Zero wrote:
Pentcho Valev, science fraud.
bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/valevfaq.htm
Here Athel Cornish-Bowden honestly defends thermodynamics but elsewhere he honestly denounces it:
www.beilstein-institut.de/bozen2004/proc...en/CornishBowden.htm
Athel Cornish-Bowden: "The concept of entropy was introduced to thermodynamics by Clausius, who deliberately chose an obscure term for it, wanting a word based on Greek roots that would sound similar to "energy". In this way he hoped to have a word that would mean the same to everyone regardless of their language, and, as Cooper [2] remarked, he succeeded in this way in finding a word that meant the same to everyone: NOTHING. From the beginning it proved a very difficult concept for other thermodynamicists, even including such accomplished mathematicians as Kelvin and Maxwell; Kelvin, indeed, despite his own major contributions to the subject, never appreciated the idea of entropy [3]. The difficulties that Clausius created have continued to the present day, with the result that a fundamental idea that is absolutely necessary for understanding the theory of chemical equilibria continues to give trouble, not only to students but also to scientists who need the concept for their work."
Similarly, John Norton both honestly defends and honestly denounces the relativistic concept of time:
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/origins_pathway/index.html
John Norton: "An emission theory fails. So Einstein would have found himself in an impossible position. The speed of light cannot vary with the speed of the emitter; presumably it must be a constant, as Maxwell's theory had urged all along. Yet in addition, Einstein was convinced that the principle of relativity must obtain in electrodynamic theory. How can both obtain? They require the speed of light to be the same for all inertial observers? The footnote already quoted above points us to Einstein's next step. "The difficulty to be overcome lay in the constancy of the velocity of light in a vacuum, which I first believed had to be given up. Only after years of [jahrelang] groping did I notice that the difficulty lay in the arbitrariness of basic kinematical concepts." The key to the puzzle is the relativity of simultaneity. If Einstein gives up the absoluteness of simultaneity, then the principle of relativity and the constancy of the speed of light are compatible after all. The price paid for the compatibility is that we must allow that space and time behaves rather differently than Newton told us."
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Special_relativity_adding/index.html
John Norton: "This special role for the speed of light sometimes arouses special wonder. What is so special about light, we may be drawn to ask, that everything else takes such special note of it? Once one starts along this path, all sorts of confusions may arise. Is it that light is used for communication and finding things out? Does everything somehow respond to how we find things out? Does special relativity still work in the dark? Well--you can forget all this mystical mumbo-jumbo, if ever it attracted you. There is nothing special about light. It's space and time that is special. They have properties we don't expect. Space and time are such that rapidly moving objects shrink and their processes slow down. For a long time, we didn't notice these effects because we did not have a thorough account of a probe of space and time that moves very fast. That changed in the nineteenth century when we developed good theories of light. It is the probe that moves very fast and, for the first time, begins to reveal to us that space and time are not quite what we thought."
www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831....e-universe-tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity. Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....It is still not clear who is right, says John Norton, a philosopher based at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Norton is hesitant to express it, but his instinct - and the consensus in physics - seems to be that space and time exist on their own. The trouble with this idea, though, is that it doesn't sit well with relativity, which describes space-time as a malleable fabric whose geometry can be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter."
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."
George Orwell explains Athel Cornish-Bowden's and John Norton's behaviour:
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."
www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
George Orwell: "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
pvalev@yahoo.com
Facebook.com
Twitter.com
Warning: Spoiler!
