[tlhIngan Hol] vIb - propagate

[SuStel]

On 3/26/2020 10:48 AM, Will Martin wrote:
> Good discussion. Thanks for the response.

This is way off topic, but since when has that stopped anyone here?


> My point about Relativity is that there are aspects of it that it 
> seems even Einstein didn’t quite get right, and he is credited with 
> coming up with the idea.

Einstein did not invent the concept of relativity in physics. This is 
the idea that there is no fixed frame of reference to the universe. If 
two bodies are in motion /relative/ to each other, neither one can be 
declared the stationary one. There is no such thing as an absolute 
stationary.

What Einstein invented were his Special and General Theories of 
Relativity. The Special Theory takes the ideas of relativity and the 
fixed speed of light, both of which were already known to physics, and 
shows that when there is relative motion between two bodies, there must 
necessarily be a contraction of space and time on one body as viewed 
from the other. It shows that space and time are not separate things or 
absolute either. The General Theory expands this to accelerated motion, 
and shows that there is no difference whatsoever between acceleration 
and gravity. It showed for the first time that the mysterious force that 
causes two bodies to accelerate toward each other, which we call 
gravity, is really just those bodies traveling along geodesics in a 
curved spacetime.

Einsteins theories have been proven correct again and again. His 
weakness was mathematics: he wasn't as good at it as he would have 
liked. Some of the things he believed about physics have been proven 
wrong (most famously, quantum-mechanical randomness). But Special and 
General Relativity are pretty darn solid.


> The core of the problem is that mathematics has a method for creating 
> a model of reality that is radically inaccurate due to its simplicity, 
> but it is accurate enough to analyze and predict certain effects, like 
> the ones you mention.

Your statement is inaccurate due to its simplicity. Mathematics can 
model reality extremely accurately. No one has tried to model every 
aspect of reality all in one equation, and no one is ever going to, 
because any such model would probably have to be as big as the universe 
itself.

And when someone discovers something inaccurate about the mathematics 
used to model reality, that's cause for celebration. For instance, 
Einstein uses Lorenz transformations to more accurately model systems of 
motion in Special Relativity. Newton's laws don't take relativistic 
effects into account, because he didn't know about them, but Einstein's do.


> Meanwhile, the mathematical model of physical objects uses the concept 
> of points — a location with zero volume — and instants — a time span 
> with zero duration. This is the flaw that makes the mathematical model 
> ridiculous. It is useful, but it is far more limited than science will 
> admit, especially through its more public face.

What about topology? Calculus? Trigonometry? These mathematical tools 
work, and not just in a handwavy good-enough way.

Science isn't hiding anything about the tools it uses. They work. 
They're true, so far as we can tell.


> Science classes don’t teach students that, as Bergson theorized and no 
> one has successfully disputed, the concept of an event requires a 
> duration; that the closer you get to observing anything to zero 
> duration, the less information you can ascertain about whatever it is 
> you try to measure or observe, because observation requires 
> information in motion, which freezes when you reduce the duration to 
> zero. Zero duration yields zero observation.

Science classes certainly do teach that. This is fundamental to quantum 
mechanics.


> This is why any distance can be expressed as a consistent rate of 
> motion measured for a given duration and vice versa. The distance 
> doesn’t actually exist without the motion. Time and space are not 
> discrete.

Possibly untrue. Much science suggests the existence of what are known 
as Planck length and Planck time, which are the smallest possible units 
of space and time, respectively. It is yet unknown whether these are 
real limits, but what would we need science for if we already knew 
everything?


> They are arbitrary abstracts of the same stuff. That’s the core of 
> Relativity. Space/Time is Motion. That’s the step that Einstein didn’t 
> take. It’s the thing about Relativity more elemental than the 
> constancy of the speed of light.

That's not the core of relativity.


> And similarly, the closer you get to zero volume, the less you can 
> observe about the location or substance of any object.

And the less time you have to hear a musical note, the less you can 
identify what that note is. If you narrow the duration of a note to less 
than the period of its frequency, you can't hear it. This is the nature 
of the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics.

And now it's time for lunch, so I'll leave this here. I don't think you 
really understand what mathematics and science are actually saying.


-- 
SuStel
http://trimboli.name

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.kli.org/pipermail/tlhingan-hol-kli.org/attachments/20200326/9237d09c/attachment-0005.htm>