Real-Time Physics

The Augean-Stable Syndrome in Science

Steve Giddings, theoretical physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara: "What really keeps me awake at night (...) is that we face a crisis within the deepest foundations of physics. The only way out seems to involve profound revision of fundamental physical principles."

This view is shared by almost all theoretical physicists and philosophers of science (most of them sleep well at night). Some even go as far as to predict the death of physics:

Mike Alder: "It is easy to see the consequences of the takeover by the bureaucrats. Bureaucrats favour uniformity, it simplifies their lives. They want rules to follow. They prefer the dead to the living. They have taken over religions, the universities and now they are taking over Science. And they are killing it in the process. The forms and rituals remain, but the spirit is dead. The cold frozen corpse is so much more appealing to the bureaucratic mind-set than the living spirit of the quest for insight. Bureaucracies put a premium on the old being in charge, which puts a stop to innovation. Something perhaps will remain, but it will no longer attract the best minds. This, essentially, is the Smolin position. He gives details and examples of the death of Physics, although he, being American, is optimistic that it can be re,versed. I am not. (...) Developing ideas and applying them is done by a certain kind of temperament in a certain kind of setting, one where there is a good deal of personal freedom and a willingness to take risks. No doubt we still have the people. But the setting is gone and will not come back. Science is a product of the renaissance and an entrepreneurial spirit. It will not survive the triumph of bureacracy. Despite having the infrastructure, China never developed Science. And soon the West won't have it either."

"Profound revision of fundamental physical principles" implies looking for, finding and, in the end, abandoning some false principle. Is there such activity in physics? Yes there is - campaigns, quite noisy sometimes, start and restart but then never reach their goal (the false principle remains well and kicking):

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, 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."

"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."

International team of leading philosophers and physicists who have come together to reassess the contemporary paradigm of the relativistic concept of time: "Unfortunately for Einstein's Special Theory, however, its epistemological and ontological assumptions are now seen to be questionable, unjustified, false, perhaps even illogical."

Special relativity is a deductive theory based on two postulates so it cannot be "the root of all the evil" unless at least one of the postulates is false. For the sake of argument, let us assume that the second (speed-of-light) postulate is false and the speed of photons, like the speed of ordinary projectiles, varies with the speed of the emitter (c'=c+v). Let us assume further that most, if not all, theoretical physicists and philosophers of science know about the falsehood. Is there any chance that things will be fixed, some exit from the blind alley found and, why not, a revolution in Kuhnian sense launched?

In my view, the answer is no. False theories die in the end but Augean stables remain that no Hercules is able to clean up. Einstein's 1905 false light postulate and its absurd consequences have become an integral part of the spirit of our civilization. In this sense they are infallible and eternal, and would disappear no sooner than the civilization itself would end.

Pentcho Valev

Buried under the Augean stables' dung accumulated for more than a century, scientists are unable to react to even blatant contradictions and absurdities in Divine Albert's Divine Theory. So Einsteinians can safely teach that the acceleration suffered by the travelling twin is both responsible and not responsible for her youthfulness:

John Norton: "Then, at the end of the outward leg, the traveler abruptly changes motion, accelerating sharply to adopt a new inertial motion directed back to earth. What comes now is the key part of the analysis. (...) Careful attention to the differing judgments of simultaneity of the two twins shows that there is nothing paradoxical in the twin effect. The brief moment of acceleration of the traveling twin completely alters the traveler's judgments of simultaneity and this alteration is key to seeing how relativity provides a consistent account of the effect. Nevertheless, many still get confused by the twin effect."

Gary W. Gibbons FRS: "In other words, by simply staying at home Jack has aged relative to Jill. There is no paradox because the lives of the twins are not strictly symmetrical. This might lead one to suspect that the accelerations suffered by Jill might be responsible for the effect. However this is simply not plausible because using identical accelerating phases of her trip, she could have travelled twice as far. This would give twice the amount of time gained."

A theory harboring such a blatant absurdity is obviously dead but critics trying to show this sooner or later stop their "line of inquiry" as they find themselves in the position of Mr. Praline. In the end the theory proves beautiful and by no means dead:

Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?

Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!

Owner: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting.

Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.

Owner: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

........................

Mr. Praline: No, I'm sorry! I'm not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any longer as I think this is getting too silly!

Pentcho Valev

Einstein's Legacy - Where are the Einsteinians? Lee Smolin: "Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it."

So where are the Einsteinians? Most of them left the sinking ship:

John Baez: "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."

"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."

Lee Smolin also left the sinking ship for a while:

"Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

"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."

"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

Then Smolin realized Einsteiniana's ship will never fully sink so it is quite profitable to return to it from time to time:

QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me. LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality. QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here? LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.

71:04 : QUESTION: What you did not talk about was time dilation, the myth of time dilation, I think that needs to be blown as well. What do you think of that? LEE SMOLIN: I disagree. This is an important point. Special relativity may be superseded but it is holding up enormously well under experiment. Giovanni Amelino-Camelia is here... and he and various friends of ours have been trying to transcend special relativity for years and we are keeping knocked back by experiment... and the experiments have shown that special relativity is true to tremendous precision... Do you agree Giovanni? Yea!

Pentcho Valev

Kuhn's Revolutions : Do They Actually Occur ?

"Kuhn held that the historical process of science is divided into three stages: a "normal" stage, followed by "crisis" and then "revolutionary" stages. The normal stage is characterized by a strong agreement among scientists on what is and is not scientific practice. In this stage, scientists largely agree on what are the questions that need answers. Indeed, only problems that are recognized as potentially having solutions are considered scientific. So it is in the normal stage that we see science progress not toward better questions but better answers. The beginning of this period is usually marked by a solution that serves as an example, a paradigm, for further research. (...) A crisis occurs when an existing theory involves so many unsolved puzzles, or "anomalies," that its explanatory ability becomes questionable. Scientists begin to consider entirely new ways of examining the data, and there is a lack of consensus on which questions are important scientifically. Problems that had previously been left to other, non-scientific fields may now come into view as potentially scientific. Eventually, a new exemplary solution emerges."

By analogy with any living body, the accumulation of anomalies would rather cause the scientific organism to age and die. The following two references describe the superanomalous status of thermodynamics and relativity, a status which, nowadays, bothers nobody:

Jos Uffink, "Bluff your Way in the Second Law of Thermodynamics"

Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78

It seems revolutions in science in Kuhnian sense occur only when a true but dull theory is replaced by a false but exciting one. In other words, a pre-revolutionary situation in science is characterized by unbearable boredom, not by an unbearably large set of anomalies as Kuhn teaches. Initially the falsehood cures the boredom by producing breathtaking miracles:

John Barrow: "EINSTEIN RESTORED FAITH IN THE UNINTELLIGIBILITY OF SCIENCE. Everyone knew that Einstein had done something important in 1905 (and again in 1915) but almost nobody could tell you exactly what it was. When Einstein was interviewed for a Dutch newspaper in 1921, he attributed his mass appeal to the mystery of his work for the ordinary person: "Does it make a silly impression on me, here and yonder, about my theories of which they cannot understand a word? I think it is funny and also interesting to observe. I am sure that it is the mystery of non-understanding that appeals to themit impresses them, it has the colour and the appeal of the mysterious." Relativity was a fashionable notion. It promised to sweep away old absolutist notions and refurbish science with modern ideas. In art and literature too, revolutionary changes were doing away with old conventions and standards. ALL THINGS WERE BEING MADE NEW. EINSTEIN'S RELATIVITY SUITED THE MOOD. Nobody got very excited about Einstein's brownian motion or his photoelectric effect but RELATIVITY PROMISED TO TURN THE WORLD INSIDE OUT."

Eventually the breathtaking "science" comes to a dead end and simply dies. There is no replacement. Thermodynamics is already dead (people don't even remember its miracles), relativity is in a process of dying - most of the Einsteinians have already left the sinking ship.

