The Only Building Block of Spacetime

[Pentcho Valev]

Nima Arkani-Hamed: "Almost all of us believe that spacetime doesn't really exist, spacetime is doomed and has to be replaced by some more primitive building blocks."

The only building block of spacetime is Einstein's 1905 constant-speed-of-light falsehood:

"Special relativity is based on the observation that the speed of light is always the same, independently of who measures it, or how fast the source of the light is moving with respect to the observer. Einstein demonstrated that as an immediate consequence, space and time can no longer be independent, but should rather be considered a new joint entity called "spacetime." https://www.bowdoin.edu/news/2015/04/physics-professor-baumgarte-describes-100-years-of-gravity.html

Pentcho Valev https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev

[Pentcho Valev]

Cosmic (or Einsteinian?) conspiracy of the highest order:

"Einstein pulled all of these ideas together in his 1905 theory of special relativity, which postulated that the speed of light was a constant. For this to be true, space and time had to be combined into a single framework that conspired to keep light's speed the same for all observers." https://www.livescience.com/space-time.html

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, pp. 123-124: "If everyone, everywhere and at all times, is to measure the same speed for the beam from your imaginary spacecraft, a number of things have to happen. First of all, as the speed of your spacecraft increases, the length of everything - you, your measuring devices, your spacecraft - shortens in the direction of motion, as seen by everyone else. Furthermore, your own time slows down exactly enough so that when you haul out your newly shortened yardstick, you are guaranteed to be duped into measuring the same old constant value for the speed of light. What we have here is a COSMIC CONSPIRACY OF THE HIGHEST ORDER." https://www.amazon.com/Death-Black-Hole-Cosmic-Quandaries/dp/039335038X

Brian Greene: "If space and time did not behave this way, the speed of light would not be constant and would depend on the observer's state of motion. But it is constant; space and time do behave this way. Space and time adjust themselves in an exactly compensating manner so that observations of light's speed yield the same result, regardless of the observer's velocity." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/special-relativity-nutshell.html

Pentcho Valev https://twitter.com/pentcho_valev