www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a909857880
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78.
"The triumph of relativity theory represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of science."
Philosophers of science remained silent. For the sake of argument, let us assume that they possess dignity which prevents them from discussing one Peter Hayes quoted by one Pentcho Valev. The assumption is wrong - this silence is not unprecedented. In 2001 Jos Uffink, an influential philosopher of science, published a text equivalent to "The triumph of thermodynamics represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of science":
philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "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."
For 9 years no philosopher of science has discussed or even referred to this text. Uffink himself seems to have forgotten it completely. Another influential philosopher of science, John Norton, published texts which, if combined with a few other texts, clearly suggest that Einstein's 1905 false light postulate has in fact killed theoretical physics. Other philosophers of science remained silent:
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state in the present. AS LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY LIGHT, ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of objections would render an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE."
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."
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."
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/
"Genius Among Geniuses" by Thomas Levenson
"And then, in June, Einstein completes special relativity, which adds a twist to the story: Einstein's March paper treated light as particles, but special relativity sees light as a continuous field of waves. Alice's Red Queen can accept many impossible things before breakfast, but it takes a supremely confident mind to do so. Einstein, age 26, sees light as wave and particle, picking the attribute he needs to confront each problem in turn. Now that's tough."
www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?opti...&lecture_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
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."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha, hm, ha ha ha."
www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
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."
Recently John Norton suggested that the conclusion that the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, a conclusion directly following from Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, should be abandoned. Other philosophers of science remained silent:
www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article...ry=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."
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, 1 Mar 2009: "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."
Re:Silent Philosophers of Science 2 Years, 3 Months ago
Karma: 6
"The triumph of relativity theory represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of science."
I like this.
If nothing else, science and philosophy share in common the same imponderables:
• Why does anything exist at all?
• Why this existence and not another?
• Is existence infinite?
• If infinite, what is infinity?
• Or, instead, was existence created?
• If created, by what or whom?
• If created, out of what?
• Was it created out of nothing at all?
• If so, what is "nothing at all"?
• Is there a teleological "purpose" behind existence?
• In the context of All There Is, where do you and I fit into it?
• What happens after we die?
As I like to point out, once you go that far out on the metaphysical limb, rational thought itself simply implodes into the philosophical equivalent of a Black Hole. Logic may go into it but what comes out? Not anything we might be able to imagine, I suspect.
Out there is right around the corner from God.
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Re:Silent Philosophers of Science 2 Years, 3 Months ago
Karma: -17
"The other Einstein" - another topic that makes philosophers of science silent. The other Einstein was the honest (but weaker) moiety of Einstein's split personality that was sorry for having destroyed theoretical physics by procrusteanizing it into conformity with his 1905 false light postulate:
en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Development_o...Essence_of_Radiation
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of Radiation by Albert Einstein, 1909
"A large body of facts shows undeniably that light has certain fundamental properties that are better explained by Newton's emission theory of light than by the oscillation theory. For this reason, I believe that the next phase in the development of theoretical physics will bring us a theory of light that can be considered a fusion of the oscillation and emission theories. The purpose of the following remarks is to justify this belief and to show that a profound change in our views on the composition and essence of light is imperative.....Then the electromagnetic fields that make up light no longer appear as a state of a hypothetical medium, but rather as independent entities that the light source gives off, just as in Newton's emission theory of light......Relativity theory has changed our views on light. Light is conceived not as a manifestation of the state of some hypothetical medium, but rather as an independent entity like matter. Moreover, this theory shares with the corpuscular theory of light the unusual property that light carries inertial mass from the emitting to the absorbing object."
www.nybooks.com/articles/20279
Lee Smolin: "It is also disappointing that none of the biographers mention the writings that lead John Stachel, the founding editor of the Einstein Papers project, to speak of "the other Einstein". These writings look beyond his struggles with the unified field theory..."
www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/9755...7e3-4a09145525ca.pdf
John Stachel: "It is not so well known that there was "another Einstein," who from 1916 on was skeptical about the continuum as a foundational element in physics, especially because of the existence of quantum phenomena."
The other Einstein misled some Einsteinians into believing that Newton's emission theory of light is compatible with and even essential for the future development of Einstein's relativity:
www.aip.org/history/einstein/essay-einstein-relativity.htm
This reprints an essay written ca. 1983, " 'What Song the Syrens Sang' : How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?" in John Stachel, Einstein from "B" to "Z".
