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Einsteiniana's priests readily criticize the absurd consequences of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate in favor of the reasonable implications of the Newtonian alternative, the equation c'=c+v showing how the speed of light varies with v, the relative speed of the light source and the observer. Still they would never replace the false postulate with the Newtonian alternative. Einstein's 1905 light postulate (c'=c) is false but it has been a money-spinner for more than a century. The Newtonian equation c'=c+v is true but, if adopted, would take science back to the end of the 18th century and Einsteiniana's priests do not wish to go there:
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory since its passage has not been captured within modern physical theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us. How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of illusion, an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a lot of time reading modern physics. 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 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."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away with the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space, but their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's general theory of relativity..."
Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com