Over the course of decades, Donald Trump’s companies have systematically destroyed or hidden thousands of emails, digital records and paper documents demanded in official proceedings, often in defiance of court orders. These tactics—exposed by a Newsweek review of thousands of pages of court filings, judicial orders and affidavits from an array of court cases—have enraged judges, prosecutors, opposing lawyers and the many ordinary citizens entangled in litigation with Trump. In each instance, Trump and entities he controlled also erected numerous hurdles that made lawsuits drag on for years, forcing courtroom opponents to spend huge sums of money in legal fees as they struggled—sometimes in vain—to obtain records.

I don't know how to get anyone to discuss the simple fact that if you have two atomic clocks in front of you, one atop the other, the lower clock will tick at a slower rate than the upper clock due to gravitational time dilation.  People can accept the theory, but they cannot accept the reality.  When talking about the theory, they can happily babble mindlessly and endlessly about curved space and time and how it all fits together.  But when talking about reality, they become hostile and cannot accept what is visible right in front of them.  They'll just argue that it is a "trick," or one of the clocks is simply malfunctioning.  And, of course, they won't even attempt to answer any questions such as, "What is time if it ticks at a different rate at different heights?"

I've been searching the Internet looking for someone who views Time and Time Dilation the same way I do.  Yesterday, I spent a couple hours browsing through two of Lee Smolin's books to see if there was anything in them that might help me figure out why no one seems to be willing to discuss what might be the biggest question in science today: What is Time if gravity and motion can cause it to run faster or slower?

The first book by Dr. Smolin that attracted my attention yesterday was "The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next."  Like other physics books I've recently read, it obviously argues that String Theory is a waste of time and resources, and that we need to take a look at the state of science today to see if it is really valid "science" or if it is  only about playing logic and mathematical "games" which prove nothing.   However, I have a problem with Dr. Smolin's writing style.  For me, he never seems to get straight to the point.  Instead, he always seems to wander into all kinds of side issues before making a point that is as clear as mud. 

Browsing through "The Trouble with Physics," I found some interesting passages and some interesting topics, but there was nothing that grabbed my interest and made me want to sit down and read the book.  Moreover, I did a "Search inside this book" for the word "dilation" and got zero results.  Time dilation is really what is of most interest to me right now.   

The other book by Dr. Smolin, "Time Reborn," poses some interesting questions and makes some interesting statements, but it all seems to lead nowhere - or to some jumble of an idea that Dr. Smolin doesn't fully explain.  In the past, I've tried reading some of his papers, but I just got lost in the technical jargon.  "Time Reborn" was supposedly written for the "general reader," but I couldn't find anything in it that really grabbed my interest.  Instead, I found stuff like this:

I used to believe in the essential unreality of time.  Indeed, I went into physics because as an adolescent I yearned to exchange the time-bound, human world, which I saw as ugly and inhospitable, for a world of pure, timeless truth.  Later in life, I discovered that it was pretty nice to be human and the need for transcendent escape faded.

More to the point, I no longer believe that time is unreal.  In fact, I have swung to the opposite view: Not only is time real but nothing we know or experience gets closer to the heart of nature than the reality of time.

Much of this book sets out the scientific argument for believing in the reality of time. If you are one of the many who believe that time is
an illusion, I aim to change your mind. If you already believe time is real, I hope to give you better reasons for your belief.

The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable.  That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary.

In shaping his special theory of relativity, Einstein established two fundamental principles. The first, which became known as the principle of relativity, asserts that observers who find themselves in states of relative motion at different (but constant) speeds must observe precisely the same fundamental laws of physics. This seems perfectly reasonable. For example, if an observer on earth makes a measurement to test Maxwell’s equations and compares the result with that of another observer making the same measurement on board a distant spaceship moving away from the earth at high speed, then the conclusions from both sets of observations must be the same. There cannot be one set of Maxwell’s equations for one observer and another set for space travellers. We can turn this on its head. If the laws of physics are the same for all observers, then there is no measurement we can make which will tell us which observer is moving relative to the other. To all intents and purposes, the observer in the spaceship may actually be stationary, and it is the observer on earth who is moving away at high speed.

The principle of relativity demands that the laws of physics must be the same irrespective of the relative motion of the observer, and you cannot use physics to tell whether it is you or the passenger who is in motion.

