CRIMESTOP IN SCIENCE
Pentcho Valev
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the
end camouflages the real problem:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
"Einstein postulated, first, that the laws of physics don't prefer one
reference frame over another, as long as each is moving at a constant
velocity. Second, he said that c, the speed of light, will appear
exactly the same to every observer, in every frame of reference. A
century later, that second postulate still defies common sense. It
says that if you're driving down the highway at a quarter the speed of
light, you'll still see the photons from your headlights racing ahead
of you at light speed--not three-quarters light speed. If I'm coming
from the opposite direction at half light speed, I'll still see your
photons approaching at c--not 1.5 times c. Since speed is just space
divided by time, and we both agree about the speed of light, we can't
possibly agree about space and time. You say my clock is too slow and
my yardstick has shrunk (not to mention my whole car). Maddeningly, I
say the same about you. The one thing we agree on, aside from c
itself, is the distance covered by the photons in the weird new
reference frame of four-dimensional spacetime. It might be a relief to
learn that physicists were talking about chucking this deeply strange
theory. But just as Einstein made only minute corrections to Newton in
everyday life--to really feel the effects of special relativity, you
have to move at a large fraction of light speed--the proposed changes
to relativity would have only subtle, hard-to-detect effects. Yet the
stakes are big: the quest for a single theory that would unite general
relativity, Einstein's later theory describing gravity, with quantum
mechanics, the theory describing the forces inside the atom.
Physicists are taking many paths to this "quantum gravity" grail, but
in all of them spacetime itself, instead of being continuous, is made
of quantum bits. "It's like the difference between sand and water,"
says Giovanni Amelino-Camelia of La Sapienza University in Rome--
except that the spacetime grains could be around a hundred billion
billionth the size of an atomic nucleus. At this "Planck length,"
named after the father of quantum physics, gravity would no longer be
described by general relativity but by the new theory."
http://www.spacetimecenter.org/conferences/2008/Henry.pdf
Teaching Special Relativity: Minkowski trumps Einstein
Richard Conn Henry
Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy
The Johns Hopkins University
"Students find physics difficult - I am thinking of first-year
undergraduate university physics majors. I found it difficult myself,
and it took me almost 40 years of teaching physics to fully understand
the reasons for the perceived "difficulty." Why do students who find
mathematics easy to understand, find physics difficult to
understand?....How grotesquely badly we teach special relativity
encapsulates the practical problem of teaching physics to the freshman
physics major. I have never found a single freshman physics textbook
that teaches Minkowski spacetime; I have never found a single text on
General Relativity that mentions "Einstein's two
postulates.".....There is no doubt that, historically, Albert
Einstein, in 1905, did introduce two postulates (and also, that it is
he who discovered special relativity). But the second of these
postulates (the one concerning the constancy of c, just in case Reese
has confused you!) did not survive the year. In September of 1905
Einstein published a development from relativitythe discovery of the
implication that E = mc2 , and in this new paper he mentions a single
postulate only. But the paper contains a sweet footnote: "The
principle of the constancy of the velocity of light is of course
contained in Maxwell's equations." How I love that "of course!"
Einstein was human!......Antique postulates that are not of anything
but historical interest to genuine physicists are presented to
students as "Special Relativity.".....I feel that the time has come to
relegate the "two postulates" to the dustbin of history, and to teach
special relativity to undergraduates (or indeed, to middle school
students) the Minkowski way."
