HOW EINSTEINIANS KILL AND THEN RESURRECT RELATIVITY

[Pentcho Valev]

Shock, horror:

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."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/10/time-reborn-farewell-reality-review
Philip Ball: "Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.amazon.com/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe/dp/0547511728
"Was Einstein wrong? At least in his understanding of time, Smolin argues, the great theorist of relativity was dead wrong. What is worse, by firmly enshrining his error in scientific orthodoxy, Einstein trapped his successors in insoluble dilemmas..."

Time for mourning? The special-relativistic concept of time is a logical consequence of Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light postulate, and since the consequence is "dead wrong", the postulate is... false? The old money-spinner is no more? All Einsteinians should immediately leave the sinking ship and become ecologists, like John Baez, and thermodynamicists, like John Norton? No. Lee Smolin is generous. True, he had to kill relativity in order to sell his books, but now he is going to resurrect it:

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://www.leif.org/EOS/PT-Lee-Smolin-2014.pdf
Lee Smolin, "Time, Laws, and the Future of Cosmology", the March 2014 issue of Physics Today: "If time is real, the past can be distinguished from the future. What, then, is one to make of the relativity of simultaneity in special and general relativity? Doesn't the experimental success of relativity imply that time's passage is a chimera, so that all that is real is the whole history of the universe laid out at once? That point of view, the block-universe perspective, led Albert Einstein to declare in a letter to the family of his friend Michele Besso that the "distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."
A reformulation of general relativity called shape dynamics resolves the quandary posed in the previous paragraph. The theory trades in the relativity of time for a relativity of size but does not give up any of the experimental successes of special and general relativity."

http://newabstraction.net/wp-content/uploads/Lee_Smolin-e1405396688725.jpg

Pentcho Valev

[Pentcho Valev]

Merciless Einsteinians (Down with Divine Albert!):

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/waseinsteinwrong/
Paul Davies: "Was Einstein wrong? Einstein's famous equation E=mc2 is the only scientific formula known to just about everyone. The "c" here stands for the speed of light. It is one of the most fundamental of the basic constants of physics. Or is it? In recent years a few maverick scientists have claimed that the speed of light might not be constant at all. Shock, horror! Does this mean the next Great Revolution in Science is just around the corner?"

http://www.rense.com/general13/ein.htm
Einstein's Theory Of Relativity Must Be Rewritten: "A group of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, must be rewritten. The group, which includes Professor Stephen Hawking and Sir Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, say such laws may only work for our universe but not in others that are now also thought to exist. "It is becoming increasingly likely that the rules we had thought were fundamental through time and space are actually just bylaws for our bit of it," said Rees, whose new book, Our Cosmic Habitat, is published next month. "Creation is emerging as even stranger than we thought." Among the ideas facing revision is Einstein's belief that the speed of light must always be the same - 186,000 miles a second in a vacuum."

http://www.amazon.com/Trouble-Physics-String-Theory-Science/dp/0618551050
Lee Smolin, The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, p. 226: "Einstein's special theory of relativity is based on two postulates: One is the relativity of motion, and the second is the constancy and universality of the speed of light. Could the first postulate be true and the other false? If that was not possible, Einstein would not have had to make two postulates. But I don't think many people realized until recently that you could have a consistent theory in which you changed only the second postulate."

http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0805/0805.1400.pdf
Hans C. Ohanian: "Although Einstein's name is closely linked with the celebrated relation E = mc^2 between mass and energy, a critical examination of the more than half dozen "proofs" of this relation that Einstein produced over a span of forty years reveals that all these proofs suffer from mistakes. Einstein introduced unjustified assumptions, committed fatal errors in logic, or adopted low-speed, restrictive approximations. He never succeeded in producing a valid general proof applicable to a realistic system with arbitrarily large internal speeds."

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/46941
Philip Ball: "Did Einstein discover E = mc2? Who discovered that E = mc2? It's not as easy a question as you might think. Scientists ranging from James Clerk Maxwell and Max von Laue to a string of now-obscure early 20th-century physicists have been proposed as the true discovers of the massenergy equivalence now popularly credited to Einstein's theory of special relativity. These claims have spawned headlines accusing Einstein of plagiarism, but many are spurious or barely supported. Yet two physicists have now shown that Einstein's famous formula does have a complicated and somewhat ambiguous genesis which has little to do with relativity. (...) While Einstein's celebrated 1905 paper, "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies", clearly laid down the foundations of relativity by abandoning the ether and making the speed of light invariant, his derivation of E = mc2 did not depend on those assumptions. You can get the right answer with classical physics, says Rothman, all in an ether theory without c being either constant or the limiting speed."

http://philipball.blogspot.com/2011/08/did-einstein-discover-emc2.html
Philip Ball: "The biggest revelation for me was not so much seeing that there were several well-founded precursors for the equivalence of mass and energy, but finding that this equivalence seems to have virtually nothing to do with special relativity. Tony Rothman said to me that "I've long maintained that the conventional history of science, as presented in the media, textbooks and by the stories scientists tell themselves is basically a collection of fairy tales." I'd concur with that."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/10/time-reborn-farewell-reality-review
Philip Ball: "Einstein's theory of special relativity not only destroyed any notion of absolute time but made time equivalent to a dimension in space: the future is already out there waiting for us; we just can't see it until we get there. This view is a logical and metaphysical dead end, says Smolin."

http://www.amazon.com/Faster-Than-Speed-Light-Speculation/dp/0738205257
Joao Magueijo, Faster Than the Speed of Light, p. 250: "Lee [Smolin] and I discussed these paradoxes at great length for many months, starting in January 2001. We would meet in cafés in South Kensington or Holland Park to mull over the problem. THE ROOT OF ALL THE EVIL WAS CLEARLY SPECIAL RELATIVITY. All these paradoxes resulted from well known effects such as length contraction, time dilation, or E=mc^2, all basic predictions of special relativity. And all denied the possibility of establishing a well-defined border, common to all observers, capable of containing new quantum gravitational effects."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026831.500-what-makes-the-universe-tick.html
"...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&id=135:its-likely-that-times-are-changing&catid=41:quantec-articles&Itemid=68
"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."

Yet... Einsteinians' children are not to go hungry in the streets (only antirelativists' children are)! Let's pray and sing hymns, Brothers Einsteinians:

http://www.everythingimportant.org/Einstein_worship/DivineEinstein.jpg

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!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuxFXHircaI
"Symphony of Science - Secret of the Stars. A musical celebration of E=MC squared and Einstein's theory of relativity. Featuring Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Greene and Lisa Randall."

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.

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."

Pentcho Valev