Мълчаливи философи на науката

A couple of weeks ago I posted on PHILOS-L, a philosophy list with 4,853 subscribers, the following quotation:

http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa?A2 … mp;P=50126
Peter Hayes "The Ideology of Relativity: The Case of the Clock Paradox" : Social Epistemology, Volume 23, Issue 1 January 2009, pages 57-78.
"The triumph of relativity theory represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of science."

Philosophers of science remained silent. For the sake of argument, let us assume that they possess dignity which prevents them from discussing Peter Hayes quoted by Pentcho Valev. The assumption is wrong. In 2001 Jos Uffink, an influential philosopher of science, published a text equivalent to "The triumph of thermodynamics represents the triumph of ideology not only in the profession of physics but also in the philosophy of science":

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."

For eight years no philosopher of science has discussed or even referred to this text. Uffink himself seems to have forgotten it completely. Another influential philosopher of science, John Norton, published texts which, combined with a few other texts, suggest that Einstein's 1905 false light postulate has in fact killed theoretical physics. Other philosophers of science remained silent:

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/papers/companion.doc
John Norton: "Einstein could not see how to formulate a fully relativistic electrodynamics merely using his new device of field transformations. So he considered the possibility of modifying Maxwell's electrodynamics in order to bring it into accord with an emission theory of light, such as Newton had originally conceived. There was some inevitability in these attempts, as long as he held to classical (Galilean) kinematics. Imagine that some emitter sends out a light beam at c. According to this kinematics, an observer who moves past at v in the opposite direction, will see the emitter moving at v and the light emitted at c+v. This last fact is the defining characteristic of an emission theory of light: the velocity of the emitter is added vectorially to the velocity of light emitted....If an emission theory can be formulated as a field theory, it would seem to be unable to determine the future course of processes from their state in the present. AS LONG AS EINSTEIN EXPECTED A VIABLE THEORY LIGHT, ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM TO BE A FIELD THEORY, these sorts of objections would render an EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT INADMISSIBLE."

http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive … Norton.pdf
John Norton: "Einstein regarded the Michelson-Morley experiment as evidence for the principle of relativity, whereas later writers almost universally use it as support for the light postulate of special relativity......THE MICHELSON-MORLEY EXPERIMENT IS FULLY COMPATIBLE WITH AN EMISSION THEORY OF LIGHT THAT CONTRADICTS THE LIGHT POSTULATE."

http://books.google.com/books?id=JokgnS1JtmMC
"Relativity and Its Roots" By Banesh Hoffmann
p.92: "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."

http://www.academie-sciences.fr/membres … _eloge.pdf
Louis de Broglie: "Tout d'abord toute idée de "grain" se trouvait expulsée de la théorie de la Lumière : celle-ci prenait la forme d'une "théorie du champ" où le rayonnement était représenté par une répartition continue dans l'espace de grandeurs évoluant continûment au cours du temps sans qu'il fût possible de distinguer, dans les domaines spatiaux au sein desquels évoluait le champ lumineux, de très petites régions singulières où le champ serait très fortement concentré et qui fournirait une image du type corpusculaire. Ce caractère à la fois continu et ondulatoire de la lumière se trouvait prendre une forme très précise dans la théorie de Maxwell où le champ lumineux venait se confondre avec un certain type de champ électromagnétique."

http://www.perimeterinstitute.ca/index. … re_id=3576
John Stachel: "Einstein discussed the other side of the particle-field dualism - get rid of fields and just have particles."
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."
John Stachel's comment: "If I go down, everything goes down, ha ha, hm, ha ha ha."

http://www.ekkehard-friebe.de/wallace.htm
Bryan Wallace: "Einstein's special relativity theory with his second postulate that the speed of light in space is constant is the linchpin that holds the whole range of modern physics theories together. Shatter this postulate, and modern physics becomes an elaborate farce!....The speed of light is c+v."

Recently John Norton suggested that the conclusion that the separation between past, present and future is an illusion, a conclusion directly following from Einstein's 1905 false light postulate, should be abandoned. Other philosophers of science remained silent:

http://www.salem-news.com/articles/june … -22-09.php
"For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious" - Albert Einstein

http://www.geekitude.com/gl/public_html … 2141509987
Brian Greene: "I certainly got very used to the idea of relativity, and therefore I can go into that frame of mind without it seeming like an effort. But I feel and think about the world as being organized into past, present and future. I feel that the only moment in time that's really real is this moment right now. And I feel [that what happened a few moments ago] is gone, and the future is yet to be. It still feels right to me. But I know in my mind intellectually that's wrong. Relativity establishes that that picture of the universe is wrong, and if I work hard, I can force myself to recognize the fallacy in my view or thinking; but intuitively it's still what I feel. So it's a daily struggle to keep in mind how the world works, and juxtapose that with experience that [I get] a thousand, even million times a day from ordinary comings and goings."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 … -tick.html
"General relativity knits together space, time and gravity. Confounding all common sense, how time passes in Einstein's universe depends on what you are doing and where you are. Clocks run faster when the pull of gravity is weaker, so if you live up a skyscraper you age ever so slightly faster than you would if you lived on the ground floor, where Earth's gravitational tug is stronger. "General relativity completely changed our understanding of time," says Carlo Rovelli, a theoretical physicist at the University of the Mediterranean in Marseille, France.....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.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies/p … index.html
John Norton, 1 Mar 2009: "A common belief among philosophers of physics is that the passage of time of ordinary experience is merely an illusion. The idea is seductive since it explains away the awkward fact that our best physical theories of space and time have yet to capture this passage. I urge that we should resist the idea. We know what illusions are like and how to detect them. Passage exhibits no sign of being an illusion....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 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. There are temporal orderings. We can identify earlier and later stages of temporal processes and everything in between. What we cannot find is a passing of those stages that recapitulates the presentation of the successive moments to our consciousness, all centered on the one preferred moment of "now." At first, that seems like an extraordinary lacuna. It is, it would seem, a failure of our best physical theories of time to capture one of time's most important properties. However the longer one works with the physics, the less worrisome it becomes....I was, I confess, a happy and contented believer that passage is an illusion. It did bother me a little that we seemed to have no idea of just how the news of the moments of time gets to be rationed to consciousness in such rigid doses.....Now consider the passage of time. Is there a comparable reason in the known physics of space and time to dismiss it as an illusion? I know of none. The only stimulus is a negative one. We don't find passage in our present theories and we would like to preserve the vanity that our physical theories of time have captured all the important facts of time. So we protect our vanity by the stratagem of dismissing passage as an illusion."

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