"This was itself a daring step, since these methods had been developed to help understand the behavior of ordinary matter while Einstein was applying them to the apparently quite different field of electromagnetic radiation. The "revolutionary" conclusion to which he came was that, in certain respects, electromagnetic radiation behaved more like a collection of particles than like a wave. He announced this result in a paper published in 1905, three months before his SRT paper. The idea that a light beam consisted of a stream of particles had been espoused by Newton and maintained its popularity into the middle of the 19th century. It was called the "emission theory" of light, a phrase I shall use.....Giving up the ether concept allowed Einstein to envisage the possibility that a beam of light was "an independent structure," as he put it a few years later, "which is radiated by the light source, just as in Newton's emission theory of light.".....An emission theory is perfectly compatible with the relativity principle. Thus, the M-M experiment presented no problem; nor is stellar abberration difficult to explain on this basis......This does not imply that Lorentz's equations are adequate to explain all the features of light, of course. Einstein already knew they did not always correctly do so-in particular in the processes of its emission, absorption and its behavior in black body radiation. Indeed, his new velocity addition law is also compatible with an emission theory of light, just because the speed of light compounded with any lesser velocity still yields the same value. If we model a beam of light as a stream of particles, the two principles can still be obeyed. A few years later (1909), Einstein first publicly expressed the view that an adequate future theory of light would have to be some sort of fusion of the wave and emission theories......The resulting theory did not force him to choose between wave and emission theories of light, but rather led him to look forward to a synthesis of the two."
press.princeton.edu/chapters/i6272.html
John Stachel: "Not only is the theory [of relativity] compatible with an emission theory of radiation, since it implies that the velocity of light is always the same relative to its source; the theory also requires that radiation transfer mass between an emitter and an absorber, reinforcing Einstein's light quantum hypothesis that radiation manifests a particulate structure under certain circumstances."
ustl1.univ-lille1.fr/culture/publication...il/lna40/pgs/4_5.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "Même s'il était conscient de l'intérêt de la théorie de l'émission, Einstein n'a pas pris le chemin, totalement oublié, de Michell, de Blair, des Principia en somme. Le contexte de découverte de la relativité ignorera le XVIIIème siècle et ses racines historiques plongent au coeur du XIXème siècle. Arago, Fresnel, Fizeau, Maxwell, Mascart, Michelson, Poincaré, Lorentz en furent les principaux acteurs et l'optique ondulatoire le cadre dans lequel ces questions sont posées. Pourtant, au plan des structures physiques, l'optique relativiste des corps en mouvement de cette fin du XVIIIème est infiniment plus intéressante - et plus utile pédagogiquement - que le long cheminement qu'a imposé l'éther."
www.mfo.de/programme/schedule/2006/08c/OWR_2006_10.pdf
Jean Eisenstaedt: "At the end of the 18th century, a natural extension of Newton's dynamics to light was developed but immediately forgotten. A body of works completed the Principia with a relativistic optics of moving bodies, the discovery of the Doppler-Fizeau effect some sixty years before Doppler, and many other effects and ideas which represent a fascinating preamble to Einstein relativities. It was simply supposed that 'a body-light', as Newton named it, was subject to the whole dynamics of the Principia in much the same way as were material particles; thus it was subject to the Galilean relativity and its velocity was supposed to be variable. Of course it was subject to the short range 'refringent' force of the corpuscular theory of light --which is part of the Principia-- but also to the long range force of gravitation which induces Newton's theory of gravitation. The fact that the 'mass' of a corpuscle of light was not known did not constitute a problem since it does not appear in the Newtonian (or Einsteinian) equations of motion. It was precisely what John Michell (1724-1793), Robert Blair (1748-1828), Johann G. von Soldner (1776-1833) and François Arago (1786-1853) were to do at the end of the 18th century and the beginning the 19th century in the context of Newton's dynamics. Actually this 'completed' Newtonian theory of light and material corpuscle seems to have been implicitly accepted at the time. In such a Newtonian context, not only Soldner's calculation of the deviation of light in a gravitational field was understood, but also dark bodies (cousins of black holes). A natural (Galilean and thus relativistic) optics of moving bodies was also developed which easily explained aberration and implied as well the essence of what we call today the Doppler effect. Moreover, at the same time the structure of -- but also the questions raised by-- the Michelson experiment was understood. Most of this corpus has long been forgotten. The Michell-Blair-Arago effect, prior to Doppler's effect, is entirely unknown to physicists and historians. As to the influence of gravitation on light, the story was very superficially known but had never been studied in any detail. Moreover, the existence of a theory dealing with light, relativity and gravitation, embedded in Newton's Principia was completely ignored by physicists and by historians as well. But it was a simple and natural way to deal with the question of light, relativity (and gravitation) in a Newtonian context."
