and the difference between truth and lie does not exist anymore.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Doublethink makes Einsteinians flagrantly cynical sometimes but the postscientific world notices nothing:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.0016v3.pdf

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Sometimes "the lie one leap ahead of the truth" degenerates (or progresses) into "the lie one leap ahead of another lie". When Einsteinians explain the absurdity called the twin paradox, they oscillate between the following Lie 1 and Lie 2:

Lie 1: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is due to acceleration (Einstein's 1918 explanation):

http://plus.maths.org/issue36/features/aiden/index.html
"This is the story of twins Peter and Paul. Paul makes a round trip in a high-speed spaceship and leaves his brother Peter on Earth. With the help of his telescope, Peter watches Paul whizzing through space. As a result of time dilation, Peter sees that Paul is aging more slowly than he. But, just as Alice and Bob both thought that the other was experiencing time more slowly than themselves, shouldn't Paul observe Peter aging more slowly than he? This would mean that each twin thought the other one was aging more slowly. In fact, the situation is not symmetrical: only the twin who stays at home is in an inertial frame. Paul experiences acceleration (that is, changes in velocity) as his rocket leaves Earth, turns around and comes back. In general, accelerated clocks (or clocks in gravitational fields) will go slow relative to unaccelerated clocks (or clocks feeling no gravitational fields). So the twin that feels the accelerations will age more slowly than the one who doesn't."

Lie 2: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is not due to acceleration:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
p. 44: "11.19. Modified twin paradox. Consider the following variation of the twin paradox. A, B, and C each have a clock. In A's reference frame, B flies past A with speed v to the right. When B passes A, they both set their clocks to zero. Also, in A's reference frame, C starts far to the right and moves to the left with speed v. When B and C pass each other, C sets his clock to read the same as B's. Finally, when C passes A, they compare the readings on their clocks..."

In the previous version of David Morin's textbook there was the following additional text:

"This form of the twin paradox loses a bit of the punch of the usual statement of the problem, since we don't compare the ages of the same two people before and after the journey. But on the other hand, THIS VERSION OF THE PROBLEM DOES NOT INVOLVE ACCELERATION."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

Total nonsense:

PV:
"Lie 1: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is due to acceleration (Einstein's 1918 explanation):
Lie 2: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is not due to acceleration: "
______________________

More than 100 years later, people like PV are still wasting their time in the paradox mud.
A simple graphical representation in a (x,ct) diagram explains clearly what happens.
Simple modifications of this thought experiment, like around trip, make its analysis even clearer and can and have also been verified experimentally.

PV systematicall presents caricatures of any topic.
In the present example, what does he mean by "is due".
Really stupid!

What is really stupid is people like you that believe the latency of light wave front reception can actually change one's place in space and/or the past and future.

If you are not stupid, develop your topic and express yourself more clearly.
And most of all, get results.

The topic has been developed several times already. You are incapable of understanding it.

If you need results, EX-Lax should do the job. You will still have to do the paper work yourself.

"What is really stupid is people like you that believe the latency of light wave front reception can actually change one's place in space and/or the past and future."

I can't figure out what this means.

The clock comparison experiment has been performeed.
It confirmed that the travelling clock is slowed down.
Clocks have also been shown to slow down in gravitational fields.
This occurs even if the clock are perfectly synchronized before the experiment.
These are today experimental facts, initially predicted by Albert Einstein.

Who said "the past and/or future has changed" and what would that mean?
Only a tortured mind can blame an experimental fact for being stupid.

How could one claim that an experimental fact could "change past and/or future"?
How could one claim a that a traveling clock would displace "one's" in space-time?
Just meaningless.

Not only has the clock slowing down been observed experimentally, but it is perfectly understood why this is so and how this is related to the constancy of the speed of light (another fact).

Welcome to the PV club, JR, where only idiots are allowed!

"The clock comparison experiment has been performeed(sic).
It confirmed that the travelling(sic) clock is slowed down."

By what experiment do you refer?