How can one prove that dead science is dead? This is almost impossible. Arguments of the type "I know a dead science when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now" simply don't work. Those who try sooner or later find themselves in Mr. Praline's silly situation:

Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it? Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it! Owner: No, no, 'e's uh,...he's resting. Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now. Owner: No no he's not dead, he's, he's restin'! Remarkable bird, the Norwegian Blue, idn'it, ay? Beautiful plumage! (...) Mr. Praline: No, I'm sorry! I'm not prepared to pursue my line of inquiry any longer as I think this is getting too silly!

Is there any hope for science? I am really not sure.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho,

Today I was told that there is a Lockman hole, a small widow that allows a not too much disturbed be infrared view out of our milky way. The photo of Dr. Felix James "Jay" Lockman shows a pretty young man. Perhaps I am the only one here who does not know how this window is to be seen in the CMBR.

You know, I feel also ashamed because I was hoping for a while that there might be something like a light-carrying ether. I regret that you seem to refuse taking issue concerning my alternative suggestion. You know, I question Einstein's first postulate while you are denying the second one. To Kuhn Einstein's relativity was a paradigm shift.

I guess, even if Einstein was wrong, and in that you might be correct, some corrections to the traditional physics were indeed necessary.

In particular, it corresponds to my critical common sense as an engineer that there are no strictly rigid bodies of infinite length, no tangible singularities, no signals that propagate faster than light relative to space, no plurality of local times, no travel back in time, no difference in aging just depending on who of two twins is considered in motion, no length contraction, no a priory existing future history, etc. Is there any way of cooperation between us?

Eckard

The Problem with Deductive Science

Jos Uffink, Bluff your Way in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, p. 94: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is actually a RED HERRING."

Clearly Uffink does not accept the entropy-always-increases version of the second law of thermodynamics but the justification for non-acceptance is implausible: criticism involving "unargued statements", "bold claims" and "strained attempts" could only be relevant when some inductive science, e.g. the Darwinian theory of evolution, is dealt with. In DEDUCTIVE science there are only two errors that can be criticized:

1. A false premise (assumption)

2. An invalid argument (the conclusion does not follow from the premises)

The problem (with DEDUCTIVE science) is that the identification of the false premise or the invalid argument is devastating - you have a full-blooded theory before and dismal ruins after the identification. The scale of the disaster could be spectacular:

Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce! (...) The speed of light is c+v." [Note: Bryan Wallace wrote "The Farce of Physics" on his deathbed hence some imperfections in the text!]

Albert Einstein (1954): "I consider it entirely possible that physics cannot be based upon the field concept, that is on continuous structures. Then nothing will remain of my whole castle in the air, including the theory of gravitation, but also nothing of the rest of contemporary physics."

Curiously, Uffink did refer to a possibly false premise (assumption) which leads to the entropy-always-increases version of the second law:

Jos Uffink, Bluff your Way in the Second Law of Thermodynamics, p.39: "A more important objection, it seems to me, is that Clausius bases his conclusion that the entropy increases in a nicht umkehrbar [irreversible] process on the assumption that such a process can be closed by an umkehrbar [reversible] process to become a cycle. This is essential for the definition of the entropy difference between the initial and final states. But the assumption is far from obvious for a system more complex than an ideal gas, or for states far from equilibrium, or for processes other than the simple exchange of heat and work. Thus, the generalisation to all transformations occurring in Nature is somewhat rash."

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho,

Are Borrill's helicity eigenvalues the solution to the enigma? I don't think so. I prefer to trust in an Anti-Wheeler thesis: No wheel rotates forever, and I would like you to comment on my last reply in "Faster than light".

Eckard

The Problem with Deductive Science II

In DEDUCTIVE science, a single false premise can ruin everything, including the career and business of high priests. Yet some time ago Einsteiniana's high priests did not know that and used to launch fierce attacks on Einstein's 1905 false light postulate:

Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes using the word "relative." (...) "Perhaps relativity is too restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity," Dr. Magueijo said. "We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of light."

Nowadays Einsteiniana's priests feel that Einstein's 1905 false light postulate should remain intact but are still unaware that, in DEDUCTIVE science, you cannot have a true premise (the light postulate) and false consequences (the relative time of special relativity). So they make career and money by fiercely attacking the relative time of special relativity while wholeheartedly defending the light postulate:

"Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

"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."