John Stachel and John Norton are friends. They write books together, sell them successfully and share the money. Yet John Stachel teaches that Newton's emission theory of light and Einstein's relativity are compatible while John Norton teaches the opposite (the scientific community invariably sings "Divine Einstein" and "Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity"; philosophers of science are generally silent):
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/rel_of_sim/index.html
John Norton: "But an emission theory is precluded in special relativity by the part of the light postulate that asserts that the velocity of light is independent of the velocity of the emitter."
"YES WE ALL BELIEVE IN RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY, RELATIVITY"
Re:Silent Philosophers of Science 2 Years, 3 Months ago
Karma: -17
Pentcho wrote: Recently John Norton suggested that the conclusion that the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, a conclusion directly following from Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, should be abandoned. Other philosophers of science remained silent:
www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html/article...ry=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."
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, 1 Mar 2009: "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."
www.magazine.utoronto.ca/blogs/the-true-...ow-relativity-works/
"James R. Brown, a U of T philosophy professor, meanwhile, argued that past, present, and future – as fundamental as they may seem – do not make up part of our "objective reality." He says that past, present, and future must all be considered equally "real." This view is sometimes known as the "block universe," in which time is represented as just another dimension, analogous to the dimensions of space, and all parts of the block are equally real. Incredibly, this leaves the so-called "flow" of time as mere illusion, Brown says. The future is just as fixed and as impossible to change as the past."
So "the flow of time is an illusion" and "the flow of time is not an illusion" are statements that per se do not make philosophers silent. However if you ask "Is the former statement a corollary of Einstein's 1905 false light postulate?", a deep silence will fall upon the philosophical scene.
Re:Silent Philosophers of Science 2 Years, 2 Months ago
Karma: -17
For a century human rationality has been procrusteanized into conformity with Einstein's idea that, for a non-rotating observer, the periphery of a rotating disk is LONGER than the periphery of a non-rotating disk:
www.bartleby.com/173/23.html
Albert Einstein (1879–1955). Relativity: The Special and General Theory. 1920. XXIII. Behaviour of Clocks and Measuring Rods on a Rotating Body of Reference
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/general_relativity_pathway/index.html
John Norton: "If one has a circular disk at rest in some inertial reference system in special relativity, the geometry of its surface is Euclidean. That is quite obvious, but it will be useful to spell out what that means in terms of the outcomes of measuring operations. If the disk is ten feet in diameter, then it means that we can lay 10 foot long rulers across a diameter. Euclidean geometry tells us that the circumference is pi x 10 feet, which is about 31 feet. That means that we can traverse the full circumference of the disk by laying 31 rulers round the outer rim of the disk. What if we have a disk of the same diameter of 10 feet but in rapid uniform rotation with respect to the first disk? Things will go rather differently. Assume that this rotating disk is covered with foot long rulers that move with it. These rulers are just like the ones that were used to survey the non-rotating disk. (That means that an observer moving with the rod on the rotating disk would find it to be identical to one of the rulers used to survey the non-rotating disk.) What will be the outcome of surveying the geometry of this rotating disk with those rods? An observer who is not rotating with the disk would judge all these rulers to have shrunk in the direction of their motion. That means that, according to this new observer, the surveying of the disk would proceed differently. Ten rulers would still be needed to span the diameter of the disk. Since the motion of the disk is perpendicular to the rulers laid out along a diameter, the length of these rulers would be unaffected by the rotation. That is not so for the rulers laid along the circumference. They lie in the direction of rapid motion. As a result, they shorten and more are needed to cover the full circumference of the disk. Thus we measure the circumference of the rotating disk to be greater than 31 feet, the Euclidean value. In other words, we find that the geometry of the disk is not Euclidean. The circumference of the disk is more than the Euclidean value of pi times its diameter."