The further distant a clock, the further into the past is the time reported from it. As the clock is moved into the distance, its time will be reported to be slowing down, regardless of how fast it is moved.

Two clocks are set to the exact same time here on Earth. One is moved a distance 8 light minutes away. Its time will report 8 minutes behind the earth clock. As it is moved the distance, its time will appear to be slowing down. When it is moved back to Earth, it reports the same synchronized time with the local clock. In other words, it appeared to have sped up as it approached.

Hefle Keating was a joke.

Einsteiniana's highest priests are not the only postscientists that exercise themselves in doublethink "with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie". Thermodynamicists are by no means worse at that:

ftp://ftp.esat.kuleuven.ac.be/pub/SISTA/markovsky/reports/06-46.pdf
"From the pedagogical point of view, thermodynamics is a disaster. As the authors rightly state in the introduction, many aspects are "riddled with inconsistencies". They quote V.I. Arnold, who concedes that "every mathematician knows it is impossible to understand an elementary course in thermodynamics". Nobody has eulogized this confusion more colorfully than the late Clifford Truesdell. On page 6 of his book The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics 1822-1854 (Springer Verlag, 1980), he calls thermodynamics "a dismal swamp of obscurity". Elsewhere, in despair of trying to make sense of the writings of some local heros as De Groot, Mazur, Casimir, and Prigogine, Truesdell suspects that there is "something rotten in the (thermodynamic) state of the Low Countries" (see page 134 of Rational Thermodynamics, McGraw-Hill, 1969)."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Sometimes Einsteiniana's highest priests break the rule "the lie always one leap ahead of the truth" and exercise themselves in doublethink with the TRUTH one leap ahead of the lie:

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."

Einsteiniana's highest priests can only indulge in this luxury when the postscientific decay is well advanced and the difference between truth and lie does not exist anymore.

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

So many jokes have proven JR is a complete idiot.

"Exactly! And so are the posts by the cement process engineer that can't tell French from Latin. "

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts controversial, inflammatory, irrelevant or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into an emotional or disciplinary response[1] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

Advanced triplethink in Einsteiniana: Lie 3 one leap ahead of Lie 2 and two leaps ahead of Lie 1:

http://www.physorg.com/news163738003.html
Lie 3: "Just when you thought you were beginning to understand the twin paradox (maybe), scientists have found something new to ponder. In the original version of the famous thought experiment on time dilation, one twin stays on Earth while the other twin takes a rocket at nearly light speed into space, and returns to find that he is younger than his twin on Earth. But a new version of the story now shows that the twin who experiences an acceleration can be older than the twin who doesnt accelerate, under slightly different conditions."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Sometimes "the lie one leap ahead of the truth" degenerates (or progresses) into "the lie one leap ahead of another lie". When Einsteinians explain the absurdity called the twin paradox, they oscillate between the following Lie 1 and Lie 2:

Lie 1: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is due to acceleration (Einstein's 1918 explanation):

http://plus.maths.org/issue36/features/aiden/index.html
"This is the story of twins Peter and Paul. Paul makes a round trip in a high-speed spaceship and leaves his brother Peter on Earth. With the help of his telescope, Peter watches Paul whizzing through space. As a result of time dilation, Peter sees that Paul is aging more slowly than he. But, just as Alice and Bob both thought that the other was experiencing time more slowly than themselves, shouldn't Paul observe Peter aging more slowly than he? This would mean that each twin thought the other one was aging more slowly. In fact, the situation is not symmetrical: only the twin who stays at home is in an inertial frame. Paul experiences acceleration (that is, changes in velocity) as his rocket leaves Earth, turns around and comes back. In general, accelerated clocks (or clocks in gravitational fields) will go slow relative to unaccelerated clocks (or clocks feeling no gravitational fields). So the twin that feels the accelerations will age more slowly than the one who doesn't."

