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A fun exercise in 'constrained' writing about a complex topic. However making that claim that it 'explained' Relativity is not valid in any reasonable sense. I
by suprgeek 11y ago
A fun exercise in 'constrained' writing about a complex topic.
However making that claim that it 'explained' Relativity is not valid in any reasonable sense.
I found the reliance on keeping to the 1000 most commonly used words to be actually fairly painful to read thru to the end and even harder to understand.
Perhaps "Relativity as explained to a 6 year old" might make it more accessible. A 6 year old has a vocabulary of ~5000 to 10000 words (for reference) and being able to take these "verbal shortcuts" aka words would make for better understanding.
- btilly 11y agoI disagree. I have never before seen a popularized attempt to explain things like light bending that managed to get things right. He even took time to mention that the popularized image of a sheet of rubber with a ball in it is an incomplete way to think about things. If it does not match your previous understanding of the topic, I'd suggest reading it again. The only better explanations that I've seen involve tensor calculus.
- Steuard 11y agoI read the previous comment not as saying that this explanation was wrong, but that it's just unlikely to be truly enlightening to someone who didn't already know the subject reasonably well. I'm on the fence about whether I agree: the cognitive load of interpreting the odd phrasing certainly does compound the cognitive load of understanding the deeply non-intuitive physics. This is quite a good presentation of the topic (or, parts of it), but if clarity of understanding were the primary goal you could probably do substantially better by translating it at least partway back into ordinary language. (But then, fewer people might be intrigued or entertained enough to read that version. So I'm not really complaining.)