Now, I don’t wish to underestimate the intellectual capabilities of theoretical physicists, who, I’m sure, are a lot smarter than actuaries, bankers and mortgage lenders. But it does seem to me that if a relatively small number of very smart people in the financial sector can delude themselves in a way that almost brought down the entire world economy, and which four years later still threatens to cause some European countries to default on their sovereign debts, then it’s surely possible that a few theorists can delude themselves about what qualifies as science?

After all, what does it matter if a few theorists decide that it’s okay to indulge in a little self-delusion?

What real harm is done? I believe that damage is being done to the integrity of the scientific enterprise. The damage isn’t always clearly visible and is certainly not always obvious. Fairy-tale physics is like a slowly creeping yet inexorable dry rot. If we don’t look for it, we won’t notice that the foundations are being undermined until the whole structure comes down on our heads. Here are the signs. The fairy-tale theorists have for some time been presenting arguments suggesting that the very definition of science needs to be adapted to accommodate their particular brand of metaphysics. The logic is really rather simple. Developments in theoretical physics have run far ahead of our ability to provide empirical tests. If we hang our definition of science on the Testability Principle, then we have a problem — this stuff clearly isn’t science.

While there are many physicists prepared to take the tellers of fairy tales to task, this is extremely sensitive ground. It is hard to criticize fairy-tale physics without being perceived to be criticizing science as a whole.

In a bold move touched by genius, he [Einstein] now elevated the constancy of the speed of light to the status of a fundamental principle. Instead of trying to figure out why the speed of light is independent of the speed of its source, he simply accepted this as an established fact. He assumed the speed of light to be a universal constant and proceeded to work out the consequences. One immediate consequence is that there can be no such thing as absolute time.  

It turns out that as an object moves with relativistic speeds a "strange" thing seems to happen to its time as observed by "us" the stationary observer (observer in an inertial reference frame). What we see happen is that the "clock" in motion slows down according to our clock, therefore we read two different times. Which time is correct??? well they both are because time is not absolute but is relative, it depends on the reference frame.

Clock comparisons are one of the essential tasks of international time metrology, e.g. for the harmonization of national standards, for enabling the interoperability between satellite navigation systems, and for the dissemination of time to the public. As an internationally agreed reference the Coordinated Universal Time UTC and, more specific, the underlying International Atomic Time TAI are computed by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) by using data from 391 atomic clocks distributed all over the world in 69 different institutes (as of October 2010). Most of them are National Metrology Institutes (NMIs) (Arias, 2009, Circular T).

In the 1970s, it became clear that the clocks participating in TAI were ticking at different rates due to gravitational time dilation, and the combined TAI scale therefore corresponded to an average of the altitudes of the various clocks. Starting from Julian Date 2443144.5 (1 January 1977 00:00:00), corrections were applied to the output of all participating clocks, so that TAI would correspond to proper time at mean sea level (the geoid). Because the clocks had been on average well above sea level, this meant that TAI slowed down, by about one part in a trillion. The former uncorrected time scale continues to be published, under the name EAL (Echelle Atomique Libre, meaning Free Atomic Scale).

In relativistic terms, TT [Terrestrial Time] is described as the proper
time of a clock located on the geoid (essentially mean sea level). However, TT is now actually defined as a coordinate time scale. The redefinition did not quantitatively change TT, but rather made the existing definition more precise. In effect it defined the geoid (mean sea level) in terms of a particular level of gravitational time dilation relative to a notional observer located at infinitely high altitude. 

Residents of Florida nervously awaiting the arrival of Hurricane Matthew might be surprised to learn that for conservative commentator Matt Drudge, the forecasts are yet another example of an Obama administration conspiracy.

Drudge, in his debut as a hurricane truther, tweeted that “The deplorables are starting to wonder if govt has been lying to them about Hurricane Matthew intensity to make exaggerated point on climate,” and “Hurricane Center has monopoly on data. No way of verifying claims.”

It has brought out the inner meteorologist not only in Drudge, but also in Rush Limbaugh. “So with hurricane tracking and hurricane forecasting, I’ve been able to spot where I think they might be playing games because it’s in the interests of the left to have destructive hurricanes because then they can blame it on climate change, which they can continue desperately continue trying to sell,” he said, according to Wonkette.