Lie 2: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is not due to acceleration:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
p. 44: "11.19. Modified twin paradox. Consider the following variation of the twin paradox. A, B, and C each have a clock. In A's reference frame, B flies past A with speed v to the right. When B passes A, they both set their clocks to zero. Also, in A's reference frame, C starts far to the right and moves to the left with speed v. When B and C pass each other, C sets his clock to read the same as B's. Finally, when C passes A, they compare the readings on their clocks..."

In the previous version of David Morin's textbook there was the following additional text:

"This form of the twin paradox loses a bit of the punch of the usual statement of the problem, since we don't compare the ages of the same two people before and after the journey. But on the other hand, THIS VERSION OF THE PROBLEM DOES NOT INVOLVE ACCELERATION."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

ADVANCED doublethink in Einsteiniana: the lie still one leap ahead of the truth but the two are combined in a single statement:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/40355
"Physicists in Germany have performed the most precise Michelson-Morley experiment to date, confirming that the speed of light is the same in all directions."

STANDARD doublethink in Einsteiniana:

"Complete honesty":

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001743/02/Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "Moreover, if light consists of particles, as Einstein had suggested in his paper submitted just thirteen weeks before this one, the second principle seems absurd: A stone thrown from a speeding train can do far more damage than one thrown from a train at rest; the speed of the particle is not independent of the motion of the object emitting it. And if we take light to consist of particles and assume that these particles obey Newton's laws, they will conform to Newtonian relativity and thus automatically account for the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment without recourse to contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations. Yet, as we have seen, Einstein resisted the temptation to account for the null result in terms of particles of light and simple, familiar Newtonian ideas, and introduced as his second postulate something that was more or less obvious when thought of in terms of waves in an ether."

James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp. 39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE LOGIQUE."

"By a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth":

http://physics.suite101.com/article.cfm/einsteins_special_relativity
Paul Heckert: "Rather than trying to understand why the Michelson-Morley experiment didn't work, Einstein effectively took the result as his starting point. He made the basic assumption that the speed of light is a fundamental constant in the universe and that all observers in any reference frame that is not accelerating will measure the same value for the speed of light."

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/496904/relativity/252878/Special-relativity
ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA: "The fact that the speed of light is the same for all observers is inexplicable in ordinary terms. If a passenger in a train moving at 100 km per hour shoots an arrow in the trains direction of motion at 200 km per hour, a trackside observer would measure the speed of the arrow as the sum of the two speeds, or 300 km per hour (see figure). In analogy, if the train moves at the speed of light and a passenger shines a laser in the same direction, then common sense indicates that a trackside observer should see the light moving at the sum of the two speeds, or twice the speed of light (6 × 108 metres per second). While such a law of addition of velocities is valid in classical mechanics, THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT SHOWED THAT LIGHT DOES NOT OBEY THIS LAW."

http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=64&Itemid=66
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star. He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down light, and make it fall back."

http://www.time.com/time/time100/poc/magazine/a_brief_history_of_rela6a.html
Stephen Hawking: "So if you were traveling in the same direction as the light, you would expect that its speed would appear to be lower, and if you were traveling in the opposite direction to the light, that its speed would appear to be higher. Yet a series of experiments failed to find any evidence for differences in speed due to motion through the ether. The most careful and accurate of these experiments was carried out by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley at the Case Institute in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1887......It was as if light always traveled at the same speed relative to you, no matter how you were moving."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

No doublethink in France: the greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is due to acceleration and that's it:

http://www.techno-science.net/?onglet=articles&article=39&page=4
"La théorie de la relativité nous dit que les phénomènes sont identiques dans tous les référentiels, or, pour Fred, celui-ci est au repos, mais c'est Franck qui voyage, donc le temps doit s'écouler plus lentement dans le référentiel de Franck vu par Fred. Franck fait exactement le même raisonnement et en déduit la même chose. Comme d'après la relativité, tous les référentiels sont identiques, ils devraient avoir le même âge, or ce n'est pas du tout le cas, comment est-ce possible ? Tout simplement parce que la relativité restreinte s'applique aux référentiels non accélérés, et que Fred, par le fait d'aller et revenir doit obligatoirement accélérer, c'est ce qui est à l'origine de la dissymétrie."

