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Panic in Einsteiniana II
http://edge.org/conversation/a-philosophy-of-physics
"Carlo Rovelli is a leading contributor to quantum gravity, who is also made influential proposals regarding the foundation of quantum mechanics and the nature of time. Shortly after receiving his Ph.D he did work which made him regarded as one of the three founders of the approach to quantum gravity called loop quantum gravity - the other two being Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin."
But Lee Smolin does not seem to care much about the relativity of simultaneity and Divine Albert's Divine Theory in general:
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."
Joao Magueijo is even more radical:
http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."
Yet neither Smolin nor Magueijo want to see Divine Albert's Divine Theory gone. It is a bad old rat but the only one they have:
http://www.angelfire.com/hi/littleprince/framechapter10.html
"Hum! Hum!" said the king. "I have good reason to believe that somewhere on my planet there is an old rat. I hear him at night. You can judge this old rat. From time to time you will condemn him to death. Thus his life will depend on your justice. But you will pardon him on each occasion; for he must be treated thriftily. He is the only one we have."
Pentcho Valev pvalev@yahoo.com