Speaker
Description
It is my duty as a philosopher to fight dogmatism - especially when aired in weird hypotheses bolstered up with high-brow mathematics. Anticipating the Einstein SR paper of 1905 by three weeks, Poincare published a formally more refined theory based on i = V(-1), where he predicted the reality of 'ondes gravifiques'. Against Einstein he argued that space has no innate metric, its only properties being topological. Andre Mercier, a co-founder of CERN, initiator of SR's 50 yr Jubilee, and founder of Gen.Rel.Grav., once wrote a paper to that journal having the startling title: 'Gravitation IS Time'. This made me invite him to the 1994 PIRT conf. at Imperial Coll., Ld. (sponsored by Brit.Soc.Phil.Sc.), where he argued that spacetime ought to be termed timespace, or supertime. The Oxford historian of cosmology J.D. North has given some examples, proving that spacetime curvature cannot be the cause of gravitation. My cosmological hero, the mathematician E.A. Milne, also Oxford, has demonstrated how local deviations from cosmic symmetry may cause the spontaneous emergence of forces, including gravity, in the universe. His colleague, A.G. Walker, then showed that the kinematic relativity of Milne, like GR, may be generalized to cover a variety of world-models. Lately P. Rowlands of Liverpool has argued that the universe must be simple, that physical laws must be invariant temporally and spatially, and that an absolute cosmic time is definable as "the birth-ordering of non-local quantum events"; he has also shown how all the "crucial" GR effects are derivable by purely classical (i.e., Newtonian or SR) means. Further, the inventor of analytic hyperbolic geometry and developer of its connexion with SR, A.A. Ungar, has deduced a general SR formula obviating the need for dark matter (but, unaware of this, a large army of observers are still wasting fortunes in a vain search for such stuff!). Moreover, T.v. Flandern has noticed that the Sun's force of gravity stems from its true position while its light is seen in another direction. Finally, E. Baird has proven that SR and GR are logically incompatible. So the GR of Einstein is not only in blatant conflict with observational fact, but simply inconsistent. There is thus every reason to search for alternatives to GR as well as to the L-CDM model based on GR!
