From the Philosophical Salon:
The Albanian prime minister Edi Rama told the following joke at an international conference: “Russia is considering unifying its time zones because there is a nine-hour difference between one side of the country and the other. Then the Russian Prime Minister went to Vladimir Putin and said: ‘There is a problem. My family was on vacation and I called them to say good night and it was morning and they were at the beach. I called Olaf Scholz to wish him a happy birthday, but he said they would be there the next day. I called Xi Jinping to wish him a Happy New Year, but he replied that they still had the old one…’ Putin replied: ‘Yes, it happened to me too. I called Yevgeny Prigozhin’s family to express my condolences, but his plane has not taken off yet.’” This joke brings us directly to our topic, namely the problem of simultaneity, in which Putin obviously thinks he lives in a block universe where the future (of the bomb exploding on Prigozhin’s plane) already exists now for him as a privileged observer.
It is well known how special relativity theory relativizes the notion of simultaneity of two events: “That no inherent meaning can be assigned to the simultaneity of distant events is the single most important lesson to be learned from relativity.”[i] The basic idea is clear: there is no absolute position in spacetime; every movement is a movement with regard to a certain observer; something moves with regard to the position of this observer. Since there are dozens of sites explaining the paradox this thesis involves, let’s quote a popular description of Einstein’s thought experiment consisting of a moving train with one observer midway in the train and another observer midway on the platform as the train moves past:
“A flash of light is given off at the center of the train just when the two observers pass each other. The observer on the train sees the front and back of the train at fixed distances away from the source of the light flash (since the front, back, and train observer are all in the same inertial frame). According to this observer, the light flashes reach the front and back of the train at precisely the same instant of time—that is, simultaneously. On the other hand, the observer on the platform sees the back of the train moving toward the point at which the flash was given off, and the front of the train moving away from it. This means that the light flash going toward the back of the train will have less distance to cover than the light flash going to the front. As the speed of light is finite, and the same in any direction relative to the platform (regardless of the motion of its source), the flashes will not strike the ends of the train simultaneously. /…/ For both observers, the speed at which the light traveled is constant, but the distance traveled (and thus the time consumed in covering the distance) varies depending on the relative motion of the observer.”
Can we then decide if one observer is right and the other wrong? The conclusion that imposes itself is that “neither one can be shown wrong, and that a simultaneity in one inertial frame need not be true outside that frame.”[ii] Sabina Hossenfelder draws the general ontological consequence of this paradox....
....MUCH MORE
The writer of this piece is Slavoj Žižek, about whom I once wrote:
Sometimes Žižek's writing can be so dense as to be almost impenetrable and because of that we'veOn the other hand:
only had one post on a fairly interesting guy. From 2011 an antipasto, and then the main course...
George Soros, the "Chocolate Laxative" of #OccupyWallStreet
We noted the arrival at Zucotti Park of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in the October 10 post "Ossify Wall Street: Russell Simmons/Kanye West; Richard Trumka, Tim Robbins Swing By; Jesse Ventura only Gets as Far as Minneapolis".
Here's what he said, via the Slovenian Government Communications Office:
...Zizek encouraged the protesters to think about the work ahead of them and not be misled by the festive atmosphere in the park.Saying that he supported George Soros, he compared the billionaire to a chocolate laxative, as he exhibited an internal contradiction. "First, they take billions from you, then they give back half. And that makes them the world's greatest humanitarians," said Zizek.He advised the protesters to take the money, but keep fighting against the system....