http://www.worldscibooks.com/chemistry/etextbook/6469/6469_preface.pdf
Arieh Ben-Naim: "I believe that the time is ripe to acknowledge that
the term entropy, as originally coined by Clausius, is an unfortunate
choice. Moreover, it is also a misleading term both in its meaning in
ancient and in contemporary Greek. On this matter, I cannot do any
better than Leon Cooper (1968). Cooper cites the original passage from
Clausius: in choosing the word "Entropy," Clausius wrote: "I prefer
going to the ancient languages for the names of important scientific
quantities, so that they mean the same thing in all living tongues. I
propose, accordingly, to call S the entropy of a body, after the Greek
word "transformation." I have designedly coined the word entropy to be
similar to energy, for these two quantities are so analogous in their
physical significance, that an analogy of denominations seems to be
helpful." Right after quoting Clausius' explanation on his reasons for
the choice of the word "Entropy," Cooper commented: "By doing this,
rather than extracting a name from the body of the current language
(say: lost heat), he succeeded in coining a word that meant the same
thing to everybody: nothing." I fully agree with Coopers comment;
however, I have two additional comments, and contrary to Cooper, I
venture into taking the inevitable conclusion: First, I agree that
"entropy means the same thing to everybody: nothing." But more than
that, entropy is also a misleading term....Finally, I believe that the
time has come to reach the inevitable conclusion that “entropy” is a
misnomer and should be replaced by either missing information or
uncertainty."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
>
> Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
> of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the
> end camouflages the real problem:
More examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring
which in the end camouflages the falsehood of Einstein's 1905 light
postulate:
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000218/00/Origins_of_contraction.pdf
Harvey Brown: "The FitzGerald-Lorentz (FL) hypothesis was of course
the result of a somewhat desperate attempt to reconcile the null
result of the 1887 Michelson-Morley (MM) experiment with the hitherto
successful Fresnel-Lorentz theory of a stationary luminiferous ether,
a medium through which the earth is assumed to move with unappreciable
drag. The MM experiment is rightly regarded today as one of the
turning points in physics, and although it is discussed widely in
textbooks, it is remarkable how much confusion still surrounds its
structure and meaning. In order then to understand the FL hypothesis,
it is necessary first to go over some welltrodden ground; sections 2
and 3 below are designed to show what the 1887 null result does and
does not imply. In particular it is shown in section 3 that IN THE
CONTEXT OF A THEORY OF LIGHT IN WHICH THE LIGHT-SPEED IS INDEPENDENT
OF THE SPEED OF THE SOURCE, A CERTAIN MOTION-INDUCED DEFORMATION OF
RIGID BODIES, OF WHICH CONTRACTION IS A SPECIAL CASE, IS REQUIRED."
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00001661/01/Minkowski.pdf
"Minkowski space-time: a glorious non-entity"
Harvey R. Brown and Oliver Pooley: "An examination of the status of
length contraction in the context of Einstein’s 1905 treatment of SR
will illustrate the way in which principle theories fail to be
explanatory. Recall that in this derivation the first conclusion drawn
from the two fundamental postulates is the invariance of the speed of
light, that it has the same constant value in all inertial frames.
This gives the ‘k-Lorentz transformations’, the Lorentz
transformations up to a velocity dependent scale factor, k. What has,
in effect, been shown is that if the speed of light as measured with
respect to frame F0 is to be found to be the same value as when
measured with respect to the ‘resting frame’ F, then rods and clocks
at rest in F0 had better contract and dilate (with respect to frame F)
in the coordinated way that is encoded in the k-Lorentz
transformations. One then appeals to the relativity principle again—
the principle entails that these coordinated contractions and
dilations must be exactly the same function of velocity for each
inertial frame, along with the principle of spatial isotropy, in order
to narrow down the deformations to just those encoded in the Lorentz
transformations. What has been shown is that rods and clocks must
behave in quite particular ways in order for the two postulates to be
true together. But this hardly amounts to an explanation of such
behaviour. Rather things go the other way around. It is because rods
and clocks behave as they do, in a way that is consistent with the
relativity principle, that light is measured to have the same speed in
each inertial frame."
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/philphys/index.html
John Norton: "Neo-Lorentzians return again. A perennial topic of
debate is whether the physical effects of special relativity (e.g.
length contraction) require some sort of physical explanation that in
turn requires some sort of state of rest such as Lorentz envisaged was
supplied by his ether."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-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."
http://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."
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-Philosophy/dp/0415701740
Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (Routledge Studies in
Contemporary Philosophy)
"Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity is an anthology of
original essays by an international team of leading philosophers and
physicists who, on the centenary of Albert Einsteins Special Theory of
Relativity, come together in this volume to reassess the contemporary
paradigm of the relativistic concept of time. A great deal has changed
since 1905 when Einstein proposed his Special Theory of Relativity,
and this book offers a fresh reassessment of Special Relativitys
relativistic concept of time in terms of epistemology, metaphysics and
physics. There is no other book like this available; hence
philosophers and scientists across the world will welcome its
publication."