"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me. LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality. QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here? LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho,

You reminded us of Smolin's project in 2011. I am not aware of a result, and I was skeptical because Smolin, instead of dealing with basic fallacies, focused on desired solutions solving "the problem of quantum gravity, which is the problem of unifying the physics of the quantum with the physics of spacetime, the problem of the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the problem of how the laws of physics, which are observed ... govern our universe".

Look at how my current essay was rated (3.8 and 1.5) while nobody except myself and a provoked comment by Christian Corda criticized it.

Klingman spontaneously wrote:"I agree with you 100%."

Fisher wrote:"I found myself openly gaining deep insights into exiting truths I had never even thought of previously."

Jackson wrote:"Another victory for realism over the fantasies emerging from careless initial assumptions."

Mishra wrote:"Your essay is as much a pleasure to read".

Hai wrote:"there is nothing to blame the teacher's essay."

Ryan wrote:"Thoroughly enjoyed reading it - thanks for a great essay!"

Perez Wrote: "... your well structured and written essay. You raised several interesting issues".

Dickau wrote:"I have admired your ability to argue your points clearly and passionately, for not accepting a half-baked answer as truth".

N wrote: "... you are not siding with Wheeler's 'anthropic view' but maintain your realistic objective point of view."

Rogozhin wrote:"Excellent essay in the spirit of Descartes".

Borrill wrote:"Eckard - excellent description of time and photon propagation."

Tamari wrote: "I ... comment ... on your very interesting endnotes."

I guess, Shannon's (and my) view is indeed the most obvious starting point of an antithesis not just to Einstein's first postulate of special relativity but also to misuse and mutilation of mathematics. Christian Corda did ignore my argument that a singularity has no measure as does also not have any other fictitious physical object, for instance the middle-point of earth. He will perhaps win the contest for what he wrote elsewhere about unitarity.

Eckard

Doublethink in Divine Albert's World

John Norton knows that, according to Maxwell's theory, the speed of light relative to the observer varies with the speed of the observer:

John Norton: "That [Maxwell's] theory allows light to slow and be frozen in the frame of reference of a sufficiently rapidly moving observer."

John Norton teaches that the speed of light relative to the observer does not vary with the speed of the observer. He explains that this invariance is the essence of Einstein's 1905 light postulate and that Einstein took the idea from... Maxwell's theory:

John Norton: "Why Einstein should believe the light postulate is a little harder to see. We would expect that a light signal would slow down relative to us if we chase after it. The light postulate says no. No matter how fast an inertial observer is traveling in pursuit of the light signal, that observer will always find the light signal to be traveling at the same speed, c. The principal reason for Einstein's acceptance of the light postulate was his lengthy study of electrodynamics, the theory of electric and magnetic fields. The theory was the most advanced physics of the time. Some 50 years before, Maxwell had shown that light was merely a ripple propagating in an electromagnetic field. Maxwell's theory predicted that the speed of the ripple was a quite definite number: c."

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. (...) It need hardly be said that the subtlest practitioners of doublethink are those who invented doublethink and know that it is a vast system of mental cheating. In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion ; the more intelligent, the less sane."

Pentcho Valev

Lakatos' Protective Belt : Justification of Dishonesty

Theoreticians don't abandon false postulates (core assumptions, axioms) in the face of refuting experimental evidence - rather, they surround them with a wall of ad hoc hypotheses which "serves to deflect refuting propositions from the core assumptions". Imre Lakatos described the phenomenon and called the wall the "protective belt":

"Lakatos distinguished between two parts of a scientific theory: its "hard core" which contains its basic assumptions (or axioms, when set out formally and explicitly), and its "protective belt", a surrounding defensive set of "ad hoc" (produced for the occasion) hypotheses. (...) In Lakatos' model, we have to explicitly take into account the "ad hoc hypotheses" which serve as the protective belt. The protective belt serves to deflect "refuting" propositions from the core assumptions..."

