On Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 6:44 PM, Edgar L. Owen <[email protected]> wrote:

> Liz,
>
> You keep repeating your UNSUBSTANTIATED claim that both Newton and
> Einstein believed in block time.
>
> I've repeatedly asked you to substantiate this claim with some actual
> quotes from them but you have been unable to do so.
>
> Please provide quotes substantiating this or withdraw the claim. That's
> only fair...
>

In Einstein's case this does definitely seem to be his own belief, for
example when his lifelong friend Michael Besso died in 1955, he sent his
family a letter in which he wrote:

"Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That
means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the
distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly
persistent illusion."

I think the serious context of this letter likely precludes the possibility
that he was joking, or that he was just speaking in an offhand way about
how relativity models the world as opposed to expressing a belief about the
way the world really is.

Jesse

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