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Science Forum Index » Astro Forum » POSTMODERNISM AND POSTSCIENTISM: WHICH IS WORSE?...
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| Pentcho Valev... |
 Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 4:42 am |
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POSTMODERNISM:
http://www.thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=43113
"This book exposes many luminaries/philosophers/cultural theorists'
abuse of scientific terms in their writings. Particularly,
intellectuals belonging to the genre 'postmodernism' are caught by
this endemic. The writers of this book are professional physicists who
have examined the various treatises written by these intellectuals and
shown that oftentimes they used scientific terms without any honest
regard to their true meanings. It is as if to show-off the rigour of
their work. “The story of this book starts with a hoax”. Disturbed by
the 'abuse of science' or more explicitly “…an intellectual current
characterised by the more-or-less explicit rejection of the
rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment, by theoretical discourses
disconnected from any empirical test, and by a cognitive and cultural
relativism that regards science as nothing more than a “narration,” a
“myth” or a social construction among many others”, one of the
authors, Alan Sokal, wrote a “parody” of the type of work that was
“fashionable” in the mainstream American cultural-studies journals.
This was titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” and got published in a special
edition of the journal Social Text in 1996. When Sokal revealed this
hoax, it was a big embarrassment for the postmoderns. This particular
parody was constructed “around quotations from eminent French and
American intellectuals about the alleged philosophical and social
implications of mathematics and the natural sciences”. Sokal just
supplied the “glue” to make these apparently disjointed quotations to
sound coherent, juxtaposed with trendy words from the latest
theoretical physics jargon. Later on, debates and discourses gradually
developed on the effects of this parody. Criticisms and counter-
criticisms ensued. The authors felt a need for collecting their
thoughts and making them available in a single volume. The goal of
this book is to criticise the “admittedly nebulous Zeitgeist that we
have called “postmodernism”. We make no claim to analyse post-
modernist thought in general; rather, our aim is to draw attention to
a relatively little-known aspect, namely the repeated abuse of
concepts and terminology coming from mathematics and physics”. This
makes the book extremely interesting. This book has altogether twelve
chapters and three appendices containing the original parody itself
and some discussions. In the main body of the book, the authors
discuss various paragraphs and quotations from Jacques Lacan, Julia
Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Bruno Latour, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles
Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Paul Virilio. Individual chapters are
devoted to the works of some of these luminaries. Consider Lacan's
student Luce Irigaray: “If the identity of the human subject is
defined in the work of Freud by a Spaltung, this is also the word used
for nuclear fission. Nietzsche also perceived his ego as an atomic
nucleus threatened with explosion. As for Einstein, the main issue he
raises, in my mind, is that, given his interest in accelerations
without electromagnetic reequilibrations, he leaves us with only one
hope, his God. It is true that Einstein played the violin: music
helped him preserve his personal equilibrium. But what does the mighty
theory of general relativity do us except establish nuclear power
plants and question our bodily inertia, that necessary condition of
life?” Again she went more bizarre: “Is E=Mc2 a sexed equation?
Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it
privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally
necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possibly sexed
nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons,
rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest …” ."
POSTSCIENTISM:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/dice.html
Stephen Hawking: "Interestingly enough, Laplace himself wrote a paper
in 1799 on how some stars could have a gravitational field so strong
that light could not escape, but would be dragged back onto the star.
He even calculated that a star of the same density as the Sun, but two
hundred and fifty times the size, would have this property. But
although Laplace may not have realised it, the same idea had been put
forward 16 years earlier by a Cambridge man, John Mitchell, in a paper
in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Both Mitchell
and Laplace thought of light as consisting of particles, rather like
cannon balls, that could be slowed down by gravity, and made to fall
back on the star. But a famous experiment, carried out by two
Americans, Michelson and Morley in 1887, showed that light always
travelled at a speed of one hundred and eighty six thousand miles a
second, no matter where it came from. How then could gravity slow down
light, and make it fall back."
http://streamer.perimeterinstitute.ca/mediasite/viewer/NoPopupRedirector.aspx?peid=5f32739a-624d-4ec8-9ecc-4d44d3d16fe9&shouldResize=False#
Lee Smolin: "Newton's theory predicts that light goes in straight
lines and therefore if the star passes behind the sun, we can't see
it. Einstein's theory predicts that light is bent...."
