Who is your favorite Physicist?

Heh, Max. You fill up page after page, with post after post, in thread after thread, always filled with sanctimonious sermons and proclamations of your expertise, all so that you can obfuscate and avoid answering even the simplest of questions.

You claim to want to "help," to "teach," to "discuss," but it's all phony. You are just looking for a toadie who will sit raptly at you feet, who listens with devotion, and who NEVER asks a question but simply absorbs your wisdom without ever saying anything except to frequently express immense gratitude for you magnificence by saying "Thank you, Your Brilliancy!"

Good luck with that.

It's humorous, for a while, but the gag gets kinda stale after a spell, ya know?

This isn't about expertise. It is about education. To get an education, you need to do the work. You have a very basic lack of understanding on a topic that is covered in high school physics.

I have suggested you take a course in Physics at a local college. I am not asking you to listen to me. I am merely suggesting that you should take the time to learn, before you pretend that you have any knowledge. You could learn from me, but you don't have to. There are thousands people who could teach you real Physics. Some of them probably are near where you live.

For you to go on and on about Poincare and Einstein, when you haven't mastered high school Physics, is laughable. If you aren't going to put in the effort to learn, I am simply going to point out to the other people here that that is what you are doing.

What's wrong with you taking a course in Physics so that you can learn something rather than just making stuff up?

Ya know, Max, I done sat in on a lot of colleges classes. They letcha do that in a lot of places, even if ya aint enrolled and even if ya aint got no money. They call it "auditing" a class, so I figure I'm an auditor, ya know?

I sat in on a class one year called "the philosophy of science." About half of the students were from the scientific disciplines (mainly physics) and the other half from liberal arts disciplines (mainly philosophy). The profs rotated, some from the physics department, some from the philosophy department, etc.

It seemed that the science geeks all had thick glasses, buck-teeth, and at least one "scientific calculator" from which they were inseparable. And, almost to man, they looked bewildered in that class. They weren't asked to do calculations, and so they were lost. "Philosophy" was incomprehensible to most of them, even when it was exclusively about science and scientific subjects. God only knows why they ever took the class. A lot of them dropped out, and most regretted having taken it.

Almost all the debate, exchanges with the professors, and questions from the students came from the philosophy side. I guess the geeks felt outnumbered, undermanned, overwhelmed, and unprepared for what they encountered.

Many of them just spent the time punching their calculators all during the class. It was sorry.

The Philosophy students are educated about Philosophy. I don't claim any knowledge of philosophy, you don't hear mean pontificating about Kant or Mills. I read a few books and even watched some YouTube videos. I haven't sat in on philosophy lectures. I haven't written philosophy papers. I haven't had my misconceptions about philosophy challenged or gotten feedback from professors who know more about philosophy than I do.

So I don't go around pretending I know how to solve philosophy problems, or criticizing the masters of Philosophy for things I know very little about. You have to do the work before you can consider yourself knowledgeable.

I have studied Physics. I spent 7 or 8 years of my life solving Physics problems, listening to professors, getting feedback. I have had my misconceptions challenged... and my understanding about Physics now is a lot different than it was before I started my education.

If I had done the work for education in Philosophy, I would feel a lot more confident pontificating about Philosophy. As of now.. me criticizing the theories of Kant or Nietzsche would be a ridiculous as you criticizing Einstein.

I prefer Physics to Philosophy. That is why I chose to dedicate several years of my life to master Physics (and maybe a couple of months to dabble in Philosophy).

It is the Physics students who are designing airplanes, building computers and inventing robots. I work with several engineers who have Physics degrees. We are building cool technology, in artificial intelligence, to make businesses more productive. To be honest, I am not really sure what Philosophy students are doing.

Since they knew me from seeing me in their class, I could usually go see all these profs during their office hours, and I always did. I would come with lists of questions that arose from their lectures. Most of them would talk, and debate with, me for an hour or more--3 or 4 days a week.

None of them, that I recall, refused to answer questions, like you do.

You didn't learn about frames of reference. Is there any area where the Physics professors were able to change your mind about something?

As we have seen here... arguing and learning are two different things.

All right, Max, you've said that at least a hundred times, and I generally just ignore it, because it's always said in some irrelevant context. But tell me WHAT, EXACTLY is it that you think I don't understand about "frames of reference?"

Be specific, for once in your life.