"UNFORTUNATELY FOR EINSTEIN'S SPECIAL RELATIVITY, HOWEVER, ITS
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS ARE NOW SEEN TO BE
QUESTIONABLE, UNJUSTIFIED, FALSE, PERHAPS EVEN ILLOGICAL."
Craig Callender: "In my opinion, by far the best way for the tenser to
respond to Putnam et al is to adopt the Lorentz 1915 interpretation of
time dilation and Fitzgerald contraction. Lorentz attributed these
effects (and hence the famous null results regarding an aether) to the
Lorentz invariance of the dynamical laws governing matter and
radiation, not to spacetime structure. On this view, Lorentz
invariance is not a spacetime symmetry but a dynamical symmetry, and
the special relativistic effects of dilation and contraction are not
purely kinematical. The background spacetime is Newtonian or neo-
Newtonian, not Minkowskian. Both Newtonian and neo-Newtonian spacetime
include a global absolute simultaneity among their invariant
structures (with Newtonian spacetime singling out one of neo-Newtonian
spacetimes many preferred inertial frames as the rest frame). On this
picture, there is no relativity of simultaneity and spacetime is
uniquely decomposable into space and time."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Sue...
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
>
> Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
> of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the
> end camouflages the real problem:
>
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/030526/26beyond.htm
> "Einstein postulated, first, that the laws of physics don't prefer one
> reference frame over another, as long as each is moving at a constant
> velocity. Second, he said that c, the speed of light, will appear
> exactly the same to every observer, in every frame of reference. A
> century later, that second postulate still defies common sense.
<< where epsilon_0 and mu_0 are physical
constants which can be evaluated by performing two
simple experiments which involve measuring the force
of attraction between two fixed charges and two fixed
parallel current carrying wires. According to the
relativity principle, these experiments must yield
the same values for epsilon_0 and mu_0 in all inertial
frames. Thus, the speed of light must be the same
in all inertial frames. >>
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/em/lectures/node108.html
Sue...
Pentcho Valev
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
>
> Examples of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold
> of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring which in the
> end camouflages the real problem:
> ..................................................
Another example of "stopping short, as though by instinct, at the
threshold of any dangerous thought" and advancing some red herring
which in the end camouflages the falsehood of Einstein's 1905 light
postulate:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/Special_Relativity/index.html
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 chased 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 see the light signal
traveling at the same speed, c. The principal reason for his
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. The speed of a light
signal was quite unlike the speed of a pebble, say. The pebble could
move at any speed, depending on how hard it was thrown. It was
different with light in Maxwell's theory. No matter how the light
signal was made and projected, its speed always came out the same."
If John Norton did not obey crimestop, his text would be as follows:
"Why Einstein did not believe the light postulate is easy to see. We
would expect that a light signal would slow down relative to us if we
chased after it. The light postulate says no. That is, in accordance
with the light postulate, no matter how fast an inertial observer is
traveling in pursuit of the light signal, that observer will always
see the light signal traveling at the same speed, c. The principal
reason for his secret rejection 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 the aether. Maxwell's theory predicted that the speed of the
ripple, relative to the aether, was a quite definite number: c. If,
however, the relative speed of the observer and the aether was v, then
the speed of light relative to the observer was VARIABLE and obeyed
the equation c'=c+v. Yet that was not the correct equation: as far as
its speed was concerned, light obeyed Newton's emission theory of
light and behaved like a pebble, say. That is, the speed of light was
again VARIABLE and obeyed the equation c'=c+v, but this equation was
different since v was the relative speed of the light source and the
observer."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
Stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of the
dangerous thought: "Einstein's 1905 light postulate (c'=c) is false;
its antithesis given by Newton's emission theory of light (c'=c+v) is
true":
http://www.astrofind.net/documents/the-composition-and-essence-of-radiation.php
The Development of Our Views on the Composition and Essence of
Radiation by Albert Einstein
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."
http://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."