http://journals.ucfv.ca/jhb/Volume_3/Volume_3_Howard.pdf
Don Howard: "In his discussion of Einstein’s “rotating disk” thought
experiment, an important step on the road to general relativity’s
implication of spatio-temporal curvature, Isaacson repeats the common
mistake of claiming that the circumference of the disk contracts,
while the diameter does not, yielding a ratio of circumference to
diameter less than π (p. 192). In fact, it is the yardstick used to
measure the circumference that contracts, yielding a circumference
seemingly larger than for the stationary disk and thus a ratio of
circumference to diameter greater than π. For a careful discussion,
see John Stachel, “The Rigidly Rotating Disk as the ‘Missing Link’ in
the History of General Relativity,” in Einstein and the History of
General Relativity, Don Howard and John Stachel, eds. (Boston:
Birkhäuser, 1989), 48-62."
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball0402/papers/montreal-may04.pdf
"Let us discuss the difference between Einstein’s and Lorentz’spoints
of view still further...It is...of great value that Einstein rendered
the theory independent of any assumptions about the constitution of
matter. Should one, then,...completely abandon any attempt to explain
the Lorentz contraction atomistically? We think the answer to this
question should be No. The contraction of a measuring rod is not an
elementary but a very complicated process. It would not take place
except for the covariance with respect to the Lorentz group of the
basic equations of the electron theory, as well as of those laws, as
yet unknown to us, which determine the cohesion of the electron
itself. We can only postulate that this is so, knowing that then the
theory will be capable of explaining atomistically the behaviour of
moving rods and clocks." (Pauli, Theory of Relativity, 1921)
http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603
"There are many things I might be asking when I ask someone to explain
length contraction. I might be asking, "Why do different inertial
observers (who are not at relative rest) disagree about the length of
a given (inertially moving) rod?" Or I might be asking, "Why is a
moving rod shorter than its stationary counterpart (of the same proper
length)?" Or I might be asking, "If you take a rod that is initially
at rest (in your frame of reference), and accelerate it, why is it
shorter after you accelerate it than it was before you accelerated
it?"......I'm not sure what Brown thinks about geometrical answers to
the first why-question, but he certainly thinks that GEOMETRICAL
ANSWERS TO THE SECOND TWO WHY-QUESTIONS ARE BAD EXPLANATIONS. He
thinks that good answers to these questions say something about the
way in which the forces holding the parts of the rod together depend
on velocity of the rod. Only that is a story of what causes the
particles to get closer together, and so what causes the rod to
shrink."
http://inac.cea.fr/Phocea/file.php?class=std&file=Seminaires/343/t343_1..pdf
Gilles Cohen-Tannoudji: "Chez Poincaré, la contraction des longueurs
et la dilatation des durées sont réelles.....Chez Einstein, la
contraction des longueurs et la dilatation des durées ne sont pas
réelles: elles sont le résultat d'un effet de perspective."
http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres/in_memoriam/Einstein/Einstein_pdf/Einstein_Damour.pdf
Thibault Damour: "La "contraction des longueurs" avait, avant
Einstein, été considérée par George Fitzgerald et Hendrik Lorentz.
Cependant, ils la considéraient comme un effet "réel" de contraction
dans l'"espace absolu", alors que pour Einstein il s'agit d'un effet
de perspective spatio-temporelle."
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Relativ/bugrivet.html
http://www.math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SR/barn_pole.html
"These are the props. You own a barn, 40m long, with automatic doors
at either end, that can be opened and closed simultaneously by a
switch. You also have a pole, 80m long, which of course won't fit in
the barn....So, as the pole passes through the barn, there is an
instant when it is completely within the barn. At that instant, you
close both doors simultaneously, with your switch. Of course, you open
them again pretty quickly, but at least momentarily you had the
contracted pole shut up in your barn."
