Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable

[The World]

Einstein's relativity is getting unbearable, even inside
Einsteiniana.
The rallying cry seems to be:
"Back to Newton through Lorentz!"
http://www.amazon.com/Relativity-Simultaneity-Routledge-Contemporary-...
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."
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Physical-Relativity-Space-time-structure-pers...
"Harvey Brown thinks that most philsophers are confused about
relativity. Most centrally, he thinks they're confused about the
relativistic effects of length contraction and time dilation. (...)
Physical Relativity explores the nature of the distinction at the
heart of Einstein's 1905 formulation of his special theory of
relativity: that between kinematics and dynamics. Einstein himself
became increasingly uncomfortable with this distinction, and with the
limitations of what he called the 'principle theory' approach
inspired
by the logic of thermodynamics. A handful of physicists and
philosophers have over the last century likewise expressed doubts
about Einstein's treatment of the relativistic behaviour of rigid
bodies and clocks in motion in the kinematical part of his great
paper, and suggested that THE DYNAMICAL UNDERSTANDING OF LENGTH
CONTRACTION AND TIME DILATION INTIMATED BY THE IMMEDIATE PRECURSORS
OF
EINSTEIN IS MORE FUNDAMENTAL."
http://www.humanamente.eu/PDF/Issue13_Paper_Norton.pdf
John Norton: "It is common to dismiss the passage of time as illusory
since its passage has not been captured within modern physical
theories. I argue that this is a mistake. Other than the awkward fact
that it does not appear in our physics, there is no indication that
the passage of time is an illusion. (...) The passage of time is a
real, objective fact that obtains in the world independently of us.
How, you may wonder, could we think anything else? One possibility is
that we might think that the passage of time is some sort of
illusion,
an artifact of the peculiar way that our brains interact with the
world. Indeed that is just what you might think if you have spent a
lot of time reading modern physics. 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 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."
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-time-an-illusion
Craig Callender: "Einstein mounted the next assault by doing away
with
the idea of absolute simultaneity. According to his special theory of
relativity, what events are happening at the same time depends on how
fast you are going. The true arena of events is not time or space,
but
their union: spacetime. Two observers moving at different velocities
disagree on when and where an event occurs, but they agree on its
spacetime location. Space and time are secondary concepts that, as
mathematician Hermann Minkowski, who had been one of Einstein's
university professors, famously declared, "are doomed to fade away
into mere shadows." And things only get worse in 1915 with Einstein's
general theory of relativity, which extends special relativity to
situations where the force of gravity operates. Gravity distorts
time,
so that a second's passage here may not mean the same thing as a
second's passage there. Only in rare cases is it possible to
synchronize clocks and have them stay synchronized, even in
principle.
You cannot generally think of the world as unfolding, tick by tick,
according to a single time parameter. In extreme situations, the
world
might not be carvable into instants of time at all. It then becomes
impossible to say that an event happened before or after another."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20727721.200-rethinking-einstei...
NEW SCIENTIST: "Rethinking Einstein: The end of space-time. IT WAS a
speech that changed the way we think of space and time. The year was
1908, and the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski had been trying
to make sense of Albert Einstein's hot new idea - what we now know as
special relativity - describing how things shrink as they move faster
and time becomes distorted. "Henceforth space by itself and time by
itself are doomed to fade into the mere shadows," Minkowski
proclaimed, "and only a union of the two will preserve an independent
reality." And so space-time - the malleable fabric whose geometry can
be changed by the gravity of stars, planets and matter - was born. It
is a concept that has served us well, but if physicist Petr Horava is
right, it may be no more than a mirage. (...) Something has to give
in
this tussle between general relativity and quantum mechanics, and the
smart money says that it's relativity that will be the loser."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-uni...
"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.homevalley.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article...
"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. (...) What he and other pioneers on the
spacetime frontiers have seen coming is an intellectual crisis. The
approaches of the past seem insufficiently powerful to meet the
challenges remaining from Einstein's century - such as finding a
harmonious mathematical marriage for relativity with quantum
mechanics
the way Minkowski unified space and time. And more recently
physicists
have been forced to confront the embarrassment of not knowing what
makes up the vast bulk of matter and energy in the universe. They
remain in the dark about the nature of the dark energy that drives
the
universe to expand at an accelerating rate. Efforts to explain the
dark energy's existence and intensity have been ambitious but
fruitless. To Albrecht, the dark energy mystery suggests that it's
time for physics to drop old prejudices about how nature's laws ought
to be and search instead for how they really are. And that might mean
razing Minkowski's arena and rebuilding it from a new design. It
seems
to me like it's a time in the development of physics, says Albrecht,
where it's time to look at how we think about space and time very
differently."
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927950.600-philosophical-deni...
New Scientist, 12 January 2011: "Scepticism towards Einstein's theory
of relativity is not confined to irrational conservatives (13
November
2010, p 48). In his later years, the philosopher Karl Popper became
increasingly troubled by relativity. I argue that, for Popper,
inconsistencies in Einstein's presentation of his theory gave a
rational explanation for persistent opposition to it (Studies in
History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, vol 41, p 354). Popper
himself ended up preferring Hendrik Lorentz's version of relativity,
which retained absolute space and time."
Pentcho Valev