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&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."
http://au.encarta.msn.com/sidebar_781540289/einstein_on_gravitation_from_scientific_american.html
Albert Einstein 1950: "Since the theory of general relativity implies
the representation of physical reality by a CONTINUOUS FIELD, the
concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental
part, nor can the concept of motion. The particle can only appear as a
limited region in space in which the field strength or the energy
density are particularly high."
http://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."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHRK6ojWdtU
"The [Maxwell] equation seemed to say that light moved at 186000 miles
per second relative to.....everything"
If Einsteinians did not obey crimestop the text would be:
"The [Maxwell] equation seemed to say that light moved at 186000 miles
per second relative to an observer at rest with respect to the aether.
Relative to an observer moving at speed v with respect to the aether,
the equation said the speed of light would be c'=186000+v. "
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-17.html#seventeen
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-22.html#twentytwo
George Orwell: "He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions - "the Party says the earth is
flat", "the party says that ice is heavier than water" - and trained
himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
George Orwell's text modified so as to describe a physics student's
self-education:
"He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself
with propositions - "Einsteiniana says that, when the observer starts
moving towards the light source, the Doppler effect is due to shift in
wavelength, not to shift in the speed of light", "Einsteiniana says
that, in accordance with Einstein's 1905 light postulate, a 80m long
pole can safely be trapped inside a 40m long barn" - and trained
himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
Einsteinians exercising themselves in crimestop by presenting
themselves with the proposition: The Michelson-Morley experiment
"showed that the speed of light is always the same (now known to be
186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary observers as well as
moving ones":
http://www.newsweek.com/id/204892
"On July 22 the Einstein Papers Project, located at the California
Institute of Technology in Pasadena, will release the 12th volume of
letters written or received by Albert Einstein - 791 of them - plus
transcripts of several notable lectures and interviews the physicist
gave, covering the year 1921. It was a momentous 12 months. You might
think there are no new revelations to be made about him, but for
Einstein groupies the current volume addresses at least one key
question: what did Einstein know about an 1887 experiment that
discovered that the speed of light is invariant, regardless of the
observer's speed or direction of motion - an idea that forms the core
of special relativity and that Einstein did not mention when he laid
out the theory of special relativity in a 1905 paper? Called the
Michelson-Morley experiment, it disproved the existence of the ether,
a substance once thought to carry light waves and form an absolute
reference frame for space. In their namesake experiment, Albert
Michelson (a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1907) and Edward
Morley (a chemist) showed that the speed of light is always the same
(now known to be 186,282 miles per second) relative to stationary
observers as well as moving ones."
However stupidity is "as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult
to attain". The same Einsteinians (more precisely, John Norton is an
Editor of the Einstein Papers Project) attaining utmost intelligence:
http://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."
http://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."
James H. Smith "Introduction à la relativité" EDISCIENCE 1969 pp.
39-41: "Si la lumière était un flot de particules mécaniques obéissant
aux lois de la mécanique, il n'y aurait aucune difficulté à comprendre
les résultats de l'expérience de Michelson-Morley.... Supposons, par
exemple, qu'une fusée se déplace avec une vitesse (1/2)c par rapport à
un observateur et qu'un rayon de lumière parte de son nez. Si la
vitesse de la lumière signifiait vitesse des "particules" de la
lumière par rapport à leur source, alors ces "particules" de lumière
se déplaceraient à la vitesse c/2+c=(3/2)c par rapport à
l'observateur. Mais ce comportement ne ressemble pas du tout à celui
d'une onde, car les ondes se propagent à une certaine vitesse par
rapport au milieu dans lequel elles se développent et non pas à une
certaine vitesse par rapport à leur source..... Il nous faut insister
sur le fait suivant: QUAND EINSTEIN PROPOSA QUE LA VITESSE DE LA
LUMIERE SOIT INDEPENDANTE DE CELLE DE LA SOURCE, IL N'EN EXISTAIT
AUCUNE PREUVE EXPERIMENTALE. IL LE POSTULA PAR PURE NECESSITE
LOGIQUE."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
> George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
> though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
> includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
> logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
> inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
> thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
> Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
>
> http://www.liferesearchuniversal.com/1984-22.html#twentytwo
> George Orwell: "He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
> presented himself with propositions - "the Party says the earth is
> flat", "the party says that ice is heavier than water" - and trained
> himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
> contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
> reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
> instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
> his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
> an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
> the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
> was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
>
> George Orwell's text modified so as to describe a physics student's
> self-education:
>
> "He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He presented himself
> with propositions - "Einsteiniana says that, when the observer starts
> that, in accordance with Einstein's 1905 light postulate, a 80m long
> pole can safely be trapped inside a 40m long barn" - and trained
> himself in not seeing or not understanding the arguments that
> contradicted them. It was not easy. It needed great powers of
> reasoning and improvisation. The arithmetical problems raised, for
> instance, by such a statement as "two and two make five" were beyond
> his intellectual grasp. It needed also a sort of athleticism of mind,
> an ability at one moment to make the most delicate use of logic and at
> the next to be unconscious of the crudest logical errors. Stupidity
> was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain."