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=5538
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://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E7D8143FF932A05751C1A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
"As propounded by Einstein as an audaciously confident young patent
clerk in 1905, relativity declares that the laws of physics, and in
particular the speed of light -- 186,000 miles per second -- are the
same no matter where you are or how fast you are moving. Generations
of students and philosophers have struggled with the paradoxical
consequences of Einstein's deceptively simple notion, which underlies
all of modern physics and technology, wrestling with clocks that speed
up and slow down, yardsticks that contract and expand and bad jokes
using the word ''relative.''......''Perhaps relativity is too
restrictive for what we need in quantum gravity,'' Dr. Magueijo said.
''We need to drop a postulate, perhaps the constancy of the speed of
light.''
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/519406/posts
"A GROUP of astronomers and cosmologists has warned that the laws
thought to govern the universe, including Albert Einsteins 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.....AMONG THE IDEAS FACING REVISION IS EINSTEINS
BELIEF THAT THE SPEED OF LIGHT MUST ALWAYS BE THE SAME - 186,000 miles
a second in a vacuum.....Rees, Hawking and others are so concerned at
the impact of such ideas that they recently organised a private
conference in Cambridge for more than 30 leading cosmologists."
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_5.html
John Baez: "On the one hand we have the Standard Model, which tries to
explain all the forces except gravity, and takes quantum mechanics
into account. On the other hand we have General Relativity, which
tries to explain gravity, and does not take quantum mechanics into
account. Both theories seem to be more or less on the right track --
but until we somehow fit them together, or completely discard one or
both, our picture of the world will be deeply schizophrenic.....I
realized I didn't have enough confidence in either theory to engage in
these heated debates. I also realized that there were other questions
to work on: questions where I could actually tell when I was on the
right track, questions where researchers cooperate more and fight
less. So, I eventually decided to quit working on quantum gravity."
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/chronogeometrie.pdf
Jean-Marc Lévy-Leblond "De la relativité à la chronogéométrie ou: Pour
en finir avec le "second postulat" et autres fossiles": "D'autre part,
nous savons aujourd'hui que l'invariance de la vitesse de la lumière
est une conséquence de la nullité de la masse du photon. Mais,
empiriquement, cette masse, aussi faible soit son actuelle borne
supérieure expérimentale, ne peut et ne pourra jamais être considérée
avec certitude comme rigoureusement nulle. Il se pourrait même que de
futures mesures mettent enévidence une masse infime, mais non-nulle,
du photon ; la lumière alors n'irait plus à la "vitesse de la
lumière", ou, plus précisément, la vitesse de la lumière, désormais
variable, ne s'identifierait plus à la vitesse limite invariante. Les
procedures operationnelles mises en jeu par le "second postulat"
deviendraient caduques ipso facto. La theorie elle-meme en serait-elle
invalidee ? Heureusement, il n'en est rien ; mais, pour s'en assurer,
il convient de la refonder sur des bases plus solides, et d'ailleurs
plus economiques. En verite, le "premier postulat" suffit, a la
condition de l'exploiter a fond."
http://o.castera.free.fr/pdf/onemorederivation.pdf
Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond: "This is the point of view from wich I intend
to criticize the overemphasized role of the speed of light in the
foundations of the special relativity, and to propose an approach to
these foundations that dispenses with the hypothesis of the invariance
of c....We believe that special relativity at the present time stands
as a universal theory discribing the structure of a common space-time
arena in which all fundamental processes take place....The evidence of
the nonzero mass of the photon would not, as such, shake in any way
the validity of the special relativity. It would, however, nullify all
its derivations which are based on the invariance of the photon
velocity."
http://www.amazon.com/Einsteins-Relativity-Beyond-Approaches-Theoretical/dp/9810238886
Jong-Ping Hsu: "The fundamentally new ideas of the first purpose are
developed on the basis of the term paper of a Harvard physics
undergraduate. They lead to an unexpected affirmative answer to the
long-standing question of whether it is possible to construct a
relativity theory without postulating the constancy of the speed of
light and retaining only the first postulate of special relativity.
This question was discussed in the early years following the discovery
of special relativity by many physicists, including Ritz, Tolman,
Kunz, Comstock and Pauli, all of whom obtained negative answers."
http://groups.google.ca/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_frm/thread/8034dc146100e32c
Tom Roberts, Feb 1, 2006: "If it is ultimately discovered that the
photon has a nonzero mass (i.e. light in vacuum does not travel at the
invariant speed of the Lorentz transform), SR would be unaffected but
both Maxwell's equations and QED would be refuted (or rather, their
domains of applicability would be reduced)."