I have answered this 11 times now. You keep saying you will never learn anything from me. You can go back and read our discussion on this thread or on the other thread (I spent a good deal of time explaining the race car example to you, but you never listened).

You are going to need to work through a simple example from more than one frame of reference... specifying a point of reference for each one. That is the way that you will understand the mathematics. You have yet to let me walk you through this. Each time I have tried (rather patiently I think) you have flipped out before you learned anything.

This really is high school physics. You obviously aren't willing to learn this from me. Take a Physics course.

Oh,yeah? 11 fuckin times, eh? Show me ONE of them.

I have no clue what you're even trying to get at. Is it the idiotic "reciprocity" premise of SR? A will see B's clock running slow in HIS frame of reference, and B will see A's clock running slow in HIS frame of reference. "And we use the lorentz transformation to calculate the precise amount, now get out your calculators, geeks, and we'll proceed"

It that what you're trying to talk about?

No scientific experiment has EVER confirmed "reciprocal" distortions, but many have effectively disproven that claim. But you don't even need an experiment, it's logically self-contradictory. You can know it's invalid a priori.

No that is not what I am talking about. Your problem is with basic Galilean Relativity. You need to understand this before you have a chance of understanding Special relativity, but Galilean relativity was understood long before this and is taught in high school physics.

I will try to help you (but I don't think this will help).

- In the train example you say the "relativist" says "Chicago slows down as it approaches". That is simply not how Galilean Relativity works. No one says Chicago slows down. You have a basic misunderstanding of how the math works.

- In the race car examples and the boat example (these three are really similar examples) you make similar errors... including saying that it is "impossible to determine" the motion. This also shows a basic misunderstanding of the mathematics.

Every time I have tried to explain to you how these examples would be solved by students in a high school physics class you have shot me down rather than try to understand the rather basic mistakes you are making.

You can't get to Special Relativity until you realize the far more basic misunderstanding you have.

The real problem is that you are unwilling to accept that you are wrong about anything. Without this, you can never learn. My education involved me having my misconceptions challenged. When I solved problems in physics, my work was corrected by people who know more than I did. That is how I learned. You have apparently never allowed yourself to go through this process.

Take a Physics class.

Stop right there. I never said "chicago slows down." And when I used he word "relativist" when mentioning chicago I was NOT talking about galilean relativity. I was talking about special relativity.

There's a whole lot of things about relativity which you have proved yourself to be woefully uninformed/misinformed about Max. Not the least of which is your inability to distinguish galilean relativity from special relativity.

1. I asked you to be specific (knowing that you wouldn't, and couldn't, be). You have failed.

2.The "concepts" of SR do NOT depend on "how the math works." It is the opposite: how the math works is strictly dependent on what the concepts dictate. This is something that you are utterly incapable of understanding, just like the geeks in the philosophy of science class I audited

Plenty of people write long posts here, me included. Don't be so lazy.

I see laymen has been spouting his usual rubbish about 'logic' by asking the rhetirical question 'can they both be right? This is exactly the infantile comment that could be made about Australians and Northern hemisphere dwellers about 'can they both be upside down ?'
Layment does not understand that LIKE THE CONCEPT OF UPSIDE DOWN, MOTION IS ALAWAYS RELATIVE' CONCEPT and that (antithesis of Newtons position) is what SR hammered home.... that there was no absolute reference frame against which to decide who was 'right'. The LOGICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THAT plus the axiom of the absolute constancy of the speed of light underpin the relativity of 'time' .
So much for layman's understanding of 'logic' !$

Yeah, yeah, Fresky. Being the solipsist that you are, there is no objective reality whatsoever, we know. Nothing can ever be right, because the is nothing out there to be "right" about. You are a monist. Most monists say there is only matter. A (very) few fools are monists who say there is only mind.

Newflash, Fresky. An axiom, by definition, is a postulation, an assertion, that can't be proven. It is a premise not a conclusion, empirical or otherwise.

There is nothing the least bit "necessary" about this axiom. Theories which reject it work better than SR.

You're such a demonstrable ignoramus when it comes to theory and history that you always embarrass yourself, poseur. Al accepted Newton's claim that all motion was relative and that there was no knowable (at that time, anyway) absolute reference frame.

He did NOT postulate the "antithesis" of Newton's claim, fool. Try educating yourself before blowing hard sometime, why doncha?