In fact this is a second procrusteanization. Initially human rationality is forced to believe (Paul Ehrenfest was a believer who did not undergo the second procrusteanization) that, for a non-rotating observer, the periphery of the rotating disk should be SHORTER than the periphery of a non-rotating disk, as Einstein's special relativity predicts:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehrenfest_paradox
"The Ehrenfest paradox concerns the rotation of a "rigid" disc in the theory of relativity. In its original formulation as presented by Paul Ehrenfest 1909 in the Physikalische Zeitschrift, it discusses an ideally rigid cylinder that is made to rotate about its axis of symmetry. The radius R as seen in the laboratory frame is always perpendicular to its motion and should therefore be equal to its value R0 when stationary. However, the circumference (2*pi*R) should appear Lorentz-contracted to a smaller value than at rest, by the usual factor gamma. This leads to the contradiction that R=R0 and R<R0."
Recently John Norton informed believers that two different disks should be compared, one of them melted, set into rotation and then solidified, as Einstein found it suitable to explain in a letter to a friend (not elsewhere):
www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/general_relativity_pathway/index.html
John Norton: "Note what was not said in this account. It did not say that we take the first disk and set it into rotation. The reason is that it is impossible in relativity theory to take a disk made out of stiff material and set it into rotation. If one were to try to do this, the disk would contract in the circumferential direction but not in the radial direction. As a result, a disk made of stiff material would break apart. If we want a rotating disk made of stiff material, we need to create it already rotating. Once in a letter on the subject, Einstein remarked that a way to get a disk of stiff material into rotation is first to melt it, set the molten material into rotation and then allow it harden. The rotating disk problem has created a rather large and fruitless literature that suggests some sort of paradox is at hand. Most of it derives from a failure to recognize that a stiff disk cannot be set into uniform rotation without destroying it."
Now John Norton will be able to explain to believers how an 80m long pole can be trapped inside a 40m long barn (the barn is melted and then solidified?) and how a bug can be both dead and alive:
math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in the barn. Now someone takes the pole and tries to run (at nearly the speed of light) through the barn with the pole horizontal. Special Relativity (SR) says that a moving object is contracted in the direction of motion: this is called the Lorentz Contraction. So, if the pole is set in motion lengthwise, then it will contract in the reference frame of a stationary observer.....So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the contracted pole shut up in your barn. The runner emerges from the far door unscathed.....If the doors are kept shut the rod will obviously smash into the barn door at one end. If the door withstands this the leading end of the rod will come to rest in the frame of reference of the stationary observer. There can be no such thing as a rigid rod in relativity so the trailing end will not stop immediately and the rod will be compressed beyond the amount it was Lorentz contracted. If it does not explode under the strain and it is sufficiently elastic it will come to rest and start to spring back to its natural shape but since it is too big for the barn the other end is now going to crash into the back door and the rod will be trapped in a compressed state inside the barn."
hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html
"The bug-rivet paradox is a variation on the twin paradox and is similar to the pole-barn paradox.....The end of the rivet hits the bottom of the hole before the head of the rivet hits the wall. So it looks like the bug is squashed.....All this is nonsense from the bug's point of view. The rivet head hits the wall when the rivet end is just 0.35 cm down in the hole! The rivet doesn't get close to the bug....The paradox is not resolved."
www.amnh.org/education/resources/rfl/web...smic/cs_michell.html
"Michell accepted Newton's theory that light consists of small material particles. He reasoned that such particles, emerging from the surface of a star, would have their speed reduced by the star's gravitational pull, just like projectiles fired upward from the Earth. (...) Michell got the right answer, although he was wrong about one point. We now know, from Einstein's relativity theory of 1905, that light moves through space at a constant speed, regardless of the local strength of gravity."
