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quote:Originally posted by Pentcho ValevTWIN PARADOX AND EINSTEIN'S PRINCIPLE OF MAXIMUM ABSURDITYRelativity hypnotists continue to confuse the zombie world by claiming, on the one hand, that gravitation is the cause of greater youthfulness of the travelling twin:http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/0143-0807/27/4/019 http://minilien.com/?qofySmJbHF and, on the other, that gravitation is not the cause of greater youthfulness of the travelling twin - see Problem 19, "Modified twin paradox", on p. 49, solution on p. 65, in http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~phys16/Textbook/ch10.pdfThat is Einstein's principle of maximum absurdity in action: Never advance an absurdity without superimposing another absurdity that negates the first.Pentcho Valev
quote:Is it possible to convince Mr Valev with rational arguments?I doubt it. After he had himself raised the question of whether he was sound in mind (a question that may have occurred to others who were too delicate to raise it publicly), I tried to summarize the course of a dialogue with Mr Valev, which went like this: Pentcho proposes a paradox that appears to undermine two centuries of thermodynamics. Nothing necessarily wrong with that — received opinion has been wrong about things for a lot more than two centuries before, and will doubtless be so again. Someone offers some arguments as to why Pentcho is wrong and thermodynamics is OK after all. Pentcho either repeats his original point or raises another quite different one. In neither case does he give any indication that he has tried to understand what is said by anyone else. The respondent tries to explain what was said before. Pentcho either repeats his original point or raises another quite different one. After a few cycles of this it becomes clear that arguing with Pentcho is like arguing with creationists about evolution; it’s just a waste of time. If Pentcho wants people to take his arguments seriously he needs to show some good faith by indicating that he is willing to take theirs seriously. He might also make a serious effort to fix his mail program so that it sends his return address properly. Saying he can’t do it and leaving it at that is too much like his response to everything else to be very convincing.