John Norton, the cleverest Einsteinian, exercising himself in and
teaching crimestop. The TEXT IN CAPITALS is an obvious stupidity but
John Norton and his students sincerely believe in it:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/HPS_0410/chapters/big_bang/index.html
John Norton: "Here's a light wave and an observer. If the observer
were to hurry towards the source of the light, the observer would now
pass wavecrests more frequently than the resting observer. That would
mean that moving observer would find the frequency of the light to
have increased (AND CORRESPONDINGLY FOR THE WAVELENGTH - THE DISTANCE
BETWEEN CRESTS - TO HAVE DECREASED)."
Without the "protective stupidity" John Norton would have to explain
that it is the speed of light that varies with the frequency when the
observer starts hurrying towards the source of light.
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
A sound question challenging Einstein's 1905 false light postulate
(note how stupid the answer is):
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_can_the_relative_speed_of_light_be_constant_when_the_Doppler_shift_of_light_suggests_addition_or_subtraction_of_velocities
Question: How can the relative speed of light be constant when the
Doppler shift of light suggests addition or subtraction of velocities?
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
"Stopping [in this case perhaps too] short, as though by instinct, at
the threshold of any dangerous thought":
http://www.universetoday.com/2007/10/03/high-energy-gamma-rays-go-slower-than-the-speed-of-light/
"The speed of light is the speed of light, and that's that. Right?
Well, maybe not. Try and figure this out. Astronomers studying
radiation coming from a distant galaxy found that the high energy
gamma rays arrived a few minutes after the lower-energy photons, even
though they were emitted at the same time. If true, this result would
overturn Einstein's theory of relativity, which says that all photons
should move at the speed of light. Uh oh Einstein."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the speed of light
varies with the gravitational potential:
http://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."
http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from:
http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/einstein-papers/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."
Yet some Einsteinians regard "The speed of light varies with the
gravitational potential" as a dangerous thought and stop short, as
though by instinct, at the treshold of it:
http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History-Time-Stephen-Hawking/dp/0553380168
Stephen Hawking, "A Brief History of Time", Chapter 6:
"Under the theory that light is made up of waves, it was not clear how
it would respond to gravity. But if light is composed of particles,
one might expect them to be affected by gravity in the same way that
cannonballs, rockets, and planets are.....In fact, it is not really
consistent to treat light like cannonballs in Newtons theory of
gravity because the speed of light is fixed. (A cannonball fired
upward from the earth will be slowed down by gravity and will
eventually stop and fall back; a photon, however, must continue upward
at a constant speed...)"
http://helios.gsfc.nasa.gov/qa_sp_gr.html
"Is light affected by gravity? If so, how can the speed of light be
constant? Wouldn't the light coming off of the Sun be slower than the
light we make here? If not, why doesn't light escape a black hole?
Yes, light is affected by gravity, but not in its speed. General
Relativity (our best guess as to how the Universe works) gives two
effects of gravity on light. It can bend light (which includes effects
such as gravitational lensing), and it can change the energy of light.
