Piero Scaruffi

These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"

Relativity and Common Sense Special Relativity asked the laws of nature be the same in all inertial frames; which implied that they had to be invariant with respect to the Lorentz transformations. As a consequence, Einstein had to accept that clocks slow down and bodies contract. With General Relativity he wanted laws of nature to be the same in all frames, inertial or not (his field equations basically removed the need for inertial frames). This implies that the laws of nature must be "covariant" (basically must have the same form) with respect to a generic transformation of coordinates. That turned out to imply a further erosion of the concept of Time: it turned out that clocks slow down just for being near a gravitational field. Furthermore, one of the holy laws of Science, the conservation of energy, makes no sense in General Relativity: it is not clear how to measure “gravitational energy” (which in Newton’s Physics was easily calculated) and it is not clear what “conserving” means in a spacetime in which time too is warped. While apparent paradoxes (such as the twins paradox) have been widely publicized, Relativity Theory has been amazingly accurate in its predictions and so far no serious blow has been dealt to its foundations. While ordinary people may be reluctant to think of curved spaces and time dilatations, all these phenomena have been corroborated over and over by countless experiments.   Back to the beginning of the chapter "The New Physics" | Back to the index of all chapters