>Jon Awbrey schrieb:
>> Pat,
>>
>> In what "frame of reference" shall I evaluate your objection?
>> I tried to follow fashion by invoking analogies from physics.
>> Relative to that frame of reference, I can only iterate what
>> all my physics professors dinned into my skull, to wit, that
>> older common sense notions of magnitude had simply ceased to
>> make sense any more lacking reference to an observer's frame
>> and the specified operations commonly known as "measurements"
>> that are an absolute, er, relative "must" to pin operational
>> definitions to the given magnitudes. (01)
I have a hard time parsing this, but if you are (or perhaps they
were) referring to the need to relate notions of length and duration
to an inertial frame of reference, then yes, of course that is what
relativity requires us to do (in fact, Newton already required this
for many other measurements, so nothing basically new here.) I fail
to see however what this has to do with the topic at hand. I hope you
are not making the distinctly unscientific mistake of assuming that
'frame of reference' here is an epistemic notion with no direct
physical significance. (02)
> That's how they taught,
>> but I will refrain from echoing all the ridicule they heaped
>> on former generations of deluded philosophers, prescientists,
>> and especially common sense normal folks who ever languished
> > in the dissociative styles of thought that dreamed otherwise. (03)
For physics teachers they sound to have been a most unpleasant bunch
of characters. You should have gone to a better school. BTW,
Newtonian physics is an astonishingly good approximation to reality
for most purposes involving terrestrial or even astronomic
velocities, e.g. the Voyager spacecraft navigation to Jupiter and
Saturn and beyond was done without needing relativistic corrections. (04)
> >
>> Ingvar sought to evade the point of that analogy by shifting
>> the frame of reference to everyday epistemology and ordinary
>> language acceptability. (05)
I believe that is where the discussion was originally anchored.
Unless of course we are considering an ontology for astrophysics or
high-energy particle physics. (06)
Pat (07)
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