In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment UNEQUIVOCALLY confirmed the assumption that the speed of light varies with the speed of the emitter (c'=c+v). That is, at that time, Newton's emission theory of light was the only theory able to explain the null result of the experiment. Then FitzGerald, Lorentz and Einstein performed a revolution by replacing the Newtonian assumption with its antithesis - the false assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter (c'=c). They also devised a protective belt - "contracting lengths, local time, or Lorentz transformations" - that quite successfully deflected refuting evidence from the false assumption:

"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."

The "protective belt" is a universal tool in scientific theorizing and in this sense it is something normal - any different science would be anomalous. Yet... a dead organism emits a specific smell which is again... normal.

Pentcho Valev

Pentcho,

Michelson's 1881 and 1887 experiments disproved Maxwell's idea of an aether relative to which the earth was imagined to move. However, they did NOT confirm what you are stubbornly reiterating, and it is NOT a false assumption that the speed of light is independent of the speed of the emitter. Read the endnotes of my current FQXi contest essay.

Eckard

Regarding the Ballad of Pentcho and Eckard (8/19/13) Einstein related his epiphany of SR as time stopping at light speed. While this is true for an observer at light velocity it cannot be true of time itself. Rather the Equivalence Principle must be interpreted as the faster an observer goes, the more closely he-she approximates the limit velocity to which time can extend. Otherwise EMR would have to create more time to be able to continue in its propagation.

Hi John Cox,

Isn't Epiphany a Christian festival held on January 6th which commemorates the arrival of the three wise man who came to see Jesus Christ? I wonder, why did you write epiphany instead of Epiphany? Did you intend ridiculing Einstein?

A ballad is a long song which tells a story in simple language. Why did you use this metaphor in connection with my rather short post of Aug. 19?

I don't share Einstein's (and your) opinion that time is stopping for a hypothetical antenna/receiver which is thought performing a relative motion away from an antenna/sender.

Eckard

Yes, Eckard.

Webster also defines epiphany as (2) a manifestation, esp. of divinity. The Eureka moment if you will. Pardon my quip of 'Ballad' referring to the disagreement between you and Pentcho Valev, There is an old country-rock song about a deal in Mexico that went way south, titled The Ballad of Poncho and Lefty.

As I said, I do not agree with the metaphor that Einstein employed, time 'stops' for no man. It is independent of the emitter. My point I seemed to have failed to make is that light velocity is that specific velocity and an observer approaching that limit would experience time seeming to extend less quickly. Fitzgerald remarked that the speed of light was 'astonishingly' low, which given a common Newtonian belief of it being instantaneous, the M&M results and the calculated distance to the sun would have been astonishing to many at the time.

The gist of my remarks were that time is local to any discrete mass, and our human experience is a second order effect in aggregate. But also that time itself in relation to gravitational domains apparently has an upper limit to the rate of its extension. Corrections to synchronization for SR and GR effects in Global Positioning satellites * Peter Galison; Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps - Empires of Time pp287-89* are more proofs of both theories. An observer, human or otherwise, cannot exceed the upper limit of velocity to which time can extend but that does not mean that time always extends at equivalent light speed. The common joke that the speed of time is one second per second is true enough in any gravitational reference. That said I'll risk outcry by suggesting that some value might be found in a mathematical construct where the 'speed of time' is equivalent to escape velocity of the local gravitational reference.

Thank you for your explanations, John.

Poncho does hopefully not remind too much of Sancho Pansa. Being a lefty (in the sense of left-handed) is something that I share with Einstein, and, if I recall correctly, also with Obama, Clinton, Bush, and others.

I do not imagine time propagating.

Eckard

My Bad, Eckard,

I do tend to be glib among a few friends with eclectic tastes, but must apologize for not thinking. This site is so generally well spoken that I forget that it is a truly international audience and what might be quickly grasped as a playful use of words culturally for me, can be gibberish to others. Also I'm an old dog and computerized communication is a really new trick, I'll try to be more careful in my choice of words.

