Re: Why atheists believe in a universe capable of Judgment and

Glenn et al. -

Just time for some quick preliminary comments before taking off.

As a picky detail, Goedel's paper wasn't in a "book" honoring Einstein. The
Festschrift for Einstein's 70th birthday was the July 1949 issue of Reviews
of Modern Physics (an issue that I was lucky to be able to rescue from the
trash when I was in grad school). Besides Goedel's paper there are a number
of other significant articles, including one by Feynman & Wheeler dealing
with advanced potentials - a subject relevant to time travel.

A couple of other good references on time travel are:

Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines 2d ed. (Springer Verlag, 1998).

Kip S. Thorne, Black Holes and Time Warps (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994).

The claim that in special relativity there is no objective time is somewhat
overstated. Of course different observers see clocks run at different rates
& coordinate time t is only a coordinate. But the proper time (t^2 -
x^2/c^2)^(1/2) between 2 events with timelike separation is absolute. &
even though this "proper time" can be defined operationally as the time
measured by a clock moving with constant velocity bhetween the 2 events, it
is something that can be defined precisely & measured by all observers.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/
Received on Sat Jun 25 09:35:11 2005