Pentcho Valev wrote:

Advanced triplethink in Einsteiniana: Lie 3 one leap ahead of Lie 2 and two leaps ahead of Lie 1:

http://www.physorg.com/news163738003.html
Lie 3: "Just when you thought you were beginning to understand the twin paradox (maybe), scientists have found something new to ponder. In the original version of the famous thought experiment on time dilation, one twin stays on Earth while the other twin takes a rocket at nearly light speed into space, and returns to find that he is younger than his twin on Earth. But a new version of the story now shows that the twin who experiences an acceleration can be older than the twin who doesnt accelerate, under slightly different conditions."

http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated. The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt. Doublethink lies at the very heart of Ingsoc, since the essential act of the Party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge ; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth."

Sometimes "the lie one leap ahead of the truth" degenerates (or progresses) into "the lie one leap ahead of another lie". When Einsteinians explain the absurdity called the twin paradox, they oscillate between the following Lie 1 and Lie 2:

Lie 1: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is due to acceleration (Einstein's 1918 explanation):

http://plus.maths.org/issue36/features/aiden/index.html
"This is the story of twins Peter and Paul. Paul makes a round trip in a high-speed spaceship and leaves his brother Peter on Earth. With the help of his telescope, Peter watches Paul whizzing through space. As a result of time dilation, Peter sees that Paul is aging more slowly than he. But, just as Alice and Bob both thought that the other was experiencing time more slowly than themselves, shouldn't Paul observe Peter aging more slowly than he? This would mean that each twin thought the other one was aging more slowly. In fact, the situation is not symmetrical: only the twin who stays at home is in an inertial frame. Paul experiences acceleration (that is, changes in velocity) as his rocket leaves Earth, turns around and comes back. In general, accelerated clocks (or clocks in gravitational fields) will go slow relative to unaccelerated clocks (or clocks feeling no gravitational fields). So the twin that feels the accelerations will age more slowly than the one who doesn't."

Lie 2: The greater youthfulness of the travelling twin is not due to acceleration:

http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~djmorin/chap11.pdf
p. 44: "11.19. Modified twin paradox. Consider the following variation of the twin paradox. A, B, and C each have a clock. In A's reference frame, B flies past A with speed v to the right. When B passes A, they both set their clocks to zero. Also, in A's reference frame, C starts far to the right and moves to the left with speed v. When B and C pass each other, C sets his clock to read the same as B's. Finally, when C passes A, they compare the readings on their clocks..."

In the previous version of David Morin's textbook there was the following additional text:

"This form of the twin paradox loses a bit of the punch of the usual statement of the problem, since we don't compare the ages of the same two people before and after the journey. But on the other hand, THIS VERSION OF THE PROBLEM DOES NOT INVOLVE ACCELERATION."

Pentcho Valev
pvalev@yahoo.com

There are five distinct words here. When affect is accented on the final syllable (a-FECT), it is usually a verb meaning have an influence on: The million-dollar donation from the industrialist did not affect my vote against the Clean Air Act.


Occasionally a pretentious person is said to affect an artificial air of sophistication. Speaking with a borrowed French accent or ostentatiously wearing a large diamond ear stud might be an affectation. In this sort of context, affect means to make a display of or deliberately cultivate.


Another unusual meaning is indicated when the word is accented on the first syllable (AFF-ect), meaning emotion. In this case the word is used mostly by psychiatrists and social scientistspeople who normally know how to spell it.


The real problem arises when people confuse the first spelling with the second: effect. This too can be two different words. The more common one is a noun: When I left the stove on, the effect was that the house filled with smoke. When you affect a situation, you have an effect on it.


The less common is a verb meaning to create: Im trying to effect a change in the way we purchase widgets. No wonder people are confused. Note especially that the proper expression is not take affect but take effectbecome effective. Hey, nobody ever said English was logical: just memorize it and get on with your life.


The stuff in your purse? Your personal effects.


The stuff in movies? Sound effects and special effects.