Needless to say, in 1905 Einstein did not say anything like "light moves through space at a constant speed, regardless of the local strength of gravity". Rather, from 1907 on, he claimed that, in a gravitational field, the speed of light is VARIABLE, not constant. In 1911 Einstein was explicitly using Newton's emission theory of light in order to show how the speed of light varies with the gravitational potential:
www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae13.cfm
"So, it is absolutely true that the speed of light is not constant in a gravitational field [which, by the equivalence principle, applies as well to accelerating (non-inertial) frames of reference]. If this were not so, there would be no bending of light by the gravitational field of stars....Indeed, this is exactly how Einstein did the calculation in: 'On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light,' Annalen der Physik, 35, 1911. which predated the full formal development of general relativity by about four years. This paper is widely available in English. You can find a copy beginning on page 99 of the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity.' You will find in section 3 of that paper, Einstein's derivation of the (variable) speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is,
c' = c0 ( 1 + V / c^2 )
where V is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light c0 is measured."
www.blazelabs.com/f-g-gcont.asp
"So, faced with this evidence most readers must be wondering why we learn about the importance of the constancy of speed of light. Did Einstein miss this? Sometimes I find out that what's written in our textbooks is just a biased version taken from the original work, so after searching within the original text of the theory of GR by Einstein, I found this quote: "In the second place our result shows that, according to the general theory of relativity, the law of the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo, which constitutes one of the two fundamental assumptions in the special theory of relativity and to which we have already frequently referred, cannot claim any unlimited validity. A curvature of rays of light can only take place when the velocity of propagation of light varies with position. Now we might think that as a consequence of this, the special theory of relativity and with it the whole theory of relativity would be laid in the dust. But in reality this is not the case. We can only conclude that the special theory of relativity cannot claim an unlimited domain of validity ; its results hold only so long as we are able to disregard the influences of gravitational fields on the phenomena (e.g. of light)." - Albert Einstein (1879-1955) - The General Theory of Relativity: Chapter 22 - A Few Inferences from the General Principle of Relativity-. Today we find that since the Special Theory of Relativity unfortunately became part of the so called mainstream science, it is considered a sacrilege to even suggest that the speed of light be anything other than a constant. This is somewhat surprising since even Einstein himself suggested in a paper "On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light," Annalen der Physik, 35, 1911, that the speed of light might vary with the gravitational potential. Indeed, the variation of the speed of light in a vacuum or space is explicitly shown in Einstein's calculation for the angle at which light should bend upon the influence of gravity. One can find his calculation in his paper. The result is c'=c(1+V/c^2) where V is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the measurement is taken. 1+V/c^2 is also known as the GRAVITATIONAL REDSHIFT FACTOR."
In 1915 Einstein managed to get rid of Newton's emission theory of light by replacing the equation c'=c(1+V/c^2) with c'=c(1+2V/c^2), which is tantamount to replacing 2+2=4 with 2+2=5:
www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-01/6-01.htm
"In geometrical units we define c_0 = 1, so Einstein's 1911 formula can be written simply as c=1+phi. However, this formula for the speed of light (not to mention this whole approach to gravity) turned out to be incorrect, as Einstein realized during the years leading up to 1915 and the completion of the general theory. In fact, the general theory of relativity doesn't give any equation for the speed of light at a particular location, because the effect of gravity cannot be represented by a simple scalar field of c values. Instead, the "speed of light" at a each point depends on the direction of the light ray through that point, as well as on the choice of coordinate systems, so we can't generally talk about the value of c at a given point in a non-vanishing gravitational field. However, if we consider just radial light rays near a spherically symmetrical (and non- rotating) mass, and if we agree to use a specific set of coordinates, namely those in which the metric coefficients are independent of t, then we can read a formula analogous to Einstein's 1911 formula directly from the Schwarzschild metric. (...) In the Newtonian limit the classical gravitational potential at a distance r from mass m is phi=-m/r, so if we let c_r = dr/dt denote the radial speed of light in Schwarzschild coordinates, we have c_r =1+2phi, which corresponds to Einstein's 1911 equation, except that we have a factor of 2 instead of 1 on the potential term."
www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from: www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/histo.../1911_35_898-908.pdf ). It predated the full formal development of general relativity by about four years. You can find an English translation of this paper in the Dover book 'The Principle of Relativity' beginning on page 99; you will find in section 3 of that paper Einstein's derivation of the variable speed of light in a gravitational potential, eqn (3). The result is: c'=c0(1+phi/c^2) where phi is the gravitational potential relative to the point where the speed of light co is measured......You can find a more sophisticated derivation later by Einstein (1955) from the full theory of general relativity in the weak field approximation....For the 1955 results but not in coordinates see page 93, eqn (6.28): c(r)=[1+2phi(r)/c^2]c. Namely the 1955 approximation shows a variation in km/sec twice as much as first predicted in 1911."
www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/
George Orwell "1984": "In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?"
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