The Einstein Revolution? Doublethink at UCSB

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http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2016/016562/einstein-revolution
" The Einstein Revolution. In celebration of Einstein's birthday, physicists reflect on the German-born scientist's work and its impact on the field and on everyday life. "We have good reason to believe general relativity is not a complete theory and, in particular, that it's going to break down in the context of describing black holes," said UCSB physics professor Steve Giddings. "That's very much an important problem in physics today. "The direct observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes really constrains the possible departures from general relativity that we know are there and limits where modifications can be made," he continued. "But the discovery is still spectacular and its announcement was one of those moments in science that you live for." "

Steve Giddings lives for gravitational waves, the ripples of spacetime, knowing that spacetime itself is a wrong concept:

https://edge.org/response-detail/25477
What scientific idea is ready for retirement? Steve Giddings: "Spacetime. Physics has always been regarded as playing out on an underlying stage of space and time. Special relativity joined these into spacetime... (...) The apparent need to retire classical spacetime as a fundamental concept is profound..."

Why should spacetime be retired? Because it is an "immediate consequence" of Einstein's 1905 false constant-speed-of-light postulate. Since the "immediate consequence" is wrong, the premise (postulate) cannot be true:

http://community.bowdoin.edu/news/2015/04/professor-baumgarte-describes-100-years-of-gravity/
"Baumgarte began by discussing special relativity, which Einstein developed, 10 years earlier, in 1905, while he was employed as a patent officer in Bern, Switzerland. Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime."

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http://www.worddocx.com/Apparel/1231/8955.html
Mike Alder: "This, essentially, is the Smolin position. He gives details and examples of the death of Physics, although he, being American, is optimistic that it can be reversed. I am not."

http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/09/05/perimeter-institute-and-the-crisis-in-modern-physics/
Neil Turok: "It's the ultimate catastrophe: that theoretical physics has led to this crazy situation where the physicists are utterly confused and seem not to have any predictions at all."

http://www.edge.org/response-detail/23857
Steve Giddings: "What really keeps me awake at night (...) is that we face a crisis within the deepest foundations of physics. The only way out seems to involve profound revision of fundamental physical principles."

Einstein predicted the death of physics in 1954:

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/pdf/files/975547d7-2d00-433a-b7e3-4a09145525ca.pdf
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."

How did Einstein base his theory on the field concept? By adopting the false constancy of the speed of light as defined in the ether field theory:

http://arxiv.org/ftp/physics/papers/0101/0101109.pdf
"The two first articles (January and March) establish clearly a discontinuous structure of matter and light. The standard look of Einstein's SR is, on the contrary, essentially based on the continuous conception of the field."

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/genius/
"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."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
Relativity and Its Roots, Banesh Hoffmann, p.92: "There are various remarks to be made about this second principle. For instance, if it is so obvious, how could it turn out to be part of a revolution - especially when the first principle is also a natural one? 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. If it was so obvious, though, why did he need to state it as a principle? Because, having taken from the idea of light waves in the ether the one aspect that he needed, he declared early in his paper, to quote his own words, that "the introduction of a 'luminiferous ether' will prove to be superfluous."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_ether_theory
Albert Einstein: "...it is impossible to base a theory of the transformation laws of space and time on the principle of relativity alone. As we know, this is connected with the relativity of the concepts of "simultaneity" and "shape of moving bodies." To fill this gap, I introduced the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light, which I borrowed from H. A. Lorentz's theory of the stationary luminiferous ether..."

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http://motls.blogspot.bg/2016/03/weinberg-is-right-historians-are-wrong.html
Luboš Motl: "So some people who consider themselves physics fans or amateur physicists (and maybe some professional physicists) would like to include the cult of an infallible Albert Einstein into the "occupation of being a physicist". But like Plato and Aristotle, Einstein wasn't infallible, either. He was wrong about many things – especially about the validity and completeness of quantum mechanics. The progress of physics since Einstein's years may look somewhat less obvious than the progress since Plato's or Aristotle's times. But it's been huge and obvious, too. Any effort to declare Einstein infallible is an effort to deny or reverse a century of progress."

http://motls.blogspot.bg/2014/09/a-conversation-with-nima-arkani-hamed.html
Luboš Motl: "We're at a rather special era because we're beginning to ask a new type of questions that are deeper and more structured, Nima [Arkani-Hamed] said. Spacetime is doomed, doesn't exist, and has to be replaced. Farmelo wanted to call psychiatrists at the point but they would conclude that Nima is sane."

So Einstein was wrong about spacetime? Luboš Motl wouldn't answer this question:

http://www.infonetworkmarketing.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ignoranza-paure.jpg

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