http://www.homevalley.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=135:its-likely-that-times-are-changing
"Einstein introduced a new notion of time, more radical than even he at first realized. In fact, the view of time that Einstein adopted was first articulated by his onetime math teacher in a famous lecture delivered one century ago. That lecture, by the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski, established a new arena for the presentation of physics, a new vision of the nature of reality redefining the mathematics of existence. The lecture was titled Space and Time, and it introduced to the world the marriage of the two, now known as spacetime. It was a good marriage, but lately physicists passion for spacetime has begun to diminish. And some are starting to whisper about possible grounds for divorce. (...) Physicists of the 21st century therefore face the task of finding the true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage."
The true reality obscured by the spacetime mirage? What could it be? Newton's universal time, what else:
http://www.fqxi.org/community/articles/display/148
"Many physicists argue that time is an illusion. Lee Smolin begs to differ. (...) Smolin wishes to hold on to the reality of time. But to do so, he must overcome a major hurdle: General and special relativity seem to imply the opposite. In the classical Newtonian view, physics operated according to the ticking of an invisible universal clock. But Einstein threw out that master clock when, in his theory of special relativity, he argued that no two events are truly simultaneous unless they are causally related. If simultaneity - the notion of "now" - is relative, the universal clock must be a fiction, and time itself a proxy for the movement and change of objects in the universe. Time is literally written out of the equation. Although he has spent much of his career exploring the facets of a "timeless" universe, Smolin has become convinced that this is "deeply wrong," he says. He now believes that time is more than just a useful approximation, that it is as real as our guts tell us it is - more real, in fact, than space itself. The notion of a "real and global time" is the starting hypothesis for Smolin's new work, which he will undertake this year with two graduate students supported by a $47,500 grant from FQXi."
WAIT WAIT WAIT! Does rejecting the consequent, spacetime, imply rejecting the antecedent, Einstein's false light postulate, as well? And the feast... over? NO NO NO! Spacetime may be wrong but Einstein's false light postulate is absolutely true:
http://www.independent.com/news/2013/apr/17/time-reborn/
QUESTION: Setting aside any other debates about relativity theory for the moment, why would the speed of light be absolute? No other speeds are absolute, that is, all other speeds do indeed change in relation to the speed of the observer, so it's always seemed a rather strange notion to me.
LEE SMOLIN: Special relativity works extremely well and the postulate of the invariance or universality of the speed of light is extremely well-tested. It might be wrong in the end but it is an extremely good approximation to reality.
QUESTION: So let me pick a bit more on Einstein and ask you this: You write (p. 56) that Einstein showed that simultaneity is relative. But the conclusion of the relativity of simultaneity flows necessarily from Einstein's postulates (that the speed of light is absolute and that the laws of nature are relative). So he didn't really show that simultaneity was relative - he assumed it. What do I have wrong here?
LEE SMOLIN: The relativity of simultaneity is a consequence of the two postulates that Einstein proposed and so it is deduced from the postulates. The postulates and their consequences are then checked experimentally and, so far, they hold remarkably well.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_rG_MWC43msA/TIz18C0ONnI/AAAAAAAAAkE/pA5AYOjGMsA/s1600/PRSll+Einstein+relativity.png
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
"We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Everything is relative, even simultaneity, and soon Einstein's become a de facto physics deity. 'cos we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. We all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity. Yes we all believe in relativity, relativity, relativity."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lE-I2I4i00
DIVINE EINSTEIN. "No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein not Maxwell, Curie, or Bohr! His fame went glo-bell, he won the Nobel - He should have been given four! No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein, Professor with brains galore! No-one could outshine Professor Einstein! He gave us special relativity, That's always made him a hero to me! No-one's as dee-vine as Albert Einstein, Professor in overdrive!"
http://www.everythingimportant.org/Einstein_worship/DivineEinstein.jpg
http://journelis.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/einstein_saint1.jpg
http://www.krugozormagazine.com/main/content/9-2009_Enshtein-3.jpg
"The Riverside Church in New York, west portal - upper line, second of right. In 1930, during a stay in New York, Albert Einstein and his wife visited the Riverside Church, too. During the detailed guided tour through the church Einstein was also shown the sculptures at the west portal. He was told that only one of the sculptures there represented a living person, and that was he himself. What Einstein is supposed to have thought in that moment when he heard that information and saw himself immortalized in stone? Contemporaries reported that he looked at the sculpture calmly and thoughtfully."
http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/bigger-last-supper-color-flattened-640x326.jpg
Pentcho Valev