But it changes the energy by shifting the frequency of the light
(gravitational redshift) not by changing light speed. Gravity bends
light by warping space so that what the light beam sees as "straight"
is not straight to an outside observer. The speed of light is still
constant." Dr. Eric Christian
Clever Einsteinians do not regard "The speed of light varies with the
gravitational potential" as a dangerous thought but they always stop
short, as though by instinct, at the treshold of an extremely
dangerous thought which is a corollary of "The speed of light varies
with the gravitational potential":
The extremely dangerous thought: "Practically no light in the universe
travels at the constant speed c=299792km/s; one reason is that there
is always some gravitational potential difference between the point of
emission and the point of reception (observation)".
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090901132806.htm
"Measuring the curvature of space caused by gravity is one of the most
sensitive ways to learn how Einstein's theory of General Relativity
relates to quantum physics. Uniting gravity theory with quantum theory
is a major goal of 21st-Century physics, and these astronomical
measurements are a key to understanding the relationship between the
two," said Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri. Kopeikin and
his colleagues used the National Science Foundation's Very Long
Baseline Array (VLBA) radio-telescope system to measure the bending of
light caused by the Sun's gravity to within one part in 30,000. With
further observations, the scientists say their precision technique can
make the most accurate measure ever of this phenomenon. Bending of
starlight by gravity was predicted by Albert Einstein when he
published his theory of General Relativity in 1916. According to
relativity theory, the strong gravity of a massive object such as the
Sun produces curvature in the nearby space, which alters the path of
light or radio waves passing near the object. The phenomenon was first
observed during a solar eclipse in 1919. Though numerous measurements
of the effect have been made over the intervening 90 years, the
problem of merging General Relativity and quantum theory has required
ever more accurate observations. Physicists describe the space
curvature and gravitational light-bending as a parameter called
"gamma." Einstein's theory holds that gamma should equal exactly 1.0."
Kopeikin and his brothers Einsteinians always stop short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of the dangerous thought: Is the parameter
"gamma" consistent with Einstein's 1911 equation c'=c(1+V/c^2) given
by Newton's emission theory of light, or is it consistent with
Einstein's 1915 (or 1955) "improved" equation c'=c(1+2V/c^2):
http://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."
http://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."
http://www.speed-light.info/speed_of_light_variable.htm
"Einstein wrote this paper in 1911 in German (download from:
http://www.physik.uni-augsburg.de/annalen/history/einstein-papers/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."
http://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."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com
Pentcho Valev
George Orwell: "Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as
though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive
logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are
inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of
thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction.
Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity."
Joao Magueijo, the official maverick in Einsteiniana, demonstrating
protective stupidity, that is, stopping short, as though by instinct,
at the threshold of the dangerous thought: "Einstein's 1905 light
postulate is false":
http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo: "A missile fired from a plane moves faster than one
fired from the ground because the plane's speed adds to the missile's
speed. If I throw something forward on a moving train, its speed with
respect to the platform is the speed of that object plus that of the
train. You might think that the same should happen to light: Light
flashed from a train should travel faster. However, what the Michelson-
Morley experiments showed was that this was not the case: Light always
moves stubbornly at the same speed. This means that if I take a light
ray and ask several observers moving with respect to each other to
measure the speed of this light ray, they will all agree on the same
apparent speed! Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity was in
part a response to this astonishing result. What Einstein realized
was that if c did not change, then something else had to give. That
something was the idea of universal and unchanging space and time.
This is deeply, maddeningly counterintuitive. In our everyday lives,
space and time are perceived as rigid and universal. Instead, Einstein
conceived of space and time - space-time - as a thing that could flex
and change, expanding and shrinking according to the relative motions
of the observer and the thing observed. The only aspect of the
universe that didn't change was the speed of light. And ever since,
the constancy of the speed of light has been woven into the very
fabric of physics, into the way physics equations are written, even
into the notation used. Nowadays, to "vary" the speed of light is not
even a swear word: It is simply not present in the vocabulary of
physics. Hundreds of experiments have verified this basic tenet, and
the theory of relativity has become central to our understanding of
how the universe works. And my idea was exactly a "varying speed of
light" theory."
Pentcho Valev
pva...@yahoo.com