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
Lee Smolin: "But there is another possibility. This is that the
principle of relativity is preserved, but Einstein's special theory of
relativity requires modification so as to allow photons to have a
speed that depends on energy. The most shocking thing I have learned
in the last year is that this is a real possibility. A photon can have
an energy-dependent speed without violating the principle of
relativity!"
http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00000313/
Jos Uffink: "This summary leads to the question whether it is fruitful
to see irreversibility or time-asymmetry as the essence of the second
law. Is it not more straightforward, in view of the unargued
statements of Kelvin, the bold claims of Clausius and the strained
attempts of Planck, to give up this idea? I believe that Ehrenfest-
Afanassjewa was right in her verdict that the discussion about the
arrow of time as expressed in the second law of the thermodynamics is
actually a RED HERRING."
http://www.amazon.com/FAREWELL-ENTROPY-Statistical-Thermodynamics-Information/dp/9812707069
A FAREWELL TO ENTROPY: Statistical Thermodynamics Based on
Information. By Arieh Ben-Naim
"Product Description: The principal message of this book is that
thermodynamics and statistical mechanics will benefit from replacing
the unfortunate, misleading and mysterious term entropy..."
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/SpeedOfLight/speed_of_light.html
Steve Carlip: "Is c, the speed of light in vacuum, constant? At the
1983 Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures, the following SI
(Systeme International) definition of the metre was adopted: The metre
is the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time
interval of 1/299 792 458 of a second. This defines the speed of light
in vacuum to be exactly 299,792,458 m/s. This provides a very short
answer to the question "Is c constant": Yes, c is CONSTANT BY
DEFINITION!"
http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=317&Itemid=81&lecture_id=3576
Albert Einstein: "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://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/0804/0804.0016v2.pdf
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=5PkLLXhONvQ
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=i5Jyu6eioZ4&feature=related
Pentcho Valev
pvalev at (no spam) yahoo.com |
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| Michael Helland... |
| Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 6:29 am |
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Guest
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On Jun 28, 7:42 am, Pentcho Valev <pva... at (no spam) yahoo.com> wrote:
Quote: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/smolin03/smolin03_print.html
Lee Smolin:
<quote>
But there is another possibility. This is that the principle of
relativity is preserved, but Einstein's special theory of relativity
requires modification so as to allow photons to have a speed that
depends on energy. The most shocking thing I have learned in the last
year is that this is a real possibility. A photon can have an energy-
dependent speed without violating the principle of relativity! This
was understood a few years ago by Amelino Camelia. I got involved in
this issue through work I did with Joo Magueijo, a very talented
young cosmologist at Imperial College, London. During the two years I
spent working there, Joo kept coming to me and bugging me with this
problem. His reason for asking was that he had realized that if the
speed of light could change according to conditionsfor example, when
the universe was very hot and denseyou might get an alternative
cosmological theory. He and Andreas Albrecht (and before them John
Moffat) had found that if the speed of light was higher in the early
universe, you get an alternative to inflationary cosmology that
explains everything inflation does, without some of the baggage.
These ideas all seemed crazy to me, and for a long time I didn't get
it. I was sure it was wrong! But Joo kept bugging me and slowly I
realized that they had a point. We have since written several papers
together showing how Einstein's postulates may be modified to give a
new version of special relativity in which the speed of light can
depend on energy.
</quote>
Yes, yes, yes.
Hubble redshift isn't something new going on with space (such as
expansion); it is something new going on with light (such as a
deceleration proportional with its decrease in energy)!
This paper explains more:
http://www.cloudmusiccompany.com |
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| Eric Gisse... |
| Posted: Sat Jun 28, 2008 11:41 am |
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On Jun 28, 8:29 am, Michael Helland <mobyd... at (no spam) gmail.com> wrote:
[snip blather]
You are unqualified to comment. Energy-dependent dispersion relations
are violently excluded by experiment and observation. |
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