I do like this thread, the concept of time being a fundamental constituent of natural physical reality is neither radical or revolutionary to me, perhaps because I came to physics more from a philosophic approach than mathematic. I've therefore given some serious thought over the years as to why physics has come to think of time as something other than a natural phenomenon, and in truth it took me a long, long time to realize that conceptually the reason why I struggled to understand many aspects was that generally physics has treated time as a quantum or relativistic effect, or a manifestation of abstract mathematics.

Long before Newton the old questions of time arose as to whether it was like a river carrying us along with it, or was it like a static state which we move through. Both concepts have problems but there seems little else to choose from. And the roots of arguments for 'non-real' time can be found in those problems. The river of time implies that someone has passed this place before it is being written by me, what intersections with that can there be? multiverses become a possibility. If it is static why can't we move around space and eventually wind up back here now? quantum entanglement comes to mind.

So the right question to ask is: what have we been missing? What nuance can be distinguished? I long ago thought that times arrow flowed past us yet carried us along at our own pace, not that we are tethered to an anchor other than our own relative mass. Time has become fundamentally localized for me, and I have no difficulty in imagining it continually recreating in seeking equilibrium with space yet also existing in a static distribution of continuum variation of rate of extension. That probably sounds pretty weird.

John,

We experience time as a sequence of events and in its mathematical reductionism, physics treats it as a measure of interval. It might seem little different whether you simultaneously measure between the peaks of waves/distance, or as they pass a marker/duration, but with the first, you are measuring space and with the second, you are measuring action.

Is time the frame of action, like space, or an effect of it, like temperature?

Does duration transcend the point of the present, or is duration simply what is present between the occurrence of events?

Now ask yourself, does the earth travel this duration from yesterday to tomorrow, or does tomorrow become yesterday because the earth rotates?

People spent a long time trying to figure out how it is that the sun moves across the sky, before realizing it was the earth moving the other direction.

Regards,

John M

Thanks, John Merryman,

for the specificity of argumentative questions you pose. I would qualify my response by referring to your preface that "physics treats (time) as a measure of interval". I do not reject that but neither do I accept it as exclusively so. It is the prevalent paradigm in assignment and generation of values in quantitative analysis, but imposes a number line on all such operations.

If I may briefly digress, a fairly recent book 'Where mathematics come from, how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being' (my library lend receipt doesn't list the authors and I've forgotten) presented research showing that precognitive infants have the innate ability to immediately distinguish 1, 2 and 3 objects, and slightly less readily 4. Also infants can readily distinguish between those numbers of objects. It seems we are genetically predisposed to cognitively develop math as a construct of interval and object.

We also possess a capacity, perhaps instinctively, to perceive continuous, nonsegmented motion or change. It is this paradigm in which I find time most accessible. A number line can be applied to it but is not a necessity. Quantitative analysis can be made by rational comparative proportion with space and energy.

I could launch into a wordy monologue but prefer to be welcome, so I'll concisely reply to the questions from a paradigm of continuum.

Time is a frame of action along with space, but covariant in scale. That

covariance induces action of time to extend seeking equilibrium with space, and energy is emergent from the stress between the rigid covariant scales, like temperature.

Duration is more difficult to express as it can be a zero point determined as an instantaneous rate of time extension of any value between nil and light velocity. That point however, is manifold of the existant velocity, the relative energy density proportional to that velocity, and the location spatially along a radial length of a rest mass of energy determined as an exponential function of the difference between the simultaneous existant velocities of nil and light velocity producing a distribution of energy in a continuum of density variation across the mass-energy volume.

So while duration could be said to transcend the point of the present, it is finite as a manifold point of occurrence between relational proportional values.

Energy emerging continuously from the spacetime covariance maintains a cohesion as a discrete mass though the lower energy density values of multiple masses may overlap and meld without loss of cohesive integrity. Those lower density limits can prescribe comparatively vast volumes so in aggregate it is quite applicable to operate in a paradigm of object/intervals as the individual discrete particles can fit right into a number line. The composite field on energy of the sun must reach at least as far as the aphelion of the longest period comet. Hope this was somewhat comprehensible.