I’ve become an expert in spotting the politics in hurricane tracking and hurricane forecasting. And by that I mean people that work at the — the National Hurricane Center is part of the National Weather Service, which is part of the Commerce Department, which is part of the Obama administration, which by definition has been tainted just like the DOJ has.

Incidentally, this is not the place to give an all-encompassing review of existing tests of gravity. Of course, there are impressive observations in astrophysics that are in line with the geometrical formulation of general relativity from which standard cosmology emerged. The fact that some of these observations may go unmentioned here is certainly a good opportunity for malevolent reviewers of this book to bemoan the missing mention of a certain experiment (incidentally, from one’s own institute), to allege the author is unaware of it, and to conclude that the arguments made in the book are flawed.

I would like to share a bit of scientific logic with those people: confirmations of the established theory are nice, but they do not reconcile contradictions that have appeared elsewhere. Moreover, they do not say anything about the viability of an alternative that is based on simpler concepts.

The second principle, on which the special theory of relativity rests, is the "principle of the constant velocity of light in vacuo." This principle asserts that light in vacuo always has a definite velocity of propagation (independent of the state of motion of the observer or of the source of the light).

Galileo had understood that the laws of nature do not depend on the motion of an observer, and Einstein applied this insight to the speed of light, c.  He realized that c did not depend on the observer: the beam coming out of the headlight of a moving train has always the same speed, irrespective of whether it is observed from the platform or from the train itself.  Einstein understood this and built a consistent theory by focusing on the fundamental meaning of c.

It appears that around 1911, Einstein had in his hand the key to an even greater discovery, a ground-breaking idea that would have explained gravitation directly from the characteristics of the universe: a theory based on a variable speed of light. Not only would c, the speed of light, be affected by all the mass in the universe, so would the very definitions of the meter and the second. These then variable yardsticks of length and time would join to create the illusion that light travels at a constant velocity of 299,792,458 meters per second.

First Approximation:  When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first approximation of the answer, one can write an algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result.

A theoretical construct has very little prospect of being true if it is not logically very simple.

Er hat wenig Gefühl dafür gehabt, daß eine theoretische Konstruktion kaum Aussicht auf Wahrheit hat, wenn sie nicht logisch sehr einfach ist.

He has had little sense that a theoretical construction has little chance of truth when it is not logically very simple.

Now, modern science has discovered that the reality of our physical existence is bizarre in many ways, but this is bizarreness for which there is an accumulated body of accepted scientific evidence. There is as yet no observational or experimental evidence for many of the concepts of contemporary theoretical physics, such as super-symmetric particles, superstrings, the multiverse, the universe as information, the holographic principle or the anthropic cosmological principle. For some of the wilder speculations of the theorists there can by definition never be any such evidence. This stuff is not only not true, it is not even science. I call it ‘fairytale physics’.  It is arguably borderline confidence-trickery.

They [many scientists] have chosen to abandon the scientific method.

With no observational or experimental data to ground their theories in reality, these theorists have been guided instead by their mathematics and their aesthetic sensibilities.

Speculative theorizing of a kind that cannot be tested, that cannot be verified or falsified, a kind that is not subject to the mercilessness of the scientific method, is now almost common currency.

Reality is a metaphysical concept — it lies beyond the grasp of science. When we adopt specific beliefs about reality, what we are actually doing is adopting a specific philosophical position.

In essence, producing a so-called ‘relativistic’ theory — one that meets the requirements of the special theory of relativity — is all about ensuring that the theory treats time as a kind of fourth dimension, on an equal footing with the three dimensions of space.

We may all be in different locations as measured by the first three dimensions, but we are all in the same location as measured by the Fourth Dimension. That location is called "now."

The speed of laser light pulses launched from Earth and returned by a retro-reflector on the Moon was calculated from precision round-trip time-of-flight measurements and modeled distances. The measured speed of light (c) in the moving observer’s rest frame was found to exceed the canonical value c = 299,792,458 m/s by 200±10 m/s, just the speed of the observatory along the line-of-sight due to the rotation of the Earth during the measurements. This result is a first-order violation of local Lorentz invariance; the speed of light seems to depend on the motion of the observer after all, as in classical wave theory, which implies that a preferred reference frame exists for the propagation of light. However, the present experiment cannot identify the physical system to which such a preferred frame might be tied.